Chase’s Manhattan

A former child star, a ghostwriter, an astronaut
and a cultural critic navigate through an
alternate NY in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

by JULIET WATERS

Paranoia is a flower in the brain.” This is a sentence retrieved from a dream by Perkus Tooth, an aging cultural critic who lives in the alterna-apocalyptic Manhattan of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. It also describes the experience of reading Lethem’s latest book. There’s a level of literary hyperactivity in Chronic City that can be as alienating as it is engaging. In time, its various themes and subplots find a place to grip and blossom inside the brain. But it does take time. And when it grips, there are moments one still isn’t entirely sure this is a good thing.

Lethem has always been something of a shape shifter. An unapologetic magpie, he prides himself on writing that reads more like a kaleidoscope of viewpoints than one lucid vision. But to give coherence to this literary collage, in his fiction at least, he seems to channel distinct narrative voices. In Fortress of Solitude, his semi-autobiographical tour de force, it was Don DeLillo. A softened, boyish Don DeLillo, but with the same recognizable tone of urban grandiosity that takes a tonne of talent to pull off.

In Chronic City, he seems to be channelling Michael Chabon, albeit a darker, shinier Michael Chabon. But unless you’re into a relentless quirkiness that produces characters with names like Perkus Tooth, Chase Insteadman and Oona Lazlo, it will take some intellectual antenna-fiddling before you discover what makes Lethem worth reading.

For me, it is sentences like this one, from the point of view of Chase, former child actor and fiancé to a Bowie-esque female astronaut who is currently and tragically trapped in a space station. “The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier. This is why I always take taxicabs.”

Chase is a feather duster in the impossible psychic squalor of his self-inflicted responsibility, Perkus Tooth. He drifts into Tooth’s life, in the way that ciphers inevitably find narcissists. An “unaccountably soulful” former child TV star, Chase is now best known for his doomed very, very long distance relationship with his teenage sweetheart, the astronaut, Janice Trumbell. But he is not without insight. As Richard Abneg, a former revolutionary turned political fixer, points out, “Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens, I actually get you.”

Most of the dialogue in Chronic City reads like this, a dance between pop culture, art and New York attitude. “I’m one of those subtext-on-the outside people,” says Oona, a ghostwriter who threatens the fidelity that Chase is tabloid-famous for.

Like a gang of aging hipsters on a desperate run from a Dan Brown novel, but soon finding themselves smack in the middle of a Wim Wenders movie, the foursome get pulled into a plot involving the pursuit and purchase of a “chaldron.” This is a brainwave-manipulating device that induces addictive trances, described here by Chase: “For something so warm…it casts a sort of… brusque…. watery…. shadow…. over so much else…. that I took for granted…” This is, not surprisingly, the insight that sparks Abneg’s “retarded Wallace Stevens” quip.

Oh, and did I mention the tiger? Seems that this vaguely recognizable Manhattan is on the run from—or in pursuit of—a rogue tiger, depending on whether you’re an ordinary citizen or paparazzi. When we enter this somewhat imaginary city, The New York Times is available in a “War Free” edition. By the end of the novel, it seems to be available in a Tiger Free edition. (Although this may be a joke. It’s hard to tell.)

What grounds the novel is the tragedy of Perkus, now a perpetually stoned conspiracy theorist (Chronic is the brand of highgrade marijuana he’s addicted to). If this were a nostalgic period piece, he’d be Withnail to Chase’s I. Instead he’s like a terrible prophecy of what the cultural critic’s life could be in 10, maybe even five years from now. Unemployed, unhinged, drifting in and out of relevance, and angry. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream,” he warns. Lethem’s city is not the reality we know. But, still, it’s no fake.

CHRONIC CITY BY JONATHAN LETHEM,
DOUBLEDAY, HC, 467 PP., $34.99