Chronic City

Probably the ultimate dystopian novel is one in which neither the characters nor the readers realize that they are in a dystopia -- at least, not until the end. This is what Jonathan Lethem has done in Chronic City.

The novel is set in a New York City that's almost, but not quite, our New York City (more on that later). The narrator, Chase Insteadman, is a former child actor whose current occupation is tragic fiance to a heroic astronaut stranded on the space station by Chinese low-orbit mines. Chase is also a useful decoration at the dinner parties of the super-rich. He is not, however, a particularly ambitious or thoughtful person. He is most like an empty vase, waiting to be filled (vases figure prominently in Chronic City, by the show more way).

Then he meets Perkus Tooth. Perkus is a character we should recognize instantly. He exists at the fringes of society, set apart by his squalid apartment and weird vintage clothing, subsisting on a diet of coffee, pot and cheeseburgers. His brain is stuffed with obscure facts about pop culture, which he obsessively spins into a complicated conspiracy theory suggesting that all of reality may be manufactured. He pours his theories into Chase, who absorbs them raptly, although he doesn't fully grasp them.

But there is something decidedly off about the alternate universe that these characters inhabit, not the least of which is that Muppets are called Gnuppets there. In Chase and Perkus's New York, the Twin Towers still stand but are permanently enshrouded in gray fog. A tiger -- whether real or mechanical or both is unclear -- randomly destroys buildings around Manhattan. Yawning chasms decorate downtown as abstract art, while also providing a convenient location for suicides. Sometimes the aroma of chocolate hangs over the city for days.

When the tiger demolishes Perkus's favorite cheeseburger restaurant, reality begins to rapidly unravel, calling into question everything we have been told so far as readers. Indeed, Lethem seems to be challenging us to take a close look at our own personal realities. Everything we see on the news, all the stories we tell ourselves -- couldn't they merely be comfortable fantasies that prevent us from seeing how fragile everything really is? Delusions we created to protect ourselves from looking down into the chasms in our own world? But as Perkus points out, before you tell a friend that he is living an illusion, you have to ask yourself whether the illusion makes him happier than knowing the truth would. show less

I think I am not a rare breed of reader. In many ways I think I read to assuage the disappointment of not having what takes to write. I read as an act of erasure, as though by eliminating all the books I like that have already been written I could stumble upon the outline of the one that's missing because I ought to have written it. In Lethem's Chronic City I felt like I he'd done what I once contemplated as a way to go about writing a novel: make a list of more or less random details you want to talk about (a tiger loose in NYC, a stranded space station, virtual worlds, non-profits providing furnished apartments for dogs, war-free editions of the newspaper, chocolate-scented smog) and then filling in a plot around them. I'm less show more interested in talking about how well accomplished that task than in mentioning a piece of reader's serendipity that occurred around my reading this book, mostly because I can't find part of it confirmed anywhere. I like to have multiple books going at once, both for the variety and because you end up accidentally encountering cool parallels. In the summers I like to set myself the task of reading 1 short story a day. While reading Chronic City I therefore happened to be also alternating between Kafka and Poe tales (which themselves pair very nicely). The first alignment with the novel was blatant. I had just read Kafka's Investigations of a Dog when Lethem's character Perkus Tooth began quoting from the story! Improbable enough, but the next one was crazier, if murkier. It has to do with the book's Bloomberg-stand-in Jules Arnheim. Poe has a short piece entitled the Domain of Arnheim about a wealthy man who expends his wealth on landscape gardening to create elaborate artificial landscapes. That parallel (for those who have read Chronic City already) can't be a coincidence, right? I googled the heck out of the terms Poe, Lethem, Arnheim, Chronic City and Domain but got nothing. In a scathing review of the book I even read a comment that Lethem's character's "names sound like riddles, which at first makes you think and, later, when you realize none of this is going anywhere, roll your eyes." This one name at least does seem to mean something, the key just happened to be hidden in one of a 209-year-old author's most obscure short stories. Weird. Also, I met Lethem once before I'd ever heard of him. Turns out he lived in my dorm room at my college before he dropped out, and he came to relive old times. I remember standing there awkwardly because I could tell I was supposed to know who he was. show less

