Chronic City (Lethem)

Chronic City 
Jonathan Lethem, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
467 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307277527


Summary
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a placeutterly unique. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—February 19, 1964
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—Studied at Bennington College
• Awards—World Fantasy Award; National
   Book Critics Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


The son of artists and activists, Jonathan Lethem has always been surrounded by art and archetypes. His father, avant-garde painter Richard Brown Lethem, ensured that the household was always bustling with fellow artists, live nude models, and a creative spirit. Despite the nurturing, artistic setting, Lethem's teen years were challenging—his mother died of cancer when he was 14, and the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood forced him to toughen up at a young age.

Lethem's Brooklyn is rich with history and stories. Much of the world knows Brooklyn through the movies and television—as an urban maze just outside the glitter of Manhattan. But Lethem's novels deliver a more emotional and brutal reality of the streets he called home (and still does). The Brooklyn culture of his childhood became the sidewalk on which he built his critically acclaimed Motherless Brooklyn, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lethem attended the High School for Music and Art in NYC, where he studied painting but began to hone his love of literature. An insatiable reader, he read the classic and the contemporary, including Kerouac, Mailer, Vonnegut, Chandler, Dostoevsky, Orwell, and Kafka. While still in high school, he finished a 125-page novel called Heroes. It was never published but is rumored to be the earliest form of what became The Fortress of Solitude.

After high school, Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont but dropped out after the first semester to work on his writing. He returned to Bennington briefly, but eventually made the move to California, hitchhiking his way across the country to arrive in Berkeley in 1984. This experience, and the years he spent in San Francisco, provided the inspiration for his first three novels, Amnesia Moon (1995), As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), and Girl in Landscape (1998).

In late 1996, Lethem moved back to Brooklyn and began writing the book that would put him on the lips of every publisher and reader in the country. When Motherless Brooklyn was released in 1999, readers fell in love with its fascinating lead characters, relentless plot, and detailed setting. It was an instant success and won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lethem's long-awaited next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, hit the shelves four years later, in 2003. He conducted a lot of research for the book, gaining yet another perspective on his beloved hometown. The novel is again set in Brooklyn, on Dean Street, where Lethem grew up. Over three decades, the two lead characters—Dylan and Mingus—experience the world through the prisms of race relations, music, and pop culture in a disturbing and compelling story of loyalty and loss, vulnerability and superhero powers.

His eighth novel, Chronic City was published in 2009. Set in Manhattan, the story focuses on an unusual friendship between Perkus, a wayward cultural critic with a penchant for marijuana and conspiracies, and former child actor Chase Insteadman.

Outside of novels, Lethem has published short fiction and lent his editing talents to a number of projects. "Odd and shocking, This Shape We're In" (an extended short story) is about an unforgettable trip to the hospital. The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye is a collection of seven short stories about everything from clones to professional basketball. Lethem and coauthor Carter Scholz have fun with the master of the bizarre in Kafka Americana: Fiction, a book of short stories with Kafka as the main character navigating absurd situations. Lethem edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, short stories about the art of forgetting by such authors as Philip K. Dick, Martin Amis, and Shirley Jackson. He was guest editor of The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, essays by writers on music.

Extras
• Lethem's original artistic impulse was to be a painter. While he remains a talented graphic artist, he first acknowledged his deep desire to write while at Bennington, where fellow classmates included Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt.

• Before he was a published writer, Lethem's only other jobs were in bookstores. His first bookstore job was at age 13, and he supported himself this way up to 1994 when his first novel was published. In San Francisco, he worked at the well-known Moe's Books, home of rare and antique tomes. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Jonathan Lethem's work has gone from postapocalyptic sci-fi to autobiographical magical realism. In Chronic City, he weaves these elements together, blending a number of actual recent events to create his own surreal urban landscape. The nearly mythological construction of the Second Avenue Subway spawns a strange destructive tiger that defies capture as it transforms the old city into a scary new one. A pair of eagles illegally squatting on an Upper East Side windowsill are summarily evicted. Best of all is the economic abyss that one once encountered above 125th Street. Here, Lethem has dropped a manmade fjord, a performance art chasm.

At the heart of this city is former child star Chase Insteadman. Lately, he is better known as a celebrity fiancé to fatale femme astronaut Janice Strumbull, who is stuck in orbit because of Chinese satellite mines. Lately, though, his greater concern is his friend Perkus Tooth. Perkus is a pauper scholar, a slightly delusional Don Quixote character whose windmills are called chaldrons, imagined vases that bring inner peace. Somewhat like the tragic poet Delmore Schwartz who Saul Bellow fictionally eulogized (and Lethem acknowledges) in Humboldt's Gift, Tooth cuts with equal parts genius and madness. Though he never really rises above a plasterer of "broadside" rants, he's a recognizable artifact of New York circa 1981. Between bong hits—yes, for you potheads, Chronic is his favorite brand—and downtown cultural references, conspiracy theories hiccup from Perkus's lips. A prevalent notion he has is that our reality is nothing more than a facsimile, a simulation of a hidden reality. Perkus'shyperactive brain only pauses when he lapses into his periodic "ellipse"—a kind of revelatory break. The only problem is his breaks are gradually increasing in frequency. Inasmuch as Perkus is a personification of the old New York and its highly endangered culture, Insteadman finds a moral duty to protect him.

