Chronic City

Before I give anyone the idea that Chronic City it too depressing to read, let me tell you that there are moments in this novel that will make you laugh out loud. Chronic City is not only funny but also breathtakingly well-written -- the kind of well-written that makes you re-read sentences and re-read them again. The themes explored are as weighty as themes come: What is real? How do we know? Does it make any difference if everything is fake? Really, does it matter whether one lives or dies? Or swaps reality for a very nifty video game? The narrator's perfect name is Chase Insteadman. I hope this tidbit whets your appetite.

Saying that Chronic City is a book about male friendship is like saying 2001 A Space Odyssey is a movie about an expedition to Jupiter, meaning not really. Chronic City is actually about representation, about what things "stand for," and about the illusions that result from the late-capitalist infotainment/political industry disruption of the representational framework. Because it is set in an alternative Manhattan full of historical characters and fictional events, locating the real within the pages of Chronic City isn't difficult, it's effing impossible, and that's the point. The object of the book's and JL's desire is the Manhattan of the late 70s: the innocent rebellion of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe; the theoretical and political maturation of pop music critics; the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. It's nostalgic for a Manhattan that still had within its borders the means to resist the onslaught of the corporate symbolic order. That said, there's no way to prepare yourself for the onslaught of JL's anger, curiosity, and sadness for the world that didn't materialize (or did) from that historic moment of critique. The writing is dazzling: from theoretical discussions on the nature of meaning to grand set pieces with dozens of characters to a narrative so perfectly paced and constructed, its surprise ending will keep you awake for days. There IS a male friendship in Chronic City: between an actor (a walking, talking, VERY sexual imaginary) and a cultural critic (sorry cultural critics: we're talking ABSOLUTE-ZERO sex), but all the characters in the book participate to the degree to which they interact with the basic relationships of representation and real, truth and big-other power. The story within the story within the story is that reality exists only as we construct it through struggle. Illusion isn't the natural state of things but the measure of our complicity with the world constructed by the powers that be. Unfortunately, it's not that simple and the true accomplishment of Chronic City is how JL imagines the relationship of struggle and complicity as a vast, complex totality, an all-too-human ecosystem of good intentions and lost opportunities. Chronic City is replete with postmodern cynicism and lit in-jokes, but it is also infused with sympathy and generosity for those who seek and fail and continue seeking. In this, JL provides more than a call to arms, he provides a measure of grace, without which the struggle for reality would be neither possible nor worth the effort.

There's no denying there's something very Seinfeld-y about this book. It takes place in New York, it's searingly funny and it's essentially about nothing. There's definitely not a lot of story, and at times that slowed me down getting through it. But I'm so glad I read it. How could you not love a book with characters named Perkus Tooth and Oona Laslo? All the characters were so well-done. Flawed, funny, interesting, human ... Perkus reminded me of Walter from Fringe, only instead of being a scientist he is a pop-culturist. Constantly espousing some new theory tied to a current New York theme. The book is filled with brilliant satire, unique friendships, and scathing social commentary, not to mention a cuddly pit bull. For Manhattan dwellers this book is a must! I think there are some aspects of this book that you can only fully appreciate being from New York. I was sorry to have missed them. I loved it.