I read this slowly, but not because it's a slow book. It is stimulatingly strange, full of blistering funny details, and has a dark core of philosophical melancholy. I savored it. And I've thought back on what a unique alternate Manhattan Lethem created in this book, simultaneously a kooky near future and somehow an accurately pop-culture-and-celebrity-encrusted 90's. Great satire, like black gold. File with: The Loved One, Cuckoo's Nest, Being There, Catch-22, White Noise, Cat's Cradle, V, Barthelme & George Saunders' stories.

I read this slowly, but not because it's a slow book. It is stimulatingly strange, full of blistering funny details, and has a dark core of philosophical melancholy. I savored it. And I've thought back on what a unique alternate Manhattan Lethem created in this book, simultaneously a kooky near future and somehow an accurately pop-culture-and-celebrity-encrusted 90's. Great satire, like black gold. File with: The Loved One, Cuckoo's Nest, Being There, Catch-22, White Noise, Cat's Cradle, V, Barthelme & George Saunders' stories.

A Sardonic Look into the Wasted Lives of Manhattanites--According to Lethem:

To read Chronic City, one might as well say that Manhattanites are clueless, pot-smoking, wool-over-the-eyes patrons of Nihilism. And according to Lethem, you'd be correct. So the question becomes not what is this book about, but instead, why did Lethem take the time to write such a meandering sprawl that lays waste to one of the best cities in the world?

Lethem rips on writers, agents, marketers, rock critics, movie critics, book critics, critic-critics, ghost writers, pot smokers, the New York Times, the New Yorker, architecture, animals, machinery, TV shows and actors (so I'll side with him on this one), endangered animals, hamburgers, The Lonely, the Smug, show more Manhattanites, ...hmmm...who did I leave out? There's more, but you get the picture.

What bitterness drove the writer to create a bloated, episodic work, that clearly lacks a plot as well as a heart? To Lethem, is this what our culture is? Episodic and metaphoric to authors who live in NY (and Maine)?

Where is the hope? (Not hope and change, just our humanist optimism?) Perkus Tooth, the 'metaphor' for the author and his friends, fails. Insteadman is purposeless, and at points, the author refers to him as Chase Unperson. In the end, Lethem leaves me feeling empty. I don't need to read to feel someone else's emptiness.

Time waster. But yes, Lethem does have some beautifully emotionlessly constructed sentences.

But why?

To write a sprawling Seinfeld episode for the literary is a colossus waste of time and life. show less

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn native and de-facto chronicler of life in the borough, caught a lot of flak for placing his last novel (gasp!) in Los Angeles. In Chronic City he casts his gaze back to the city that never sleeps, although his version of Manhattan is, as you might imagine, a little off.

Lethem has a gift for blending literary genres; his fiction always has a smattering of science fiction, his noir has a metaphysical bent. In between 2007’s geographically maligned You Don’t Love Me Yet, and this novel, he even took a stab at reviving the forgotten superhero Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics, and it is the comic book that informs this novel; it’s characters are, by choice, two-dimensional, and play out all the necessary show more New York archetypes against a flat back drop of apartments, diners, taxi cabs, and improbable not-so-random violence.

The novel’s protagonist is an empty vessel named Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who lives off of royalties and making the scene with Manhattan’s rich and even richer. His latest claim to fame, and the one that instills him at all the important parties, is his engagement to an astronaut who is marooned on the International Space Station due to a carpet of space mines that have been sowed underneath its orbit by the Chinese. Like a lot of things in the novel, this is taken for granted and nobody seems that interested in doing anything about it. Perhaps, and just perhaps, this is Lethem’s dig at the place the international community finds itself in relation to China’s rising prominence on the world stage. At this point, what could we do if they decided to mine the heavens? Write a strongly worded letter? Stop buying … oh, I don’t know, everything?

