| Title | : | Chronic City |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0385518633 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780385518635 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 467 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2009 |
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 place utterly unique.
Chronic City Reviews
-
Chronic City will most definitely NOT be a 5-star book for everybody (as evidenced by the mixed reviews here) so here's a simple test to help determine if it will tickle your fancy or not. Please choose the answers that best describe your feelings:
1. I find Richard Linklater's semi-surreal, conversation-based films such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly (possibly Slacker as well) to be:
A. Mostly amazing, makes me think deep thoughts
B. Pretty good, nothing special
C. Boring
D. Don't know, never watched those
2. I find Philip K. Dick's paranoia-infused work concerning the nature of reality to be:
A. Mindblowing and awesome for the most part
B. Decent, makes good movie fodder occasionally
C. Sloppy and/or incomprehensible
D. Don't know, never read him
3. I find listening to philosophically-inclined stoned people frantically and loudly debate existential topics to be:
A. Hilarious, with the occasional cool concept or nugget of seeming truths
B. OK in small doses
C. Very annoying
D. Don't know, never was around any philosophically-inclined stoners
If you've answered anything other than "A" to more than one of those questions, then there's a decent chance this may not be the book for you. However, even if you've answered "B" to one or two, but still had an "A" mixed in, then you may very well find this to be up your alley. If you answered "D" to more than one, then it's a total crapshoot, but it helps if you're someone who sometimes enjoys thinking about the nature of the world around you, just for kicks. "C's" are just-plain-bad as far as you and this book jiving.
Either way, it's best to go in with an open mind, but at the same time realize that the many strange things about the Manhattan of this novel (the following examples are all mentioned early on in the book)--such as the escaped tiger wreaking havoc in the city; the transcendental power of rare vases called "chaldrons" that the main characters are obsessed with finding; the letters Chase receives from his famous astronaut fiancee, who's stuck in space due to a bunch of Chinese mines orbiting the Earth (and who Chase has difficulty remembering); the gray fog that pervades all of Lower Manhattan; even the mysterious homeless guy who lives beneath Perkus's apartment window--all have a purpose and serve as clues as to what's really going on. It's important to keep this in mind, and not simply go on thinking it's all just a bunch of characters and their insane stoned ramblings, with some tiger silliness and such added in for flavor.
The first time I attempted to read Chronic City--a few years back--I didn't realize this, and I ended up giving up within a few chapters, not quite getting the point. Now it's clear I just wasn't in the right frame-of-mind. Intrigued by the constant praises the author has heaped upon Philip K. Dick over the years, and the fact that I'm a fan of Lethem's science fiction works of the 90's, I briefly skimmed online reviews, and the glowing ones all emphasized words like "conspiracy," "insane," "simulacrum," "uproarious," and "existential." Those words are some of my favorites, so I dove in again with a different mindset, and I just now turned the final page, my mind well and truly blown.
It certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea, so I can't give a full-on, no qualifiers recommendation. But if you're like me, and enjoy getting caught up in mysteries about what's real and what's not, with a group of eccentric thirty-something, pseudo-intellectual, "used-to-be-a-big-deal-but-are-now-pretty-much-just-stoners" (hence the "Chronic" in "Chronic City') for company, then you're not likely to find a more sublimely-written, enveloping--at times even mind-bending--book around, with more than a handful of laugh out-loud moments, a rarity for me with literature.
In other words, 4 to 5 stars for those of us who are mostly "A's," and 3 stars on average for the rest, in my estimation. Some people, I'm sure, will find the stellar dialogue and great characters (including the city itself) enough to carry them through. There's no denying that Jonathan Lethem can write, so have faith that it IS all leading somewhere, and just enjoy the ride in the meantime, even if it is a bit meandering. Me, I wish I could have spent even more time with these lunatics--especially Richard "forever stalked by eagles" Abneg, whom I pictured as Zach Galifianakis (bearded version), which made his plight even more ridiculous and amusing--and I'll probably be re-reading Chronic City every few years for the rest of my life, and that's more than good enough for a 5-star rating in my book, even if many may disagree.
I have a feeling, however, that it will find its audience one day, but for now I'm just glad that I gave this book another shot, as I believe I may have found a new "must-read everything" author in Jonathan Lethem.
5 Stars. -
In which Lethem tackles paranoia and conspiracy theory, in other words, DeLillo and Pynchon territory.
There’s a wonderful book struggling to get out of this rambling oblique farce of a novel. The full blooded obsessive vigilance of conspiracy theorists would make a great subject for a modern novel – the watchdogs who watch the watchdogs, an informed elite calling to account a sinister informed elite at the other end of the political spectrum. I watched a video yesterday where a guy examined frame by frame that famous shot of the woman hanging outside the window of the Bataclan. He was looking for evidence that the Paris shootings were another false flag event whose sinister purpose is to scare populaces into eventually accepting police states and fascist politics. In the broader spectrum of things his reasoning came across as absurd but isolated within the footage itself there was something suspiciously stagecrafted about what we see. You understood then that what we believe depends entirely sometimes on the base of some deeper emotional need. Fascinating though was the sense that the guy espousing his theory believed he was right at the heart of history, a major player in the shaping of the future. A man who has found his raison d’etre. I couldn’t help seeing there the ideal character for Lethem’s novel.
Unfortunately in Lethem’s world the conspiracy theorist, Perkus Tooth, isn’t intriguing or located at the cutting edge of monumental world events. His intellectual suspicions, fuelled by dope (Lethem’s take on conspiracy theorists is too often founded on lazy clichés) are mostly irrelevantly absurd – whether or not Brando is really dead for example. So there’s quickly a sense Lethem is making fun of conspiracy theories which seemed to me a cheap and easy way to dismiss a compelling phenomenon of our times (DeLillo and Pynchon are both far more subtle and thought-provoking and many layered in their examinations of this subject). After all, do we really believe without some misgivings the official versions of the Luther-King and Kennedy assassinations? Or, to take it several steps further, do we believe it was the Jews or communists who burnt down the Reichstag? The politics of power is a dirty dog-eat-dog business. There’s bound to be sinister undertakings involved. But Lethem is going to ignore the sinister for slapstick. He’s found an easy target for mockery and he’s damned if he’s not going to take full advantage of it. Another cop-out is the novel is set in some kind of alternate universe where Lethem can further indulge his self-indulgence for the absurdly implausible. And this was the problem for me. This is a novel of brilliant surfaces but little depth. There was a much more daring and ambitious novel hived in his material but he rejected it for a madcap convoluted haul through event after event of inconsequential absurdity.