In the two weeks since I finished Chronic City, scenes from the novel keep floating up from the tunnels they've dug in my subconscious, forcing me to rethink my original not very high opinion of this book. In spite of his post-modern tics, Lethem has created a story powerful enough to linger, which is my most important criteria for novelistic excellence. I don't know how he does it, because his tricks and tools fail in other authors' hands, but he's managed to create a three-legged pit bull who lives in an apartment for dogs and a dying astronaut who lives on a disintegrating and vegetative space station and a hapless pot-smoking intellectual hero I can't forget. Like Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's earlier novel, Chronic City has rearranged itself in my memory from a slick compendium of the annoying tendencies in modern fiction into one of the best contemporary novels I've read. My original less flattering review is below: In Chronic City, Lethem has succumbed to the pot-smoking author's postmodern fallacy, which is that your readers will enjoy your failure to take your characters and story seriously as much as you do. What's left when the narrator's unreliable, your characters are collections of tics and in-jokes, and even your McGuffin (or chaldron, in this case) is revealed to be nothing more than a collection of pixels in a virtual world? Language, sayeth the postmodernists, and since that's all there is in a novel, it had better be enough. In another recent pot-infused novel, Pynchon's Inherent Vice, it is. Though Lethem's capable of some lovely passages, in Chronic City, it isn't. Pynchon isn't any more serious than Lethem about his plot or his characters, but he does have a reverence for the details of the physical world that infuses his descriptions, and makes them lovely enough to stand on their own. In Chronic City, nothing exists outside the claustrophobic worlds of in-crowd art and political paranoia, and though Lethem makes heroic attempts to move us with the beauty of his artificial world, for me, it isn't working. By the end of the novel Lethem makes an attempt to lead us back to the tangible by introducing Ava, the three-legged pit bull, who leads the narrator to the iconic flock of actual birds who have long decorated the small and shrinking view from his Manhattan window. Too bad that Lethem obscures Ava with that more traditional symbol of hope and meaning: the birth of human infant. It's way too late in the history of our overpopulated world for human birth to have the resonance Lethem tries to give it. Obscuring emotional content with a collage of signs and symbols is what Chronic City's all about, perhaps symptomatic of marijuana's effect of disengaging intellect from emotion.

Chase Insteadman is a former child star whose current claim to fame is his relationship with Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped by space mines in an endless orbit on the International Space Station, whose frequent love letter dispatches to Chase are published in the New York Times. Perkus Tooth is a formerly notorious but reclusive intellectual provocateur, who used to write about pop culture for Rolling Stone but refuses to be labelled a mere music critic. They both inhabit a modified Manhattan, in which the twin towers still stand, but are obscured from view by a permanent and dense fog, where strange scents and sounds and bizarre weather patterns are accepted as the status quo, and where an enormous and apparently unstoppable tiger disrupts traffic and destroys low-rent developments. These unlikely friends, and a whole host of odd but utterly believable characters, end up on a dead end quest for a kind of virtual holy grail that turns their already skewed perceptions of reality upside down. It's a very funny and insightful and maddening yarn. It's also all over the map in terms of the range of topics and interests and intrigues. If you really want page turner conventional storytelling, featuring driven characters with clear-cut aims and narrow focus and tight plotting, you might be disappointed. Oona Laszlo, the extraordinarily prolific ghost writer and part time lover to Chase Insteadman, describing preparations for her magnum opus, the rejected autobiography of the postmodern architectural artist Laird Noteless, states: "I read Ballard and Baudrillard, and by the way, I don't care what anyone says, Ballard's just Baudrillard without the u-d-r-i." You might say Lethem splits the difference here - or concurs with Oona that this is a difference without a difference - the book is equally an exploration of hyperreality and simulation as it is of the way routines and habits and technology embed a very tangible metaphysics. It's as much a grippingly visceral story of manufactured passions as it is a headily abstract exploration of the desert of the real. Of course it could all be just a big long joke - a kind of postmodern parody, or reductio ad absurdum of claims the world is untethered to anything more solid than political pronouncements and newsroom spin - but if so, it's both very funny in the telling and disturbing in its import as the untethered world it depicts is a bit too close for comfort (too close, for example, to a world in which a balloon boy hoax can command almost exclusive media attention, drawing commentary from experts all over in all the major networks for a few days, days in which real and important stories were being ignored). Lethem mixes real life literary and cultural and philosophical references with full-on fabrications one can only wish existed, such as Perkus's rare copy of an underseen and underappreciated Werner Herzog film called Echolalia, for which Herzog interviews Marlon Brando, who refuses to be int