An alternate Manhattan

CHRONIC CITY

By Jonathan Lethem

Doubleday, 467 pages

Available at select National Book Store branches

In The Book of Other People, the wildly imaginative anthology of short fiction edited by Zadie Smith, readers are introduced to Jonathan Lethem’s Perkus Tooth, a preening and eccentric culture savant who occasionally veers off into a “satori-like state he called ‘ellipsistic’; how, when he ventured there, he glimpsed bonus dimensions, worlds inside the world.” Though brief, the story about this intriguing character succinctly captures the author’s ideas about the emptiness of modern life, deftly painting a surreal picture of a Manhattan where the activity dissolves into something fake and inconsequential.

Incidentally, Perkus Tooth returns to Lethem’s Chronic City, a novel that builds a rather circuitous and marijuana-tinged extrapolation on a similar theme while extending its boundaries to a Gotham retrofitted with potheads, vapid Upper East Side socialites, socialist rebels, and other crackpot citizens of a city programmed into a cyclic state of unreality. Perkus, who isolated himself into a life of hermitage, “believed Manhattan had become a fake. A simulation of itself” — a place where its orderly, gridded infrastructure belies a real and inherent chaos.

However, unlike the earnest retakes on fictionalized cities like David Copperfield’s London or even the Big Apple visited in Lethem’s earlier works, this ersatz Manhattan recalls neither the restless hustle and bustle nor the sundry textures of a borough teeming with life. Instead, this alternate universe Manhattan is a weird and coldly mechanized, virtual reality fabrication whose buildings are constantly threatened by an escaped tiger that could also be a renegade tunnel burrower; where fjords cast by a postmodern sculptor eerily stud the city like Ground Zero monuments; where a chocolate-scented fog drifts over like a toxic haze; and where vacant apartment buildings are repurposed as ritzy canine shelters.

This surreal recapturing of New York City, while no doubt privy to its extreme cultural and financial stratifications, grapples but trivially with the crucial, social issues and the emotional malaises that inflict the novel’s members, capitalizing greatly on excessive emissions of postmodern prattle that read as if the distorted figures of Salvador Dali had walked into a James Joyce and Paul Auster novelistic hybrid. 

To live in this Manhattan, as noted by its narrator, “is to be persistently amazed at the world squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave.” A tiresome stream-of-consciousness monologue trails his philosophical commentary, and though it ideally showcases the author’s scintillating and ornately detailed prose, it drives with neither the purpose nor the pathos telling of a city with quirks and idiosyncrasies ripe for authorial harvesting.

Oddly enough, the characters in this novel fall flat, too, embodying not the flinty complexities of real-life New Yorkers, but rather the deliberately parodic (snooty socialites who throw lavish dinner parties, narcissistic artists who puncture the ozone with their winded jabber, and eccentric “mediocrities and has-beens” who aimlessly wander about) and polygonal cartoons tossed into this bizarre “simulacrum” of a plot. Perkus Tooth, the loafer who debuted in Lethem’s short story as a neurotic and iconoclastic one-time rock critic, resumes his life of idleness here, babbling about senseless big city metaphysics while subsisting on a deadly diet of burgers.

But rather than employing his spacious, 400-odd pages efficiently, Lethem manages to transform an interesting case into a blathering drag. In the course of the novel, if Perkus isn’t stoned on designer label marijuana, surveying old films by Werner Herzog, or indulging in silly theories about Marlon Brando, he can be found obsessively gushing (“Was it better to have loved chaldrons and lost, or never to have loved them at all?”) about an inordinately expensive and rare vessel of sorts revealed later to be a virtual hoax. He scours for it relentlessly on eBay and escalates one bid to five figure sums, defeated only by an unreliable dial-up connection. When his “bohemian grotto” collapses, he moves into a dog-shelter-cum-apartment-complex, meeting there a loving, three-legged pitbull named Ava who becomes his roommate and confidante. He also develops a chronic case of hiccupping that could potentially kill him.

The narrator, the genial, if somewhat staid former child actor named Chase Insteadman (a play on Pynchonian nomenclature), is a handsome “Manhattan gadabout” who functions ineffectually as the novel’s plot driver. Although keenly observant and sensitive to his upscale milieu, he confesses to being “outstanding only in my essential politeness”—coming off as a forgetful and confused gent who lives up to his name as a listless substitute, or to pun the phrase, as a genuine instead-man.

Curiously, the excerpts where Chase does play the more prominent lead involves his public and furtive love interests: the former a winsome, eloquent astronaut called Janice Trumbull, who mails him heartfelt and sometimes cloying missives from an international space station stuck in the void; the latter a conspiracy-smitten ghostwriter named Oona Laszlo, who covertly fills page after page of autobiographical text for a postmodern fjord sculptor called Laird Noteless. Chase makes the headlines when his public girlfriend is trapped in deep space and grows a malignant foot tumor, spurring The New York Times to capitalize on their tragic, long-distance romance. For someone labeled as “the saddest man in Manhattan” though, one questions if his nonchalant dalliances with Oona were underwritten as coping mechanisms for heartache.

But the festoonery doesn’t end there, as Lethem’s supporting members too are infected with the same hee-haw mockeries that transformed Manhattan into this cheap parody of wearing redundancies. Notwithstanding the Thomas Pynchon character clones like the plasticized socialite Georgina Hawkmanaji, Chase’s stage mom Sandra Saunders Eppling, or the avant-garde artist Laird Noteless, bloated elements such as the virtual reality scifi conspiracies, or those juvenile japes on that “chaldron,” or the massive hipster tome called Obstinate Dust by author Ralph Walden Meeker (an obvious play on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) remodel the world’s favorite metropolis into a contrived, dimensionless caricature that neither reproduces Gotham’s innate verve nor its gritty glamour. 

Dylan Ebdus, one of the heroes in The Fortress of Solitude (the crown jewel of Lethem’s bibliography), was portrayed as someone who knew “Manhattan, knew David Copperfield’s London, knew even Narnia better than he’d ever know Brooklyn north of Flatbush Avenue.” Confessions aside, that deeply personal and endearing novel about friendship, family, alienation, and estrangement, defined Brooklyn with such an immediate and masterly construct, seamlessly blending various genres into an elegantly inventive postmodern narrative spiked with a dash of fantasy. Chronic City, his anticipated comeback to NYC, regrettably worked better as a short story, when it was devoid of the undue artifice and the gaudy special effects that mire it in such nebulous nonsense.