Customer Reviews

Chronic City: A Novel

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm a big fan of Lethem's writings. I like his sensibility and always feel he has something compelling to say about the human condition.

Chronic City, like Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, is full of jokes, especially about the hipster crowd. A lot of the jokes have an in-the-know or insider quality. The characters' names, Chase Insteadman, Perkus Tooth, Oona Laszlo, to name a few, sound eerily similar to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. There is also Ralph Warden Meeker, the author of a 1,000-page novel Obstinate Dust. This seems like a tongue-in-cheek allusion to David Foster Wallace and his sprawling Infinite Jest. One of my favorite jokes is how film critic Perkus Tooth retypes New Yorker articles in a different font style because he believes their gravitas and persuasion is dependent, not on content, but on the iconography of the New Yorker itself. As a compendium of jokes written to be enjoyed by the literati cognoscenti the novel is hilarious.

Sadly, though, Chronic City didn't work as a compelling and absorbing narrative. In fact, the plot left me incurably cold, emotionally distant, and ultimately frustrated.

Stylistically, the novel is a success as Lethem's language and craft always prove eloquent and polished. But this self-consciously hipster novel suffers from a lacking plot engine, self-indulgent characters prone to long-winded discussions about their esoteric knowledge of the arts, and as such the novel suffers from being more of an intellectual exercise with little emotional power. Its theme of hipsters lacking direction doesn't have enough plot impetus or emotional involvement to be rendered with the kind of power I expect from Jonathan Lethem. Five stars for jokes; three stars for plot line.

In case you miss some events the first time, don't worry Lethem will return to them - and return to them - until you want to scream "Get on with the story! (If there is one.)". Thus went the first half of this book.

Actually there were some attempts to mingle several stories, none of which will push this to the top of Lethem's bibliography. As much as I usually enjoy Lethem, this one was a disappointment.

The whole book is about some amorphous Manhattan of perhaps some not-so-distant future. The characters are equally as formless as they wander without purpose from one juvenile, hedonistic romp with sex, pot and booze, to another. They are equally unwilling to provide meaning to each other's lives - and they are 'friends'.

Of course, no book by Lethem is a total flub. There are always enough zingers and turns of phrase to keep even a lesser effort worth another turn of a page. The interactions of the characters are presented in a noirish style, and where the novel does advance, there were some moments of meaning.

Fortunately, I'll probably have forgotten this one before Lethem releases his next one - and hopefully the next one will have something about it to remember. I suggest you to wait for that next one and give this one a pass.

I loved Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" and enjoyed "Fortress of Solitude", but this attempt really misses the mark. The main characters are has beens on the periphery of art, fame, money and high society in New York City. Their lives are boring and pointless, but they spend their time together to mutually reinforce their false sense of importance. The book moves at a dreadfully slow pace, or perhaps it just seems that way because the story and characters are so uninvolving. This book is a real dud.

I'm a big Jonathan Lethem fan, have read most of his work except for a few of his early books, and so was enthused to read this based on the description. It's not bad, but meanders and ultimately is kind of disappointing. The writing is fabulous, and there are a lot of interesting ideas put forth, ultimately it seems as if Lethem doesn't know how to tie it all together and make any kind of 'grand statement.' I'm not an editor and I could have easily sliced 50-75 pages out of this. So if you are a big fan, worth reading, but if you are a casual fan who liked 'Motherless Brooklyn' and are looking for something as good, you'll definitely be let down by this!

There's nothing wrong with this book, but it was a mistake for me. I got it because I am an admirer of Jonathan Lethem -- and I still am -- but while I loved "Gun, With Occasional Music" and "The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye," his literary novels are just too detached and meandering for me to enjoy. I love the way he writes, and there are some wonderful flourishes in this book -- I particularly liked Laird Noteless, the "sculptor" whose works are nothing more than enormous holes in the ground in awkward places, and the moment when the main character, Chase Insteadman, has one of those classic hypochondriacal synaesthetic attacks, when he is overwhelmed by sensation and alienation -- and it turns out he has the flu.

But for the most part, the book felt wrong to me. I need more of a narrative and less self-aware humor. I have also known people like Perkus Tooth, and I don't like them, so sympathy for this guy was hard to drum up. For those who enjoy postmodernist literature, I think this book would probably be a wonderful experience, but I couldn't finish it. Which, of course, makes me feel like a semi-literate buffoon, but there are too many books out there to read, and enjoy reading, for me to spend more time slogging through something that I can't get a handle on.

