Jonathan Lethem’s ‘Cellophane Bricks’ collides art writing with narrative imagination

Above the Fold Read time 13 minutes Photography by Torkil Stavdal. The novelist joins Document to discuss his new collection of prose on the work of Nan Goldin, Rachel Harrison, and several others Jonathan Lethem wants to do everything a writer can do at least once. His double-digit count of novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn , have established him as a leading fiction author. But they form the core of a career that also includes countless short stories, two books of cultural criticism, as well as a host of rarer literary exploits, including completing Donald Carpenter’s final, unfinished novel Fridays at Enrico’s and editing The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick , a massive compilation of the late sci-fi author’s 8,000-page outpouring of frenzied, hand-written journal entries detailing his visionary experiences. Lethem himself identifies as a persistent dabbler. The Brooklyn-born, California-based author’s latest volume, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture , published last month by ZE Books, offers a survey of another form among his far-ranging output: his writings on visual art from the past four decades. Cellophane Bricks , a beautifully crafted hardback, celebrates the author’s appreciation for the world of images through its engaging spreads. The collection’s 38 texts span interrogations of the enduring tactile and totemic allure of books, to personal reflections on Lethem’s upbringing in 1970s New York City, to “essays” commissioned for exhibition catalogs, artist’s books, and monographs featuring works by Julian Hoeber, Nan Goldin, David Maisel, and Gregory Crewdson, among others. In these “word paintings” as he calls them, or fictions-as-exhibition texts, Lethem’s refusal to churn out conventional art writing, in favor of dreamy, headlong exercises in worldbuilding (many of them fully realized works of short fiction), is not his way of driving a hard bargain or dragging his heels, but a principled commitment to reward these artists with a small piece of the thing that he does best. To describe these fictions as “responses” to a body of artworks falls woefully short. Through them, Lethem enacts a glorious performance of the power of images to set the narrative […]

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