If you’ve never read Lethem before I’d recommend Motherless Brooklyn where his stylistic brilliance doesn’t, like in Chronic City, overcompensate for his lack of intellectual daring or vigour. He’s a very good writer but this novel convinced me he’ll never be quite in the same class as DeLillo or Pynchon. -
Moments of 5-star writing here but I found myself unable to have the kind of deep, caring engagement with the story arcs and characters that such a rating generally requires. That said, the book was fully entertaining all the way through. Jam-packed with humorous and thoughtful riffs and meta-riffs on pop culture, avant garde art, stoned philosophizing--all pulled through the looking glass of Lethem's penchant for Noirish Mystery and geekish cataloging. Clever but not too-clever.
The most enjoyable aspect for me was on the surface level of the writing itself and the way little curios were laid about and then connected and/or disconnected to and from one another after the fact. Lethem's clearly a seasoned writer by this point and it shows in the texture and shape and the variations of his word choices and the phraseology of his descriptive motifs and every page held multiple sightings of such delicious penmenship.
I didn't find this to be quite the 'mindfuck' book some describe it as. I think some of the more wacky elements are used brilliantly as red herrings in service of the idea that truth is pretty slippery and elusive and human beings are generally self-centered and lashed to overactive imaginations--not so much floated out there to truly blow your mind, man. -
Lethem’s work is seemingly more palatable when the hyper-luminosity of vaunting ambition to write the sort of lofty and lengthy Great American Novel in the manner of a Bellow, a Roth, or a Franzen is unpresent. This bloated and stressfully long-winded plotless slab of hipster-wankery sacrifices the humour, pacing, and genre-bending marvellousness of the earlier novels in favour of a character study of two vacuous, deeply uninteresting persons, in a hermetically sealed Manhattanverse where everything reeks of soda bread and kale smoothies. That said, Lethem writes astonishing sentences. That said, like Updike, these sentences tend to waft aimlessly around paragraphs of other preciously primped sentences, becoming sentences in-and-of-themselves, existing in their very thingliness as sentences, removed from any sort of relation to the trying, incoherent book in which they feature. As Chronic City regresses across 468 long, looong pages, a form of chronic readerly worry takes root—one where you fear the novel, in its nagging intolerability, in its continual poking at David Foster Wallace (the parodic tome Obstinate Dust is routinely mocked), will force you to hurl it spinewards across the room at some undefined point. Three stars, you say? Yes. Lethem writes astonishing sentences. I stuck around and read them all. Respect due. (To me).
-
Es curioso lo que me ha pasado con este libro. Tengo que reconocer —y me avergüenza hacerlo— que, deslumbrado por el despliegue de diálogos brillantes y situaciones increíbles, se me escapó la sorpresa final, ese detalle clave que hace que todas las piezas encajen. Lo sorprendente es que, aun así, Chronic City me pareció un libro extraordinario.
Nada más comenzar a leer Chronic City, la encasillé —sí, lo sé, los prejuicios nunca traen nada bueno— como una de esas novelas posmodernas de las que se puede esperar cualquier cosa menos una trama propiamente dicha. Y como ese tipo de libros son mis favoritos, mis ideas preconcebidas y yo nos dejamos llevar por los mil personajes e historias, a cuál más original e interesante, sin darme cuenta —como el personaje principal— de que, discurriendo discretamente en un segundo plano, la historia principal no solo existía, sino que en un ingenioso giro final daba un significado completamente distinto, más profundo e inquietante, a la novela. El hecho de que el propio protagonista siguiera con su existencia tan ignorante como yo de las fuerzas que gobernaban su destino es un magro consuelo.
Así que fue solo más tarde, una vez terminado el libro —que me había encantado a pesar de todo lo que me había perdido— cuando, comenzando a escribir estas líneas, tuve mi momento “si seré zoquete…”, releí las últimas páginas y ahí estaba, tan obvio que aún no entiendo cómo no me di cuenta a la primera.
Pero basta de hablar del final; volvamos al principio.
Si usted quiere darle brillo y glamour a una fiesta, a un cóctel o incluso a un funeral, el invitado ideal es Chase Insteadman. El que en su día fuera actor infantil en una serie televisiva de gran éxito, hoy se ha convertido en un tipo encantador y mundano que trabaja de “cara conocida” en actos sociales. Además, su prometida Janice es uno de los astronautas trágicamente atrapados en órbita desde hace meses en la Estación Espacial, desde donde le escribe apasionadas cartas —puntualmente publicadas en The New York Times, edición “sin guerra”— que sus conciudadanos devoran mientras esperan con el corazón en un puño su rescate, como si se tratase de un reality show más. Esto no sólo ha multiplicado la popularidad de Chase, sino que además garantiza que en cada velada a la que sea invitado para “rellenar las grietas de la fachada social” protagonizará un buen rato de conversación animada y morbosa en torno al drama de la popular pareja.
Chase es conformista, inocentón y superficial; siempre va a remolque de los demás. No es que sea feliz, pero se ha acostumbrado a esa existencia tranquila y cómoda como actor de reparto de la escena social neoyorquina, así que prefiere no hacerse preguntas.
Pero cuando conoce a Perkus Tooth, un antiguo crítico musical underground que se hizo famoso por empapelar la ciudad con sus desquiciadas invectivas, el cascarón que protege a Chase comienza a resquebrajarse, dejando a la vista un Manhattan oculto, heredero de la Gran Manzana de finales de los setenta. Entonces un lugar vivo y creativo, ahora esta fruta está siendo devorada a grandes mordiscos por el Manhattan del dinero y de los privilegios, para lo que primero necesita acabar con los pocos “gusanos” que, como Perkus, sobreviven de la época gloriosa. Ya nos lo advirtieron los Rolling Stones:
Uh-huh, this town's full of money grabbers
Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots, huh
Shadoobie, my brain's been battered
A tan sólo unas calles de los apartamentos de mullidas alfombras donde los ricos celebran sus fiestas, en la infecta cueva donde vive Perkus enterrado bajo montañas de oscuras novelas, discos viejos, cintas de video y cajas de marihuana (“Chronic” es una de tantas formas de referirse a la hierba de alta calidad en slang), Chase escucha a su nuevo amigo perorar incansablemente, como un gurú de la cultura pop, acerca de la televisión, el cine o la política, mientras se alimentan a base de café, hamburguesas y maría a partes iguales.