If Perkus is Insteadman's moral conscience, Richard Abneg, an opportunistic politico, is Insteadman's naked ambition. Though Abneg started as an East Village anarchist, through intellect and arrogance he rose to become a powerful aide to Mayor Arnaheim (a Giuliani-Bloomberg hybrid). Now he's dismantling the rent stabilization laws he once championed. Eventually, these two work together to save Perkus.

Though Chronic City at times requires patience, it is a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, the book sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset. The key to his city lies in the very notion of reality: Chase Insteadman's moniker implies that this former actor is now just a stand-in for a greater (perhaps former) reality. By the conclusion, I found myself wondering if Lethem hadn't originally written a shorter simulacra of Chronic City, when it was just an Acute City. From him I would expect no less. —Arthur Nersesian (A Signature Review)
Publishers Weekly

"Behind the illusion there's nothing" spills forth from the ramblings of Perkus Tooth—Lethem's latest in a line of colorful characters—and succinctly captures the essence of the author's eighth novel. Set in Manhattan, the story focuses on an unusual friendship between Perkus, a wayward cultural critic with a penchant for marijuana and conspiracies, and former child actor Chase Insteadman. Holed up in Perkus's clapboard apartment, the duo try to weave together the chaotic events occurring in the city by way of virtual worlds, ghostwriters, and Marlon Brando. The stunning and unexpected conclusion calls into question whether the two are casual observers of the elaborate ruse or its central characters. Verdict: As with his other novels, the pleasure of this work is derived from the inventiveness of Lethem's characters and his verbal dexterity in description. Although the novel is slow to gain momentum, fans of Lethem's work (e.g., Motherless Brooklyn) will be rewarded for their patience with insight into the truthfulness of reality. —Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal

One of America's finest novelists explores the disconnections among art, government, space travel and parallel realities, as his characters hunger for elusive meaning. Long associated with the borough of Brooklyn, Lethem shifts to Manhattan in the indeterminate near future, ringing changes on the speculative science fiction that first earned him a cult following. Combining deft reportage and cultural insight with postmodern invention, he imagines a time and place where it is possible to opt for the "WAR FREE EDITION" of the New York Times. Manhattan's citizenry is terrorized by a tiger on the loose, but the marauder may be a media invention, a government construct or a machine. First-person narrator Chase Insteadman, an erstwhile child star, still lives off his residuals, as well as the refracted fame that makes him a welcome guest at the city's finer dinner parties. That fame has been recently underscored by the tragic fate of his fiancee, Janice Trumbull, a scientist-astronaut suffering from cancer while orbiting in space; her heartbreakingly witty letters to Chase are covered extensively in the media. Chase seems as disconnected from his surroundings as Janice is from earth, yet his life changes after a chance meeting with Perkus Tooth, a marijuana-smoking cultural critic who once enjoyed some renown as a writer for Rolling Stone. Tooth's sidekick is a wisecracking ghostwriter named Oona Laszlo whose work calls the very idea of identity into question; her relationship with Chase threatens to dispel the romantic myth of the child star and the astronaut in which the city apparently has so much invested. All truths and realities are open to interpretation, even negotiation, in this brilliantly rich novel. Chase is the hero Manhattan deserves, we see, when Tooth describes his friend as "the ultimate fake. A cog in the city's fiction." Lethem's most ambitious work to date, and his best since Motherless Brooklyn (2001).
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. When do you think the action of the novel occurs? Is there a reason the time was left vague? Is this the "real" New York City?

2. At what point did you begin to suspect that Chase Insteadman was living a fiction? At what point in their story do you think Perkus Tooth understood that Chase had been deceived about his role?

3. Can you accept that Oona Laszlo is responsible for the letters attributed to Janice Trumbull? Is it possible, as a writer, to create another human being more generous, large-hearted, and responsive than yourself?

4. What is the meaning of the wild animals that intrude on the lives of these Manhattanites—the eagles, the tiger? Do they have anything to do with the weather?

5. Have you ever felt that the place where you lived or grew up was being turned into a 'simulacrum' of itself?

6. Have you ever tried to care for someone impossible? Are you now? Does Perkus Tooth remind you of anyone in your own life, or did you find Chase's decision to befriend him misguided?

7. At different points in Chronic City, Perkus Tooth seems to attempt to sustain himself completely on culture and language, then, alternately, to try to leave culture and language entirely behind and live a "pure" life. Do you think either approach is possible?

8. The author's working title forChronic City was "Manhattan". The Woody Allen film by that name was often criticized for depicting a Manhattan consisting only of the white upper middle class. Is Chronic City self-aware about the limitations of its characters? Does Chase Insteadman's response to the black kids he meets near the Urban Fjord, or to the black man in the jail cell imply another version of Manhattan creeping into view?

9. What does the gray fog hide?

10. Was Chase unfair to Oona? Should he give her another chance?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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