Insteadman’s “lostronaut” writes him letters that are reproduced in the New York Times (albeit in the War-Free edition that seems to be favored by most) so that most people know more about what is going on than he does. Insteadman’s problem is that he can’t quite remember his fiancé or how he became an ornamental table setting.

There are clues from the beginning that all is not right with Lethem’s island, for one, Lower Manhattan has been enveloped in a mysterious dense fog that never dissipates. Like DeLillo’s “air-borne toxic event,” there is a disconnect between what’s real and what is simulated. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (whose position as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona, Lethem is due to inherit) has become Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, another overly long book that no one finishes. Muppets have become Gnuppets, which may just be a wink at Gnosticism, loosely defined by Wikipedia as “consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that the material cosmos was created by an imperfect god.”

The root of Gnostic belief, gnosis, is further defined as “a form of mystic, revealed, esoteric knowledge through which the spiritual elements of humanity are reminded of their true origins within the superior Godhead, being thus permitted to escape materiality.”

Insteadman’s catalyst, and a fount of esoteric knowledge, is Perkus Tooth, a stand-in for an aspect of Lethem’s own personality in much the same way as Kilgore Trout took the heat for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Tooth is a twitchy, well-stoned cartoon in the Lester Bangs mold, and although he bristles at being called a rock critic, is as remembered for a stint at Rolling Stone than for a series of intellectual commando-style broadsides that papered the Bowery back in the day.

The chronic in the novel’s title, is an allusion to the high-grade marijuana that Tooth, Insteadman, and a former activist-turned-mayoral-fixer, Richard Abneg, imbibe with stunning regularity. The trio’s pot-driven cultural insights and conspiracy theorizing are either the best parts of the book, or the worst, depending on one’s own proclivities. I, for one, loved Tooth’s Marlon Brando obsession and manic drive to “connect the dots.”

Almost exactly halfway through the book, a game-changing possibility is introduced that ties directly into Gnostic belief and, like religion, either explains everything or nothing at all. Tooth’s homeless associate Biller finds work designing “treasure” for a virtual universe called Yet Another World, created in turn by Linus Carter, a brilliant but socially inept designer—an imperfect god.

A description of Carter’s online universe reads like a Lonely Planet guide to Manhattan itself, a “… paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever.” The line between real and unreal becomes even more blurred as Insteadman realizes that “Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money has its solvent powers …”

In the end, our empty hero comes to realize it doesn’t really matter if the island that he knows is indeed real, or if anything actually exists on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. He learns the hard way that what is important is the real relationships that we form with other travelers.

As for Tooth, he is finally permitted to escape materiality through losing everything and finally finding a kindred spirit, in this case a massive three-legged pit bull named Ava. The dog continues to work healing magic on Insteadman after his own collapse into his own footprint. Having inherited the responsibility of walking her, he finally abandons Manhattan’s ubiquitous taxis for a street-level view of his world.

“… it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care.” show less

I rated this book 4 stars at first but changed it to 5. I kept thinking back on it and deciding I wouldn't have wanted Lethem to change much, if anything, about it. It was the best imitation of Philip K. Dick I've ever read - high praise in my opinion. Along with As She Climbed Across the Table the skewed lens through which we view the microcosm he presents is endlessly fascinating. The characters are ridiculous, but that's what makes them entertaining. At first it can seem like a jumble of ideas, bandied about left and right, but by the end they resonate together, harmonize and condense.

I have one nitpick though. The set-up for Julio Cortazar's Final Exam felt too similar. You have these snooty people wandering around the city, it's show more enveloped in fog, and there is even a mention of an escaped wildcat. I recommend reading Cortazar's book if you liked this one. show less