Perkus ha tejido una tupida red de referencias culturales (de
Mailer a
Bernhard, de Chet Baker a los Rolling Stones, de Brando a los Pequeñecos) que sostiene su propia teoría de la realidad; una teoría ingeniosa y paranoica que cuestiona la realidad misma, o al menos la apariencia de esta. Una teoría que, para desesperación de Chase, cambia cada semana. Perkus, cuyo poder de sugestión es superior al de la hierba, arrastra a Chase a un permanente estado de revelación en el que sus descabelladas ideas funcionan como una lente con la que observar la realidad no sólo con mayor detalle, sino también con una textura diferente, más real, más viva.
Pero cuanto más atentamente observan la realidad, más se desmorona esta, dejando entrever las contradicciones del mundo perfecto y plácido en el que Chase creía vivir. A fin de cuentas, quizá Perkus tiene razón porque, ¿cómo podemos estar seguros de que lo que percibimos es real o, al menos, no está manipulado? ¿Cómo puede tener Chase la certeza de que la farsa social que vive el encantador prometido de la valiente astronauta no es un papel más en su carrera de actor, una función que se representa en los periódicos ante la mirada de toda la ciudad? ¿Qué certezas podemos tener nosotros mismos sobre nada?
This town's been wearing tatters (shattered, shattered)
Work and work for love and sex
Ain't you hungry for success, success, success, success
Does it matter? (Shattered) Does it matter?
I'm shattered
Chronic City es una novela ambiciosa, compleja y plagada de referencias —reales e inventadas—, pero su lectura es fresca y dinámica. Jonathan Lethem recrea en ella un Manhattan reconocible, con sus calles numeradas, sus tiendas, sus restaurantes, sus museos, pero a la vez irreal, onírico, rodeado de una neblina gris que se pega a la ropa y asolado por un invierno interminable y por un extraño tigre subterráneo devorador de edificios enteros que se ha convertido en algo cotidiano.
Sobre este escenario al que se le ve el cartón-piedra, Lethem ha convocado a una extravagante corte de personajes arquetípicos de los que el autor se sirve para construir una especie de parábola que, en última instancia, esconde una velada crítica al poder del dinero y de los medios y a la vida sonámbula, conformista e insensible que vivimos.
Todo en Chronic City tiene un aire ligeramente pynchoniano, pero es sólo eso, un guiño, una referencia al maestro. La novela de Lethem posee una personalidad muy diferente, menos juguetona, más melancólica y amarga. De todos modos, al igual que sucede con
Pynchon, realismo y fantasía se entretejen de un modo en que a veces cuesta saber cuál es cuál, dibujando un New York tan imaginario que parece real —¿o es al revés?.
Pride and joy and greed and sex
That's what makes our town the best
Pride and joy and dirty dreams and still surviving on the street
And look at me, I'm in tatters, yeah
Con una acción que se desarrolla en unos pocos meses, en un ámbito geográfico muy reducido, con muy pocos personajes relevantes, a pesar de la gran cantidad de nombres citados, Chronic City tiene, sin embargo, características de novela épica, de saga:
Moby Dick con un actor superficial y porrero en el papel del capitán Ahab, persiguiendo la verdad (a fin de cuentas, su nombre es Chase) en lugar de a una ballena.
Chronic City es una magnífica novela que va evolucionando en las manos del lector, que la comienza fascinado por el despliegue de imaginación de Perkus y divertido por la ingenuidad de Chase, personajes a los que inmediatamente coge cariño, para después intrigarse por los extraños acontecimientos que se van sucediendo y finalmente reflexionar con detenimiento acerca de cuestiones tan trascendentes como la búsqueda de la verdad o el sentido de la vida. Un texto sugerente, capaz de hacer comprender al lector con ansias de aventura que lo importante no es cazar la ballena, sino renunciar a la comodidad y a la seguridad de las verdades prefabricadas y salir a perseguirla sin tregua; mejor fracasar siendo marinero que triunfar como un pez de colores en un acuario.
Ahhh, look at me, I'm a shattered
I'm a shattered
Look at me- I'm a shattered, yeah
P.S. 2020:
En los años que han pasado desde que escribí este comentario, volví a leer Chronic City no en una sino en dos ocasiones más, una en español —probablemente para hacerme perdonar mi falta de atención la primera vez— y otra en inglés —porque en ese momento ya se había convertido en uno de mis favoritos. Además, he disfrutado de otros cuatro libros del autor, y sus detectives metafísicos, sus hippies trasnochados y sus pijos neoyorquinos se han convertido en figuras familiares. La reseña escrita en 2011 no hace en absoluto justica a la novela, lo sé, como tampoco creo que sea capaz de hacerlo ahora. Supongo que haber seguido leyendo al autor puntualmente todo este tiempo dice bastante más que mis palabras. -
The early parts of this I thought were great. And for a time I was thinking to myself that Chronic City had the potential to be even better than the brilliant Motherless Brooklyn. There were echoes of Lethem doing for Manhattan what Paul Auster did so well for Brooklyn. The introduction to characters here really drew me in, with the early friendship between Chase Insteadman and the oddball Perkus Tooth in particular being really interesting. They, along with friends Richard Abneg and his wealthy partner Georgina Hawkmaniji were the sort of company that had me miss them every time I put the book down. That is, until somewhere in the middle third when Lethem stopped being Lethem and decided to try and morph into a combination of Pynchon, DFW - there is a doorstopper of a book in here called Obstinate Dust, and DeLillo. The characters suddenly felt less important, and it became a novel of ideas; of validity and falsity; of pot-fuelled paranoia. There was a scene in the first third of all four of them in Perkus's apartment, huddled around his computer whilst a bidding war is taking place on eBay for a chaldron vase - Perkus is utterly fixated with chaldrons. A joint is passed around. Drinks are knocked back. There is euphoria in the air. There is even dancing to a record that you just don't dance to. And while in the end their bids were unsuccessful because the price kept skyrocketing, this scene stirred my soul and warmed my heart. This became a moment I was still thinking about 300+ pages on as I was simply getting bored out of my wits, and I couldn't tell you anything that really happened after that up to somewhere around when Perkus re-emerged into the novel with a dog called Ava and a serious case of the hiccups, as I literally can't remember. I wanted nothing more than to just go back to Perkus's apartment and stay there. So disappointed. I couldn't really care in the end whether the giant tiger stalking Manhattan was real or fake, and as for the side story of Chase's fiancée being trapped in space - of all the things that could happen she ends up getting a cancerous sarcoma in her foot - it felt like he was trying to write the ideas for two or three novels into one. As I loved the first third and marvelled at his writing at times then it's enough to give it a 3/5, but my god did it ever feel bloated. -
I was enthralled with this strange tour of the dope-inspired concerns of a contemporary group of Manhattanites. They form a circle of friends around a visionary former rock critic named Perkus Tooth. The portrait rendered of New York as a “pocket universe” for these characters seems like a pleasant cross between the disturbing delusions in novels by Philip K. Dick and the fun self-fulfilling quests in Vonnegut tales. From hybrid vigor, the offspring is satirical but not vicious, solipsistic but not smug, playful not comic. Also, the prose is marvelous, the characters warm and human, and the read is easy.
