Chronic City: A Novel
by Jonathan Lethem
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan LethemEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-13
ISBN: 0385518633
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Reviews of Chronic City: A Novel
Book Review: "What did anything in the city have to do with what was real?"
Summary: 5 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Chase Insteadman is a survivor of one kind of altered reality, the world of the sitcom which made him a star before he had reached adulthood. Now the grown-up Insteadman, the narrator if not really the hero of Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, drifts through another kind of hyper-reality, the impeccably described physical and social maps of Manhattan where he lives. As Insteadman describes it, he is "riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star."
Letham has done a marvelous job of depicting Manhattan, just as he has with Brooklyn in the past in books like Motherless Brooklyn. The city's physical landscape is instantly recognizable, but also the way Manhattan residents shape the city to meet their own needs, carving out their own mini-universes on its surface. Lethem also adeptly portrays, subtly, the city's social elite, moving in their narrow circles and obsessing about the quintessential Manhattan issues, like real estate, money, bleeding-edge art and raw power.
Lethem's Manhattan is almost hermetically sealed off from any outside world, to the extent that I found myself feeling almost claustrophobic, as if his Manhattan was a world unto itself. (There is even a "War-Free Edition" of the New York Times for his Manhattanites who prefer to cherish the illusion of being insulated from an outer reality on the island.) The only other world that makes an impact on the self-absorbed and self-regarding citizens of Manhattan is literally in outer space: it consists of a disparate group of astronauts trapped in orbit in the international space station by a floating field of Chinese mines, unable to get home and able only to stare back down at Manhattan from countless miles up in the heavens. Among them is Chase Insteadman's girlfriend, Janice Trumbull, who writes him poignant e-mails (which are published everywhere.) To Chase, Janice seems increasingly to be his raison d'etre, lending him substance in a kind of skewed way - he had, he ponders, become "arm candy on Janice Trumbull's phantom arm."
But then, Lethem's Manhattan is rather askew, as the reader slowly realizes. large grey fog of mysterious origins has absorbed the lower tip of Manhattan, home to both Wall Street and the World Trade Center site. A "tiger" of some kind is prowling beneath the surface of Manhattan and surfacing only to devour buildings and people. A chocolate odor floats through the sky; unseasonal blizzards bring the city to a standstill; dogs and human beings are afflicted with toxic bouts of hiccups.
In many ways, the real hero of this book is Perkus Tooth (most of Lethem's characters end up saddled with delightfully Dickensian monikers), the oddball pop critic who scrutinizes the most schlocky television dramas as well as obscure cinematic works in search of hidden linkages, and is convinced that the New Yorker is trying to exert some kind of control over its readers not through its articles as much as the typeface it selects to print them in. Chase drifts into Perkus Tooth's orbit, the 'plot' that Lethem has crafted revolves largely around their relationship, with Chase playing the straight man to Tooth's maverick persona. Chase has easy charm, but little substance; Perkus has, Chase imagines, immense insight but little ability to cope with the wider world. (Or is Chase deluding himself on that score?) He begins to view Perkus as the antithesis of his distant astronaut girlfriend, someone who is physically present, for whom he can care and have it actually make a difference.
Or can he? Because in Lethem's novel, the nature of reality is constantly shifting and hallucinatory phenomena - caused by illness, cluster headaches or the excessive consumption of powerful pot sold under brand names like CHRONIC and ICE (and later, brands that reflect the city's obsession with both the tiger and the fate of Janice Trumbull, trapped in space.) - just aggravate this. At the outset, Chase tells the reader that he no longer acts - unless, he adds rapidly, "you call my every waking moment a kind of performance." Lethem's ability to keep the reader constantly off balance is at once frustrating and fascinating. Is the Manhattan that Chase and Perkus and their extended circle inhabit really nothing more than a giant Potemkin Village? Are they cogs in some broader fictional narrative of which they aren't aware? Life in this Manhattan is not a comfortable place, and there are certainly few heroes (or heroines.) Perkus and Richard Abneg join the mass of Manhattanites chasing after the mystical "chaldrons", a kind of large vase, frantically bidding for them online only to see them stolen from beneath them at the last moment. Perhaps their mistake is to believe that chaldrons - like other things that we deem to be essential, happiness and stability perhaps - are there to be sought after frantically but never attained; that attaining them will cause them to vanish. Similarly, some realities are unbearable and must be banished from the characters' mental and physical landscapes.
This is a fascinating novel, and one that is beautifully written. It's also a compelling picture of Manhattan circa 2009, one that I can imagine presenting to my nephews and niece a few decades hence, alongside books like Bonfire of the Vanities, when they ask what New York was like in this period. It is neither a simple or straightforward read, however. The reader is in the same position as Chase Insteadman, constantly finding himself caught off balance by events and having to question all his previous perceptions and assumptions. While it's obviously carefully crafted, it never felt either pretentious or self-conscious and Lethem nails the Manhattan zeitgeist. (The book's minor characters include a hilarious portrait of a Michael Bloombergesque mayor as well as an artist who specializes in creating giant holes in the ground and calling them art installations, who could be a sendup of three or four art world figures I can think of.) It's an almost impossibly complex narrative - the only option is to let yourself go and immerse yourself in Lethem's parallel universe.
Highly recommended to those who enjoy literary fiction with allegorical twists and an almost Dickensian scope. 4.5 stars, rounded up.
Summary of Chronic City: A Novel
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Jonathan Lethem, the home-grown frontrunner of a generation of Brooklyn writers, crosses the bridge to Manhattan in Chronic City, a smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and the rent-controlled. Lethem's story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and now is best known as the loyal fiancé of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its centers of power, even to the city's billionaire mayor. Paranoiac Perkus sees urgent plots everywhere--in the font of The New Yorker, in an old VHS copy of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid--but Chronic City, despite the presence of death, politics, and a mysterious, marauding tiger, is itself light on plot. Eschewing dramatic staples like romance and artistic creation for the more meandering passions of friendship and observation, Chronic City thrives instead on the brilliance of Lethem's ear and eye. Every page is a pleasure of pitch-perfect banter and spot-on cultural satire, cut sharply with the melancholic sense that being able to explain your city doesn't make you any more capable of living in it. --Tom Nissley
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