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.

If Seinfeld was "the show about nothing," then Chronic City just may be the novel about nothing. It's beautifully written, but very little happens in the course of its 480 pages. To keep my comparison alive, you'd find your "Jerry" in protagonist Chase Insteadman--one of the many unusual names we'll discuss in a moment. The book's jacket copy describes him like this:

"Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much-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."

Within the novel's text, Chase describes himself: "My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I'm truly a vacuum filled by the folks I'm with, and vapidly neutral in their absence." In other words, a hard character to really care about.

Chase is surrounded by a group of equally oddly-named friends. Foremost among them is Perkus Tooth, the "Kramer" of the bunch. Perkus is long past quirky and deep into weird territory. He's a largely sequestered social critic who spends his days and nights getting high and sharing semi-coherent rants with a selected few. Perkus's life-long friend, Richard Abneg, a city bureaucrat, can be our "George." And their long-time associate, and Chase's secret lover, Oona Laszlo, rounds out our quartet as "Elaine."

My comparison with this long-dead television show is a little ridiculous, but at the same time, it's not crazy at all. These are caricature New Yorkers, doing their thing. Chase is the least objectionable of the bunch, but none of them are all that likeable. By far, the most sympathetic character is Janice Trumball, trapped in space and pining for her man. Her letters home were my favorite part of the novel, but they were few and far between.

So, I mentioned the names. To those already listed add Strabo Blandiana, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanjani, Anne Sprillthmar, and many others. The crazy names certainly weren't randomly selected, and it's no casual mistake when Chase is erroneously addressed as "Chase Unperson," and Perkus is later referred to as "Mr. Pincus Truth." Lethem winks at his readers with this passage:

"His name is Stanley Toothbrush."
"See, now you're definitely making fun of me, because that's idiotic."
"Stanley would be awfully hurt if he heard you. You have no idea how often people laugh in his face."
"Toothbrush... that's just a little hard to swallow."
"No more so than stuff you swallow every day."

The New York setting is as much, if not more, of a character than any of the others. (And the title references not only Manhattan, but a grade of marijuana. Did I mention the characters spend interminable portions of the novel getting high and having only vaguely comprehensible conversations?) Lethem's Manhattan is immediately recognizable; I've eaten at the burger joint the characters frequent. At the same time, it's a sort of bizarro Manhattan where the city and the citizens have to deal with tigers run amok, a pervasive scent of chocolate, and can choose to read the "War-Free Edition" of the Times. Muppets are Gnuppets, and are referenced constantly. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

I don't think anyone but Jonathan Lethem will ever understand what it all means, but by the end I understood what he was getting at. I just didn't care. As terrific as some of the writing is, the novel as a whole is rather tedious, and ultimately unsuccessful. I can't honestly recommend reading it unless, perhaps, you're a pothead with an extraordinary vocabulary.

It's hard to confront the spectacle of a favorite writer's apparent meltdown into derivative and self-parodying writing. Jonathan Lethem has been a favorite contemporary writer, with his Motherless Brooklyn sitting securely in my list of the best novels of the past 20 years. I opened Chronic City with anticipation and excitement, but it took almost no time--fewer than 100 pages--to dismiss my potential enthusiasm and force me into a hopeful slog through the 300 more pages of the book, hoping all the way that it would be redeemed, that Lethem would pull one of his magic tricks and the whole thing would fall into place. Instead, we have a soggy and droopy "aftermath of 9/11" novel, much worse than Don DeLillo's similarly disappointing effort.

Lethem creates an alternative history of the aftermath of the fall of the towers, replete with lowgrade satire of the Manhattanites of wealth and power, evocations of the artistic rebels of the '60s surviving as disillusioned sellouts or demented fantasists. It's a novel with a narrator who is a man of no character, NOT to be confused with a segment of Robert Musil. Insteadman is an empty shell, which can be an interesting point of reference when surrounded with others who presume to characterize him, as the others in this novel do; the problem here is that Insteadman is not just devoid of character, as he tells us ad nauseam, but he is also unbelievably boring. None of the quirky or sinister or pathetic characters he encounters, none of the odd "alternative events" that signal to us we are in a parallel "New York" (with a dense fog over southern Manhattan instead of a deep crater being re-constructed into a 9/11 memorial), can relieve the tedium of his narrative. Even a couple of shifts of p.o.v. fail to help. The femme fatale, Oona, is almost immediately identifiable as the agent of deceptions that surround Insteadman in an entirely familiar "this is a constructed world and you are merely a pawn playing your role in it" plot. The names dropped are just dropped; the supposed mysteries that create ambiguity or uncertainty are merely trivial, as they are supposed to be. The novel is 420 pages of flaccid prose which even a rogue tiger wandering loose in Manhattan cannot render interesting.