The key characters are all effectively “residual people”, each riding a peripheral role depending on past successes or cultural trends set by others. For example, Perkus now resorts to writing liner notes for new albums. The narrator, Chase Insteadman (once misidentified as “Unperson”), is a former child star of a sit-com living off of residuals. His semi-celebrity status is enhanced from being treated by the media as the faithful, suffering fiancé of a woman astronaut Chase barely remembers now, trapped for months in the International Space Station by Chinese sabotage. A former protégé of Tooth, Oona Lazlo, is a ghostwriter who creates memories for celebrities who have trouble recounting them. Richard Abneg, a former radical tenant’s rights advocate, now works for the billionaire mayor as a fix-it man such as the smoothing over tenant evictions in redevelopment projects.
Although they could be considered social parasites, they treat the reality that filters into their cave as a cosmic puzzle for which they have the responsibility to resolve its hidden meanings, linkages, and possible conspiracies. Because the novel has a focus on this derivative mode of living, not much happens in terms of conventional plot. Aside from a couple of love affairs carried on by Chase and Richard, much of the action lies in the bull sessions with Tooth in his cramped apartment or neighborhood hamburger shop. Tooth mesmerized me, a vibrant creation seared into my mind along with the unforgettable fictional Neal Cassidy in Kerouac’s “On the Road”. Here is a great example of how his riffs flow like jazz improvisations on a theme”
Between starved attacks on his bagel, gobbets of pureed fish and mayonnaise dripping from between his fingers, Perkus named Brando as the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes of our murdered era. … “what I have in mind is when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Oscar in his place. …In one gesture Brando ties our rape of the Indians to this figure of our immigrant nightmare, this Sicilian peasant doing the American dream, capitalism I mean, more ruthlessly than the founding fathers could ever have dreaded. We’re as defenseless against what Don Corleone exposes, the murderous underside of Manifest Destiny, as the Indians were against smallpox blankets. And in the vanishing space between the two, what? America itself, whatever that is. Brando, essentially, declining to appear. Because the party’s over. …By refusing to show up Brando took on the most magnificent aspect, it’s as if Toto sweeps the curtain aside and the great and powerful Oz has absconded, leaving you to contemplate the fact that behind the illusion there’s nothing. The Oz of American history, for all its monstrousness, is all we’ve got.…”
The kind of conspiracies Tooth trucks with are typified by his belief that Brando’s death was faked. That the font choice and framing of the stories in the New Yorker are responsible for tricking the reader into seeing himself in the stories. That his obsession with acquiring a new form of exquisite ceramic vases called chaldrons through eBay is being foiled by secret powers-that-be that are hoarding them for a mysterious purpose. The largest plot on his mind is that maybe reality is a simulation for which we might as well go along with (which as actually based on a real academic physicist’s theory of the multiverse). He comes to suspect that the mysterious periodic destructions of parts of the city that are attributed to a giant escaped tiger represent some kind of cover-up of something else by the mayor, possibly some sort of slippage in the simulation.
Some of Tooth’s off-the-wall speculations seem pushed in jest (though he has trouble reading a massive book called “Obstinate Dust”, which reviewers identify as a stand-in for Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”). At least his friends sometimes take them that way, as illustrated here in this send-up of Manhattan residents’ sense of living in an island universe:
“Cops live in New Jersey, don’t they, Richard?”
“Jersey, sure, or Staten Island or Hicksville or White Plains, whatever.”
“They laugh because they know.”
“Know what?” said Richard warily, sensing the trap.
“What’s outside the limit, maybe fallout-strewn wasteland or Chinese slave dictatorship, people in cages too small for dogs.”
‘In that case wouldn’t it be more sensible to use robot policemen? said Richard. …Robot policemen wouldn’t track so much fallout back and forth from Staten Island don’t you think? And they wouldn’t require so many bribes, or toroid pastries.”
In a piece on his web site,
Who Is Perkus Tooth, Anyway?, Lethem notes that he was derived from an amalgam from several real people, but “wouldn’t exist without the precedent of the character Rudolph Menthol, from Rufus Firefly’s great novel Years Between Islands”. His fondness for his character seems similar to that he holds for P.K. Dick, as explored in his essay
Crazy Friend:
For me, I like helpless braggarts, obsessive fools, angry people. My ears perk up at the word ‘pretentious’ – that’s usually the movie I want to see, the book I want to read, the scene I want to make. Nearly anyone I’ve found worth knowing was difficult enough, vivid enough, to qualify at some point as my crazy friend.
