FANS OF JONATHAN LETHEM are right to be wary of his
newest, Chronic City. After two inarguably great novels,
Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem
turned in 2007’s frankly embarrassing You Don’t Love Me Yet, a
midlife crisis in book form. In You Don’t Love Me Yet, Lethem
abandoned his home court, the New York City about which he writes so
well, to satirize the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles. Coming
from one of their own, writing about a decadent Western outpost, the
tinny novel may well have served to confirm the dearly held belief of
many New Yorkers that LA is hollow, vapid, somehow fundamentally less
than real.
It’s interesting, then, that it’s to New York Lethem returns to
examine the notion of constructed realities head-on. Lethem builds his
own Manhattan in Chronic City—the island is shrouded in
fog, its weather turning to snow in the summer, its streets ravaged by
a marauding tiger. Most ominously, the world is at war, the details of
which are left vague. We know only that the New York Times has
begun releasing a “war-free edition,” and that above the earth, a
spaceship and its crew are stuck in orbit, trapped by a Chinese
minefield.
One of the space-bound astronauts just happens to be the
fiancée of Chronic City‘s protagonist, Chase Insteadman.
Chase is a former child actor grown into a daffily genteel playboy,
residuals from his boyhood sitcom ensuring a frictionless existence.
His only communication with his astronaut fiancée comes in the
form of her long, pensive letters, in which she clings to the details
of their relationship even as her own survival seems ever more
unlikely. The letters are published in the Times, and the entire
city follows the story with fascination, making Chase a sort of
born-again celebrity, now as well known for his astral love as for his
childhood fame.
When Chase meets a man named Perkus Tooth, he’s slowly but
irrevocably exposed to a world completely unlike his own—to the
possibility, in fact, of other worlds existing. Perkus lives a life of
unfettered geekdom. He’s a film nerd who smokes too much weed, with the
time on his hands to pursue every association that flashes through his
drug-jarred mind. Soon Chase is joining Perkus on his pop culture
rambles, listening as Perkus unfurls epiphanies about the nature of
reality and how it relates to The Muppet Show, or weaves
theories about Marlon Brando as the “living avatar of the unexpressed,
a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era.” As
Chase becomes ever more involved with Perkus’ life and the characters
that populate it—including a sell-out housing activist who now
works for the mayor, and a prickly ghostwriter who specializes in
celebrity memoirs—he soon finds himself subject to the currents
and conspiracies of Perkus’ paranoid yet persuasive worldview. “It was
his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my
being,” Chase says. “To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d
drifted.” They smoke a lot of pot together, too—and develop a
particular obsession with an item known as a “chaldron,” a piece of
virtual pottery that exists only in the computer game Yet Another
World.
As the game’s title dryly suggests, Chronic City is an
exercise in world building. It’s also far more than a mere
exercise—Lethem has an undeniable knack for tempering the
asepticism of his ideas with the humanity of his characters. In its
big-hearted ambition, Chronic City stands among Lethem’s
best.