Star Struck: Fame, my family and me, By Cosmo Landesman

Cosmo Landesman was always the odd one out, a conventional misfit in a family of weirdoes. After a lifetime of abortive attempts, his father Jay would try anything for one more shot at fame. His mother Fran, a songwriter with an incandescent compulsion to perform, is only comfortable with the epithet "legendary". His brother Miles has performed with more forgotten bands than any rocker alive, yet still retains a puppyish enthusiasm. By way of contrast, Cosmo's modest yearning for the safe pabulum of literary fame seems like an act of apostasy against the family escutcheon. What Cosmo wanted was "a mom and a dad". What he got was a pair who went from New York beatniks to fixtures of Swinging London to acid-head hippies to apostles of free love, and beyond.

In case you are ignorant of these folks, I should explain that Cosmo is the film critic of The Sunday Times. Oh yes, and he was formerly married to the controversialist Julie Burchill, in whose reflected fame the entire Landesman family basked for a while. Cosmo's father once ran a night club in St Louis, Missouri, where the ground-breaking comedians Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen performed; published a short-lived literary magazine called Neurotica; and wrote a never-published, semi-autobiographical novel, The Nervous Set, later seeking to turn it into a musical. Cosmo's mother has written numerous jazz songs, one of which, "Spring Can Hang You up the Most", has been widely recorded and deserves to be called a standard. And Cosmo's brother has written songs that other artists have recorded and has performed with numerous bands, including some that you will have heard of.

Starstruck is essentially two books, the first a bittersweet and often achingly funny family memoir, and the second a thoughtful social history of fame and celebrity in modern Britain. Some reviewers have complained about the hybrid nature of the enterprise, even suggesting that the passages about fame lack fresh insight. I must disagree. I think that the overall package works exceedingly well.

Landesman charts the burgeoning culture of celebrity, from the inordinate interest of the British press in a model named Sabrina in the 1950s to the Liz Hurley phenomenon of the 1990s and the inanities of reality TV in the 2000s. He blames "the gatekeepers of cultural values – critics, editors, publishers, television producers and opinion formers – who have failed to offer any kind of resistance to celebrity culture". The failure of traditional institutions that once afforded channels to self-esteem for ordinary people – he calls it "the privatisation of the collective provision of self-esteem" – has allowed celebrity culture to conquer us by way of substitute. As an offbeat social history of the last few decades, Starstruck is indispensable.

A master of the bathetic punch-line, Cosmo is also adept at terse put-downs. Of his father's indefatigable self-promotion: "Hell has no hustler like Jay with a new project." On his brother: "Only Miles could play to an empty room and call it a triumph." And here he is on his father's status anxiety: "This is a man who could walk into an empty broom cupboard and still worry about being the biggest name there."

With gritted teeth Cosmo lives through his parents' experiment in living. "On weekends," he recalls of the late Sixties, "there would be parental acid trips which was like having your parents away for the weekend, and yet still at home." Newspapers and magazines come to interview Jay and Fran (and photograph them en famille) for features about their macrobiotic diet and their open marriage. There is a sublime moment when Miles echoes Jay and Fran in urging Cosmo to relax: "It was then that I realised things had changed in my family: my brother had become one of them." It is only when watching a stage show called Family Outing at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival, in which the naked Martinez family (mother, father, daughter) talked about their relationships that Landesman "felt an unfamiliar sensation: my family was normal".

At the root of this book is a wonderfully traditional English theme: embarrassment. Landesman has spent many years of feeling embarrassed by his parents. As a child, he wanted them to conform more. He begged them to put up some curtains in the front windows of their Islington house so that the neighbours couldn't see in; they mocked him for his bourgeois angst.

For their part, his family are unembarrassable, showing a truly American pioneering spirit in this respect, especially his father, Jay. When Jay failed to raise a laugh during a 10-minute stand-up comedy routine for Peter Cook, he excused himself by saying: "Peter, this is subliminal humour: I'm trying to take the laughter out of comedy!" To which Cook drily responded: "Congratulations, Jay." And who could fail to be in awe of someone who wrote a musical called Dearest Dracula (in 1965) and persuaded Vincent Price and Busby Berkeley to sign up? Or someone who thought of creating the Jay Landesman Museum by turning his home into a celebration of his own life before the idea was scotched on health and safety grounds?

Starstruck is a work of half-hearted exorcism. Landesman wants to banish his demons but is fearful of their absence. Reader, he loves his wacky family and on the strength of this quirky memoir-cum-social history one can surely say that embarrassment has been the grit in his oyster.