The essay accounts for Lethem’s pervasive influences from Dick. His first book, which I enjoyed a lot,
Gun, With Occasional Music is described as “Dick-meets-Chandler”. And his second book,
Amnesia Moon, which I didn’t love, was expanded from stories written in his early 20’s that show a strong Dickian theme of “infiltration of reality by a single sinister and intoxicatingly malignant force”. Lethem’s most popular book,
Motherless Brooklyn (a 5 star read for me), features mobster Frank Minna, who conforms to a Dickian feature of main characters who are “powerful but unsteady father-figures … men both bullying and charismatic, generous and treacherous.” Tooth fits this profile too, and the play on the simulated world idea in “Chronic City” is a clear Dickian influence. In an interview with h+ Magazine
Chronic Citizen, Lethem notes that after his efforts at editing a Library of America collection of Dick’s works, he “wanted to, in some way, project a relationship to Dick‘s writing. I wanted to find a way to extend my own feelings about it into fictional space. For me, this is a book that‘s suffused in his influence.”
Despite all this homage to Dick, Lethem is rightly confident of bringing his own voice and special contributions to his work. His prose appeals to me like Irving and Chabon's. Like Vonnegut, he infuses a warmth and hopefulness in characters in the process of forging their reality. At the end of the interview, he admits to what could be labeled the Absurdism variant of an Existential outlook (i.e. that we may never know the true foundation of the reality we perceive, but we need to shape our own version of meaning and ride with it):
What are the tolerances for the exposure of sustaining fictions in any given life? At some point, you‘re going to settle. You‘re going to make a snow globe and live inside it.
-
Shortly after a bout of sobriety and a return to Portland, from Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan Lethem give a reading in the building where I work. I've expressed opposition to public readings before, or at least a considerable amount of disdain toward an interest in the celebrity status of certain authors; admittedly a preoccupation or opinion derived from William Gaddis's thoughts on the subject. I was in total agreement with this man about how irrelevant it was to endlessly probe for questions about the personal life of an author and the relation between this life and their work. Gaddis's stance on this also had much to do with the ability of the work of fiction itself being more than capable of answering any of the questions that a reader could possibly have about it, thus single-handedly, in a theoretical sense, eliminating the need for Q and A sessions, and lengthy explanations given in public. What I overlooked of course, was that these events are typically fun, especially if you're stoned. And they're revealing, revealing in a way that I was happy to discover, was actually possible.
And especially if you're stoned and it's a book like Chronic City, and you find yourself in a constant state of wonder about whether or not the book is revelatory, or if it's just that you're stoned, and the story is about people who ostensibly smoke a lot of pot, and endlessly riff about pop culture, film, Manhattan, music, and cultural etc. And especially if you're a cinephile and the book is largely about film, and possibly even influenced by film, in a stylistic sense.
Lethem strolled up to the podium like a literary version of Max Fischer from Wes Anderson's Rushmore; astute looking, confident in a nerdy-almost-nebbish sort of way, attentive, and generally enthusiastic about explaining and narrating. He read the first chapter straight through. I was on the edge of my seat, mouth agape, completely immersed, at times of the feeling that someone was narrating a Preston Sturges film out loud to me. I loved it. I also loved Lethem's openness about influence, and his fondness of the cinema. After all, the two main characters of this particular story meet at the home offices of the Criterion Collection, and after all Perkus Tooth's character is an extension of Lethem's avowed interest in film, the side that has been expressed to an almost hyper-articulate degree in his collection of essays entitled The Disappointment Artist.
After he finished reading from his book, I felt inescapably compelled to ask my new, favorite, contemporary author a question about film and literature. This, after all, is a man, who to me, seems to be making a literary attempt to bridge the two artistic cultures. So I asked, following up on a previous question about the influence of film in Lethem's work (most of which, I'm admittedly unfamiliar with, but looking forward to reading through), "It seems that contemporary novelists, such as Pynchon, Dellilo, Wallace, etc, are more open about writing about film in their fiction, and not only writing about it, but letting the medium of film influence the way that contemporary fiction is narrated and told, this in mind, do you feel as though you're part of this community of these types of authors/cinephiles/(theorists almost)?" And he replied, "well, community is a funny word to use when you're talking about someone like Thomas Pynchon, but yes, I do find film to be a very important influence in my work, however, I would go even further back and cite Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov as heavier influences in the sense of novelists who openly write about, and are influenced by film, thank you."
What I really wanted to say after that was that I was stoned, and that in retrospect, yes, "community" was a poor word choice. Of course, there were other questions I had. But this was what I was most curious about, being somewhat new to Lethem's work. This is actually all relevant. Chronic City is after all, a book about people who live through and in circles of entertainment. And Chase Insteadman's character grows through his understanding of an art that he had only previously been a tool of. Perkus reveals this to him, in high-grade government marijuana induced rants about film in a diner down the street from his house, or in his apartment, one filled with the detritus of all of the obscure, fragmented culture that he so adores. Lethem's characters attempt to connect their relationship with art to their more "real" surroundings; i.e. Manhattan. The books' plotlessness may strike some as being devoid of intention or direction, but in the end it flows like one of Tooth's rants, written by an enthusiast of culture who wants to share this wonderful condition, to make it human, to make us all feel a little less shallow for just being voyeurs. -
Long live Perkus Tooth! He must live, he is our Don Quixote, our post-9/11 innocent (even chaste) madman making of his own delusions (or, as I prefer, his own powers of imagination) a marvelously engaging and living world, the living world of this extremely entertaining novel.
Tooth is at war with illusion, using his own illusions as weapons, and it’s this clashing of culture’s false illusions and Tooth’s real illusions that creates life. There is nothing real, or rather the real exists at basic levels – exemplified by a dog’s sniffing and shitting in the novel – but reality at the higher levels of the human intellect, and by extension human society, is crowded with nothing but illusions; and what this novel reveals is that there is something within engaged humans that creates human truth, and that this truth (besides sniffing and shitting) is the only truth we have.
Chase Insteadman, the blank slate non-entity and narrator of this novel, learns what this something is through his progressively deepening involvement with Tooth. He learns that there is no objectified grail, i.e. some tangible Truth of revelation, and that Truth is not even contained within objectified human activities and pursuits, but, again, that it’s through engagement (a deep inner process that manifests externally) that Truth is revealed, yet still it remains ever-elusive. It is up to each individual to discover the lineaments of their own engagement.
Sound like a self-help book? Well, it's not, but there is a warm humanism evident, and an earnestness, but it's never treacly, remaining tacit, informing and enriching the novel from below.
