BOOKS
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
/ Daniel Hamilton
11.13.09
Chronic City
By Jonathon Lethem
Doubleday
480 pages
$27.95
Through his apartment window there is a sliver of empty sky—some small evidence that the world is continuous beyond the island of Manhattan. The window view, only partly blocked by the neighboring Dorfll Tower, affords Chase Insteadman, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, a momentary glimpse of a layered world: a flock of birds moves in instinctive patterns around an unknown church spire that is the single structure rising into the sky. In the blue space beyond, an airplane passes through the frame. And in the black void beyond that, a space station with Chase’s astronaut fiancée trapped on board continues its perpetual orbit around the earth. These objects, Chase understands, move according to their own laws, each oblivious and inconsequential to the other, their stories linked only to a single nexus—to Chase and the narrative he creates.
The world is a web of intersecting and diverging trajectories in Chronic City in which confluence is illuminated only by the partial visions of characters who construct, each according to their unique histories and paranoias, their own worlds within worlds. It is, in other words, a story about storytelling, and as such encompasses under a single, ambitious, and decidedly postmodern umbrella the ideas about identity, culture, history, cities, and loss that Lethem has been exploring since Motherless Brooklyn.
The enormous plot goes like this: Chase is a former child star best remembered for his role in an inoffensive and long-syndicated sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. He lives on residual checks and the occasional voice-over gig, but also finds himself as the unwitting lead in a national tabloid story in which he waits, heartbroken and ever-hoping, for the return to earth of his astronaut fiancée, Janice, who is trapped in orbit on the international space station. Janice writes heartbreaking love letters to Chase that the press scoops up from NASA for publication.
The publicly lived melodrama gives Chase an eerie sense that his life is scripted and meaningless, and indeed, an odd emptiness pervades every scene of the novel. As though in search of some palliative, something to fill the void, Chase wiles away his evenings with New York’s elite on an Upper East Side party circuit that values him as a guest for being charming and pleasant and for being at the center of the human interest story du jour.
“I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence,” says Chase. It’s an observation typical of his pointedly self-aware narration and one that hints at a paradox at the heart of the book: that Chase, the only reliable storyteller we have, is also the character who we know least about, who seems most deeply lost, and who is least cognizant of the writing on the walls around him. His myopic vision is tuned to the details—to minute gestures, textures, feelings, and motivations—but seems unable to discern the broader arc of the narrative. That is, of course, if there is one. It’s a big question in this book.
Against this backdrop, Chase meets Perkus Tooth, a freelance writer specializing in Criterion Collection liner notes. In an earlier New York, Perkus had plastered downtown with raves about art and music that earned him a cult following and a short stint as a critic for Rolling Stone, but his fifteen minutes of countercultural fame have long passed. Chase finds Perkus as an aging bohemian retreated into a hole of his own making, an obsessive collector, and a dying type of guardian whose curatorship of esoteric culture has become sadly irrelevant in the age of both the internet and—in one of the story’s knowing ironies—the age of Criterion Collection. Perkus is Lethem’s most compelling character, and his longing and loss are the book’s thematic anchor. Surrounded by forgotten culture and his own forgotten celebrity, Perkus is—like Chase, and like an Upper East Side that itself seems to be forgotten by time—a ghostly figure. There is loss at the heart of this story, experienced as an unknown emptiness.
And yet, to the aimless Chase, Perkus’s voracious and insatiable consumption of art and ideas seems to be fueled by some inner compass, the mechanics of which he is determined to understand. The relationship gives him some ersatz direction through a delicately skewed Manhattan—a hazy amalgamation of the real and fantastic that could have sprung from Pynchon or Delillo, though Lethem has said the direct influence was Philip K. Dick. It’s a city composed of actual headlines and thinly veiled fictionalizations of real-life city figures, as well as, for example, a loose killer tiger that may or may not actually be a city-sanctioned tunnel-digging robot that has developed a mind of its own. There’s a war-free edition of the New York Times. And an artist named Laird Noteless makes public art installations that are simply gorges cleaved out of the city streets. As ominous weather and strange smells descend on the island, there is a pending sense of doom, like the place is being eaten away.