And there are borrowings, which perhaps Lethem fully expects us to recognize. The most blatant: Janice Trumbull, supposedly Chase Insteadman's lover, is a female astronaut stranded in a space station surrounded by Chinese explosive devices; she sends back letters to Chase that are published in the NYTimes, keeping a fascinated audience involved in their doomed romance and making him a celebrity who is on everyone's invitation list. Surely Lethem knows that many will think of Walt Dangerfield, the astronaut in Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney, circling the earth in orbit, playing popular music that is broadcast back to earth, keeping in touch as he rotates toward death. Others have written, as well, about the commodification of art and the manipulation of celebrity to control and distract a curious public. Others have written better about it, including Philip K. Dick and Don DeLillo, not to mention William Gaddis.

I wish I were not so deeply disappointed in this novel. I still admire Lethem and trust that we will have more great work from him. This should never have left his hard drive.

I was pleasantly surprised by Chronic City's well developed and likable characters as well as a view of Manhattan that probably was closer to the reality of experiencing than place than it would have been if Lethem eliminated all frivolity. The friendships and romances between the characters are believable and their almost accidental dedication to each other is touching as they are all drawn together by the common cause of Perkus Tooth. None of them seem sure about what makes Perkus so appealing. Chase Insteadman, a former child actor living off of residuals, cocktail parties and arm candy fame, takes on a care taker sort of role for Perkus since he can't take care of his fiance, Janice, who is lost in space and growing sicker every day. As time goes on, everyone in the group seems to realize that the only thing that can be real in a place where nothing is as it seems, are the feelings you have for those closest to you.

Jonathan Lethem's ability to create a reality on the page is undeniable, whether it be the mind of a young man with Tourette's Syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn or the vibrant life of street kids on Brooklyn's Dean Street in the 1970s in The Fortress of Solitude. With an eye for unique observations and an ear for the perfect words to describe them, he allows the reader to share his often unusual visions of people, places, and events. His characters, always quirky and often asocial, offer new perspectives on contemporary life. Often considered a "genre-bending" author, Lethem rejects pigeon-holing and confinement to a set of formulaic expectations. Instead, he lets his vibrant, energetic characters take him where they will, in the process forming new story patterns while providing new insights into old themes.

While this freedom for his characters has been effective and successful in previous novels, the characters in Chronic City are, unfortunately, generally weak and self-indulgent human beings, and letting them loose to explore their limited worlds does not translate into the evolution of grand themes and new perspectives. Stuck in their own worlds, often fueled by alcohol and pot, they dither and quake, avoiding responsibility and concerted action, as if their own lives are the center of the universe.

Chase Insteadman, the main character, is a former child actor, now living on residuals, which gives him entree into elegant social circles. He is the fiance of Janice Trumbull, an American astronaut trapped in orbit on an international space ship, who writes him long and sad letters, relayed by NASA. Chase has befriended Perkus Tooth, a "cultural critic" and devoted fan of Marlon Brando who lives in an unkempt Upper East Side flat from which he lowers food and gourmet varieties of pot to a homeless man, who, in turn, steals and sells his books. Oona Laszlo, a ghostwriter currently working on a book for avant-garde exile Laird Noteless, who creates "abysmal spectacles," is attracted to Chase Insteadman. Richard Abneg, an assistant to Mayor Arnheim, is working to undo rent control while making moves on a wealthy woman so that he will have a place to live.

As these characters interact at parties, conduct an intervention for Perkus, read the "war free" edition of the New York Times, and work to save the eagles at Abneg's apartment building, Lethem creates a broad satire of life in the city. Because the characters themselves are self-centered and lacking the aggressive, hard edges which make good satire come alive, however, the overall effect of the satire remains generalized, without a grand scheme to keep the the reader engaged and active in the characters' lives and caring about their outcomes. The novel lacks a clear thematic focus for its frenetic ideas, and the "cute" names throughout suggest a straining for effect. Mary Whipple

Motherless Brooklyn
The Fortress of Solitude