So these are the basic ideas of the book, but the problem is that as an idea-man Lethem isn’t quite up to the task. I know of his love and admiration for Philip K. Dick, and this book does investigate some Dickian preoccupations, but he doesn’t add anything to them, in fact he dilutes them to a Truman Show level; there is none of that patented and authentic Dickian metaphysical dread. But what Lethem does he does very well and on a much larger canvas (or at least in much greater detail) and with a verbal panache beyond PKD’s wildest dreams.
There is also a problem with Insteadman’s being such a non-entity, in that for him to learn something is something of an anti-climax (and as an aside, his “romance” with his astro-fiance is a bit juvenile (though maybe that's intentional?)), so at a character level his “re-birth” falls just a bit flat, like what he learned he should've learned long ago, though still it made me feel good. But on a symbolic/allegorical level, with Insteadman representing post-9/11 Manhattan starting from scratch and going through a process of re-birth, there is potent resonance and significance.
Some could accuse the book of being bloated with verbal pyrotechnics, and Lethem does get too enamored with his own voice and wit and humor at times, but it’s only the narrative that’s fatty, on the verbal level it’s pure sinew, so if one keeps one’s nose to the page and forgets being epi-critical for a moment, the reading experience is pure pleasure, and a wild ride.
But this problem of book bloat comes to the fore when considering this as the possible masterpiece that Lethem seems to’ve intended. As grand entertainment, there’s no problem, but as a masterpiece to be read and reread with each rereading offering fresh unfoldments and insights there is. Part of the problem is that Lethem has a problem with letting things remain ambiguous and trusting that the readers get his allusions and meanings through storytelling alone. Too many times he offers expositions of what he means in order to tie little happenings to his larger themes. For instance – he talks of dogs creating maps of invisible worlds through their sniffing as they navigate Manhattan, but then he feels the need to make what he really means even clearer by paralleling these doggy olfactory worlds with the larger theme of virtual worlds on-line. This reminded me of that horrible plastic bag scene in American Beauty. It feels like a violation, like our minds have been rummaged and our private epiphanies made public. Instead of revealing the beauty, these tendencies actually steal them from us. Trust your readers! Trust your viewers! If they don’t get what you’re getting at then fuck ‘em, the beauty and epiphanies are there, in potentia.
Anyway, long live Perkus Tooth! -
CRITIQUE:
In Praise of Perkus Tooth
By the end of the first page of this novel, I was fascinated by the character, Perkus Tooth (no relation to Spooky Tooth ;))(1.), not just his Pynchonesque name, but his personality.
Within two chapters, I was convinced that Jonathan Lethem had created the character and his peers, so that he could hang out with them. It's not often that a character is such immediately appealing, good company.
Perkus is a former rock critic, and has a headful of ideas about film, literature, music, and philosophy .
Lethem identifies and sympathises with his passions, and so do I.
There's a lot to get your head around in this novel, but both the subject matter and the sentences make the effort worthwhile. The approach to the subject matter is enthusiastic, and the prose is exuberant. The novel is its own reward.
Beast of Burden (as Recalled by a Former Rock Critic/ Reviewer)
I remember the first time I heard "Beast of Burden" on the radio. It had just been released as a single and this was the first time it had been played on my local college radio. Within three or four notes of the start of the riff (it only takes about four seconds), I knew it must be the Rolling Stones, and I got up on my feet - to dance - or shuffle around, anyway. That was when Charlie (R.I.P.) kicked in.
I'd like to think that I knew for sure it was Keith Richards playing the riff (in the YouTube version, I'm almost certain he's in the right channel), but in retrospect it could have been Ron Wood (assuming he's not just playing lead). The two guitarists intertwine so well on this song, as if they were swapping roles with each other.
I can still listen to it on my headphones dozens of times in a row. It's such a perfect song, even if it's not hard enough or rough enough. "You're a pretty, pretty, such a pretty, pretty, pretty girl. Come on baby, please, please, put me out of misery."
Three Imaginary Boys Become Major Dudes, My Funky Ones
The narrator of the novel, former child actor Chase Insteadman (another one of many Pynchonesque names, possibly signalling his contrarian nature?), is just as captivated by Perkus Tooth as I was, and as the third character, former tenants rights advocate and now policy adviser to the mayor of New York, Richard Abneg, is.
Together, these three imaginary boys form a rebellious/ non-conformist cabal, a coterie, a consortium, a support group for and with each other. Chase refers to them as "my little gang" (by analogy with Pynchon's "whole sick crew").
Chase's explanation for his own affection for the group is "the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious." The three of them share obsessions.
Chase's sometime, secret girlfriend, the ocelot fur hat-wearing Oona Laszlo, a biographer and ghostwriter, calls them "helpless brainy boys", and refers to their shenanigans as "more boy games", even though, of the girls, she comes closest to membership of the club.
"Les Non-Dupes Errent"
Abneg recalls the time when he and Perkus were at high school and called each other "Les Deux Non-Dupes". At school, they'd protest "Les Non-Dupes Refusé". By the end of the novel, the mayor of New York responds, in the words of Lacan (as quoted by Zizek), "Les Non-Dupes errent"
("those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most."):
Chase translates the original -
"My own high-school French, flickering in memory, supplied the interpretation. Like knights-errant, we non-dupes were not only lost but mistaken. We wandered in error. To be unduped was not to live. There was no way out, only a million ways back in."
Manhattan Transference
Chase (originally from Indiana) met both Perkus and Abneg much later in life in New York, when he fantasised about "boys together...that unimaginable land of brilliant New York childhood I'd been made to feel ashamed I lacked."
The three of them together embody all of the romanticism with which the naively youthful Indiana boy regarded New York City.
Some Girls
While there are girls around the fringes of the major dudes, they are referred to as "the women", and are more like alluring accessories.
Perkus doesn't seem to have ever had a relationship with a girl. He describes the formation of a sexual relationship as "pair-bonding", which he regards as a precursor to "the tyranny of coupledom."
Chase and Oona think of themselves as "secret lovers", although the others know about their relationship.
Richard has a relationship with Georgina Hawkmanaji, although there is no cloak of secrecy around their relationship.
The cover of the Rolling Stones' 1978 album, "Some Girls". Five images on the cover were blotted out, when the use of the likenesses was challenged.
East 84th Street Simulacrum
Perkus lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment in East 84th Street.
His fascination with culture is mainly internalised, now that he's ceased writing, reviewing and broadsiding:
"Perkus, operating from a platform of cultural issues arranged into jigsaw sense, had gone years certain his solipsism was a pretty good home."
While he cherishes Manhattan, "Perkus lived as much inside a conundrum as he did a city:"
"[Perkus] lived as much in a construction as Chase Insteadman."
Perkus' construction/conundrum is a creation of his own, a personal simulacrum or solipsism.
Chase explains, "Where Perkus took me, in his ranting, in his enthusiasms, in his abrupt, improbable asides, was the world inside the world."
The inside world is the world inside the (Perkus') mind, the world constructed inside (and by) the mind. Not only does Perkus have other heads inside his head, he has an entire world or universe.
Perkus as the Target of a Plot
Although there is little traditional plot to the novel, Chase likens whatever events there are to Perkus following "the plot of his fixations". He also believes that Perkus, being as paranoid as any of Pynchon's characters, is "the target of a plot", although it's not clear whether this also means the plot of the novel. We read on, wondering what, if anything, will happen to Perkus?
Inside his head, Perkus has "a pantheon of heroes", a headful of heads, which includes Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer, Seymour Krim, Franz Marplot, Colin Wilson, JG Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Dennett, John Cassavetes, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, Richard Hell, Lester Bangs, Legs McNeil, Paul Nelson (one of whom - Marplot (2.)- I'd not heard of before).
Rock critics play a big role in this pantheon. Perkus reveals:
"[Rock critics] are super-high-functioning autistics...They're brilliant, but they're social misfits..."
"They taught me what I know, how to think...Each an explorer of new worlds, a Columbus or Magellan. They were my brothers."
"His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads."
Moai on Rapa Nui/Easter Island
East 84th Street Revisited
Much of the novel is concerned with simulated worlds or simulacra:
"Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it's possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings...who sincerely believe they're truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you'd never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it..."
"Deviants and avant-gardists could build neighbourhoods as solid, in their way, as those of the suburbanites..."
The contents of Perkus' mind and Manhattan itself are replicated in at least one digitally constructed "pocket universe" called "Yet Another World".
Each of these pocket universes is a post-modern construction that is self-contained, and unconnected with other simulacra.
Residents feel at home here. They can "ride the hegemonic bulldozer" of this simulated world.
"Nobody - that's no body - really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighbourhood or pocket universe."
In "Yet Another World", players or residents acquire value and store it in a container called a "chaldron" (which itself has value), which Perkus regards as "a container of souls":
"Chaldrons were the creme de la creme of virtual treasure."
Perkus tells Chase that Oona is "your chaldron."
The gang spends lots of time on eBay bidding for a chaldron without success. When Perkus sees a chaldron at the Mayor's party, he observes:
"What the chaldron revealed now...was its sublime and superb thingliness."
It's a concrete, thingly stand-in for reality, or a simulacrum.
There's even a sense in which the novel itself is a chaldron that contains the world of the novel.
The cover of the Beatles' 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reveals their influences and inspirations
Ironic Frolic
Once the dudes start their pursuit of a chaldron, the girls call them the "Chaldron Club for Men", and the "Fellowship of the Chaldron".
Not only does this world (either the real Manhattan or Yet Another World) allude to Thomas Pynchon's early fiction (e.g.,
"V."), but it resembles some of the mental displacement of Philip K. Dick's later science fiction.
As post-modern as the novel's concerns might be, Lethem or his narrator seems to think of the movement as "too-late modernism", i.e., as a variant of modernism that missed the boat carrying earlier innovation.
Nevertheless, the characters share a quest for a "brick of pages" called "Obstinate Dust" (written by Ralph Warden Meeker), which is modelled on David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest".
Undermining the City and the Simulacra
As if all of this isn't enough, Manhattan and the simulacra are threatened by an escaped tiger, which roams the island uncontrolled, and attacks apartment buildings, subways and tunnels.
Chase tries to relate the tiger to Perkus:
"I thought crazily how the tiger might be Perkus' poltergeist, destroying only what he found himself unable to live with: his kingdom of broadsides, the prospect of a lover, the city itself."
But the tiger mightn't be the only cause of destruction and self-destruction...
Grey Matter Mr. Graye
Both drugs and music pervade the novel.
In the novel, the word "Chronic" is the name for a brand of dope, which is consumed in vast quantities by the characters. So the Chronic City of New York in the title is a dope/drug-fuelled city.
The Rolling Stones' 1978 album, "Some Girls", is the gang's party music of choice. There are threads of this album throughout the entirety of the novel (and this review):
"'Some Girls' is as much a New York record as 'White Light/White Heat' or 'Blonde on Blonde'."
Lethem praises a new song by another band when he claims that it's "as compelling as a Rolling Stones riff..."
The highest compliment I can pay "Chronic City" is to say that it's as compelling as the riff on "Beast of Burden".
The cover of the Dangtrippers 1991 album, "Transparent Blue Illusion"
FOOTNOTES:
(1.) My sporting house at secondary school was called "Tooth House", one of many reasons I feel an affinity with this novel.
(2.) I suspect that this is a fictional name.
LYRICS:
Oona's Brand New Ocelot Pill-Box Hat
[Apologies to Bob Dylan]
When your tutors dispute all of your equations,
And your suitors mostly cause you irritations,
You spend all day sick playing with your creations,
You know they're only quick-witted male Caucasians.
I asked the doctor if I could visit some time,
Figure out if your hat was that expensive kind,
If it was made out of the best ocelot.
I wonder if that's why they say it cost a lot.
SOUNDTRACK:
-
“Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?”
― Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City
I really wanted to like Chronic City. I really wanted to enjoy Lethem's latest NY story. Sorry, no go. The problem is Letham falls straight into a void, a hole, existing between Michael Chabon and William Gibson. Don't misinterpret. I'm not saying he falls between, or is sandwiched next to them. Nope, Lethem disappears. He doesn't measure up. The author seems to actually vanish.
The whole Manhattan/MacGuffin/Chaldron quest story in theory seems like it a respectable idea for novel. It isn't hard to imagine a novel built around Manhattan's many MacGuffins (references to Mailer, DeLillo, Bellow, and other City writers, abound in this novel); an island-city filled with pretense, exaggeration, self-absorption, cultural significance, and artifice.
