It is a declining world that Chase and Perkus attempt to parse and understand, and they wind up, along with a small group of friends, on a paranoid wild goose chase through the city’s forgotten slums and halls of power. Richard Abneg, whose unruly beard is the only vestige of his countercultural past, is a right hand man to the mayor and is their skeptical friend on the inside. Oona Laslow, a ghost writer of insipid celebrity autobiographies whose thick carapace of sarcasm obscures more than she is letting on, is a mysterious friend of Perkus’ for whom Chase falls.

The motley crew spends long nights smoking pot in the mole-hole Perkus has carved out of his rent-controlled apartment. An inordinate amount of time is devoted to them engaging in stoner philosophy and then bidding with a dial-up internet connection on eBay, chasing after elusive talismans called ‘chaldrons’ that inevitably go at the last second to anonymous bidders for tens of thousands of dollars. But what are the chaldrons? And more importantly, to what secretive world are they disappearing? Are they connected to the killer tiger that is terrorizing the city? Are they connected to a flock of protected birds nesting over Richard’s apartment window? Why are those birds protected? And what has really happened to Chase’s fiancée, Janice? In an attempt to connect the dots, the crew digs for truth in a bottomless hole, only boring deeper with each new discovery. Suspicions are confirmed. Conspiracy theories pan out to be possibly true. Fears that the world is run in secret by money and insular centers of power are mostly correct.

The relationship with Oona does create a compelling love triangle between Chase, the woman on earth, and the woman in outer space that turns out to be at the heart of the book’s deeper mystery. Janice’s well-placed love letters from outer space are achingly sincere and genuinely moving. And while the letters give Lethem room to play with some imaginatively tragic and comic sci-fi space drama, they also expand on the eerie sense of loss and emptiness at the center of the story. Janice is another sort of half-real figure whose presence is felt and then forgotten. Her position at any given moment is known, like a star, only by the imperfect light that reaches earth.

That the characters feel unreal in this way is one of the difficult realities of reading Chronic City: that what is thematically compelling is also dramatically flawed. It’s a long book, and for two hundred or so middle pages it feels like it, and for two hundred or so middle pages in which a lot of stuff happens to unknowable characters, it can feel like a long game of narrative chess. Chase’s narration is so dense with astute observations about people and relationships and cities, it is disappointing that he himself, as well as his friends, seem empty until the end of the book. There, for the first time a shared history between Richard and Perkus is believably rendered with a single uttered line that is both hilarious and sad, and the hole at the center of Chase’s life fills in. It is a quietly poignant conclusion, but it can be a slog getting there.

Fortunately, Lethem infuses the book with the kind of sweeping observations about people and the way they live that in baser forms might be called stereotype, but here hit on weirdly accurate general truths that might be called Updikian. He knows New York intimately, and the book is better for it. Among the convincingly rendered realities of life in the city is the odd phenomenon in which a person can construct their fate out of a physical space, the way in which they can become psychologically trapped in an apartment—what Lethem (might be loath to call) their Fortress of Solitude.

He is due credit, at least, for delving into intimidatingly over-worn, and yet oddly under-explored territory. In a pot-fueled story about worlds within worlds, the long shadows cast by Pynchon and Delillo and Barth are hard to escape, and yet as a story about the subjective narratives that are the building blocks of the world, Chronic City does have something both difficult and moving to say. People find purpose in stories. People locate identity in stories. People, tragically, create stories and get lost inside. This is not the book in which the author, wrestling with purpose and meaning in his own work, attempts to justify to believers and skeptics alike, “why we write.” Of interest to Lethem are the stories that create New York City out of a 13x2 mile grid and the stories that sustain that city even as it is passed from one dead generation to the next. This being a Lethem book, culture itself is a story with as many variations as there are points to connect. And for a book that attempts to answer the age-old and so potentially uninteresting question, “is the story true?” Chronic City finds truth that does not preclude fantasy or conspiracy or any of our various responses to the unknown.

Related Articles from The Fanzine

The Haze Pervades: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Matthew Derby on Roberto Bolano's Skating Rink

The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott