Many of the book’s essays focus on the author’s over-identification, both in his childhood and in his adulthood, with pop culture artists, writers and filmmakers. In the opening essays, “Defending The Searchers,” he writes of his long-lasting obsession with the John Ford/John Wayne western beloved by film buffs for its genre-busting inclusion of an antihero protagonist. Lethem makes a career out of defending the film from potential detractors, going so far as to shout down some hecklers in a theater the first time he sees it; his passion for the film is so self-conscious that he is willing to stand up for it even before he has seen the whole thing. But the essay is not about The Searchers; it’s about Lethem’s need to find self-definition in someone else’s art. His role as Defender of The Searchers is something of which he can be proud, and his probing analysis of the film’s complexities is merely part of his self-definition.

Similarly, “13, 1977, 21” is not about Star Wars; the content of the film itself is barely mentioned in the essay. It’s not even really about the fact that Lethem saw the film 21 times in the summer of 1977. It’s about the fact that Lethem wanted to see the film 21 times. The point of the essay lies in the revelation that, once Lethem got a little older and realized that Star Wars wasn’t worthy of his adoration, he decided to see Kubrick’s 2001 as many times as he had seen Star Wars so that the more intellectual film could replace the more lightweight one as his new film obsession.

Lethem visits other personal obsessions, as well. He gives us essays on the work of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, comic book artist Jack Kirby and filmmaker John Cassavetes, and he writes of them with even more drooling devotion, even more elliptical, scholarly vocabulary to prove how crazy he is for these people and their creations. It’s an interesting idea, this need for aesthetic identification, the juvenile need to have a favorite everything. It seems universal - we all did it as kids - and if Lethem didn’t grow out of it, is he really all that different from the rest of us? The problem is that, once this slightly interesting idea is unearthed, Lethem doesn’t have much else to say. He loops around, analyzing and explaining, pounding and reiterating, and all his fancy extro- and introspection doesn’t add up to much. If you’re not really into John Ford or John Cassavetes or Philip K. Dick, the essays are as much fun to read as it is to be cornered by a talkative obsessive at a party.

Lethem’s essays are saved only by the candid and brave autobiography that goes along with them. The writer grew up in a hippie household in Brooklyn, the son of the painter Richard Lethem, and the writer’s teenage rebellion/Oedipal angst over his parents’ chaotic lifestyle provides fodder for some compelling reflection. The best essays are those that are most overtly about Lethem’s youth, his home, and his family. “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” uses an abandoned subway station as the frame for neighborhood nostalgia, and “Lives of the Bohemians” is a highly charged art historical treatment of the ever-shifting work of Lethem’s painter father. Casting a shadow over all of this is the early death of Lethem’s mother. Her affliction with a brain tumor colors most of what Lethem sees around him, and although she, as a character, mostly lurks on the edges of the essays, she is always there. In “The Beards” Lethem gathers together a series of impressions of films and books, each them placed chronologically in relation to his mother’s death, as if, for him, the day she died marks his own personal BC/AD benchmark.