By Jonathon Lethem
Doubleday
480 pages
$27.95
Through his apartment window there is a sliver of empty sky—some small evidence that the world is continuous beyond the island of Manhattan. The window view, only partly blocked by the neighboring Dorfll Tower, affords Chase Insteadman, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, a momentary glimpse of a layered world: a flock of birds moves in instinctive patterns around an unknown church spire that is the single structure rising into the sky. In the blue space beyond, an airplane passes through the frame. And in the black void beyond that, a space station with Chase’s astronaut fiancée trapped on board continues its perpetual orbit around the earth. These objects, Chase understands, move according to their own laws, each oblivious and inconsequential to the other, their stories linked only to a single nexus—to Chase and the narrative he creates.
The world is a web of intersecting and diverging trajectories in Chronic City in which confluence is illuminated only by the partial visions of characters who construct, each according to their unique histories and paranoias, their own worlds within worlds. It is, in other words, a story about storytelling, and as such encompasses under a single, ambitious, and decidedly postmodern umbrella the ideas about identity, culture, history, cities, and loss that Lethem has been exploring since Motherless Brooklyn.
The enormous plot goes like this: Chase is a former child star best remembered for his role in an inoffensive and long-syndicated sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. He lives on residual checks and the occasional voice-over gig, but also finds himself as the unwitting lead in a national tabloid story in which he waits, heartbroken and ever-hoping, for the return to earth of his astronaut fiancée, Janice, who is trapped in orbit on the international space station. Janice writes heartbreaking love letters to Chase that the press scoops up from NASA for publication.
The publicly lived melodrama gives Chase an eerie sense that his life is scripted and meaningless, and indeed, an odd emptiness pervades every scene of the novel. As though in search of some palliative, something to fill the void, Chase wiles away his evenings with New York’s elite on an Upper East Side party circuit that values him as a guest for being charming and pleasant and for being at the center of the human interest story du jour.
“I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence,” says Chase. It’s an observation typical of his pointedly self-aware narration and one that hints at a paradox at the heart of the book: that Chase, the only reliable storyteller we have, is also the character who we know least about, who seems most deeply lost, and who is least cognizant of the writing on the walls around him. His myopic vision is tuned to the details—to minute gestures, textures, feelings, and motivations—but seems unable to discern the broader arc of the narrative. That is, of course, if there is one. It’s a big question in this book.
Against this backdrop, Chase meets Perkus Tooth, a freelance writer specializing in Criterion Collection liner notes. In an earlier New York, Perkus had plastered downtown with raves about art and music that earned him a cult following and a short stint as a critic for Rolling Stone, but his fifteen minutes of countercultural fame have long passed. Chase finds Perkus as an aging bohemian retreated into a hole of his own making, an obsessive collector, and a dying type of guardian whose curatorship of esoteric culture has become sadly irrelevant in the age of both the internet and—in one of the story’s knowing ironies—the age of Criterion Collection. Perkus is Lethem’s most compelling character, and his longing and loss are the book’s thematic anchor. Surrounded by forgotten culture and his own forgotten celebrity, Perkus is—like Chase, and like an Upper East Side that itself seems to be forgotten by time—a ghostly figure. There is loss at the heart of this story, experienced as an unknown emptiness.
And yet, to the aimless Chase, Perkus’s voracious and insatiable consumption of art and ideas seems to be fueled by some inner compass, the mechanics of which he is determined to understand. The relationship gives him some ersatz direction through a delicately skewed Manhattan—a hazy amalgamation of the real and fantastic that could have sprung from Pynchon or Delillo, though Lethem has said the direct influence was Philip K. Dick. It’s a city composed of actual headlines and thinly veiled fictionalizations of real-life city figures, as well as, for example, a loose killer tiger that may or may not actually be a city-sanctioned tunnel-digging robot that has developed a mind of its own. There’s a war-free edition of the New York Times. And an artist named Laird Noteless makes public art installations that are simply gorges cleaved out of the city streets. As ominous weather and strange smells descend on the island, there is a pending sense of doom, like the place is being eaten away.
