Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, October 2009)
Steve Gillies
A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire. He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right. Then he completely fails to do so. His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book. “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.” Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.
Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously. There isn’t actually too much action to speak of. Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth. Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay. Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.
Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station. A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development. A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district. Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names. The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani. It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.
There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut. For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore. What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room. Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.
Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan. There are hundreds of them. The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place. Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.
Steve Gillies is a current MFA Candidate in Fiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted Environmental Chemist.