The failure is Lethem builds this plaything city, this imaginary island, but when it comes down to it (in the end) all Letham does is reflect without escaping the worst cliches of Manhattan.
And while he is sometimes clever, the writing here just isn't that good. For me, that is where the real frustration comes in. I want it to be better. I want it to say more. I want it to matter. It just isn't, doesn't and won't.
Still, I'll give it three stars for no other reason than one character reminded me of a friend in college, plus it gave me an opportunity to try and actually sell a chaldron on eBay. That has to count for something. -
I had to force myself to finish this one. I love Lethem's style and concepts, but this story lacked any real plot in my eyes - the characters are quite unlikeable. Chase is unsympathetic and Perkus was a stereotypical smart-yet-weird, stoner, faux-intellectual. The story wasn't entirely boring, but it was cliche in some aspects. I couldn't empathize with a lazy once-actor, nor with an evidently smart but absolute nutter like Perkus. He reminded me of those people who smoke weed and discuss conspiracy theories as if they are fact, which they believe makes them part of some other "more-aware" society. It isn't very exciting. The Chaldron obsession seemed more drug induced than anything else too ... was I supposed to read this book stoned? I did like how all the "answers" were revealed at the end, but really, my life was not enhanced by a 500 page novel about has-beens. I'll still read Lethem, but I'm growing less and less enchanted with his contemporary fiction - his sci-fi (Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon, Gun, with Occasional Music) is infinitely better.
-
Video review
For everybody who's ever felt like their city constitutes the entire universe. Its orderly structure makes its roaring madness navigable, accessible, even homely. Possibly Lethem's funniest, most addictive, best book - and the man has written some incredible stuff. -
Jonathan Lethem escribió 'Huérfanos de Brooklyn', uno de los libros más desternillantes que he leído nunca, cuyo protagonista es un detective con el síndrome de Tourette (!). 'Chronic City', en mi opinión bastante inferior a aquella, contiene también momentos realmente divertidos. Pero el aire que Lethem le ha dado a 'Chronic City' no es el mismo que el de 'Huérfanos de Brooklyn' o 'La Fortaleza de la Soledad', su obra magna. Se trata más bien de una obra caótica y distópica, todo un homenaje a dos de sus autores de cabecera, Thomas Pynchon y David Foster Wallace. (De hecho en varios momentos de la novela aparece un libro en manos de los personajes de título La bruma indistinta, de Raph Warden Meeker.)
'Chronic City' tiene como protagonista a Chase Insteadman, que fue actor infantil y ahora vive de las reposiciones de las series que protagonizó. Chase vive su propia tragedia personal: Janice, su novia astronauta, está atrapada en una estación espacial y recibe periódicamente sus cartas contándole los problemas por los que están pasando allá arriba. Un día Chase conoce a Perkus Tooth, encuentro que cambiará su vida para siempre. Perkus, ex crítico de rock y famoso por la confección de carteles, le introducirá en un mundo donde impera la paranoia y las teorías conspirativas (memorable todo el tema de los calderos) y la inmersión en referencias culturales varias.
Chase y Perkus son los dos ejes de esta novela, dos personas que llegarán a labrar una atípica y verdadera amistad. Además de los personajes de carne y hueso de 'Chronic City', cabe mencionar también la ciudad de Manhattan, rodeada por una extraña bruma, así como el asedio a la que es sometida su población por una tigre gigante (!).
'Chronic City' no ha llegado a entusiasmarme. Está bien escrita y Lethem es un gran narrador, pero me ha costado entrar en el mundo que plantea, demasiado caótico y excesivo en ocasiones. -
I was looking forward to reading this book, I really was. But as I got farther into it, hoping that something interesting would happen, I found myself wanting to do other things -- pretty much anything else, including dusting and emptying the dishwasher -- rather than read this book.
Lethem gives us a motley crew of Upper East Side oddballs to start “Chronic City.” Chase Insteadman, child star of a TV sitcom, now lives comfortably on royalties but is dealing with renewed publicity as the fiance of Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped in a space station orbiting Earth (the letters from Janice are arguably the best part of the book). Chase’s newfound friend Perkus Tooth is a reclusive former guerrilla gadfly with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure films. Their mutual friend Oona Laszlo is a ghostwriter for celebrity autobiographies. A few other types populate their small circle.
They’re not lovable eccentrics, or comical eccentrics, or scary eccentrics. Chase isn’t really even eccentric, he just goes with the flow of the eccentrics around him. But they don’t do much, and as such nothing much happens in this book.
They smoke pot and discuss movies. They smoke pot and bid on vases on eBay. They smoke pot and go to fancy dinner parties. And when they stop smoking pot they don’t get any more interesting.
Lethem is a clever, creative writer — showy, even, but he has the chops to pull it off. His descriptions evoke searing images in few words; his phrases turn with an elegance few writers could ever hope to match. But it’s largely wasted in “Chronic City” on tedious characters and a plot that can only in a fit of generosity be called “meandering.”
The cultural name-dropping — both fictional and real — gets old quickly, and the over-the-top names are more distracting than Dickensianly apropos. Besides Chase, Perkus and Oona, we have Georgina Hawkmanaji, Florian Ib, Strabo Blandiana, Anne Sprillthmar and Laird Noteless.
And the people with the halfway normal names — Janice Trumbull, the astronaut, and mayoral aide Claire Carter — turn out to be the more interesting characters, and we don’t get nearly enough of them.
“Chronic City” reads like it’s one big winking in-joke. It’s occasionally droll, but carried on for 467 pages, it ends up quite a slog. -
This is my favorite of Lethem's novel thus far. Fortress of Solitude had moments of brilliance, but the language felt too wanna-be DeLillo. Motherless Brooklyn was a bit dull for me, though others I know really love that book. I resent his novel about Silver Lake--I have not read it, nor will I. I realize it's merely "an entertainment" in an ouevre of more serious books, but after spending a whole novel complaining about the gentrification of Brooklyn, why go and write a novel about an east-side LA neighborhood, post-gentrification, without being sensitive to the area's fraught history? Not cool.
Mike Reynolds wrote a terrific review of Chronic City, which I urge you to read right away. Just skip my stupid musings.
I found this book dazzling in its strangeness. I love books about stoners, I think. Perkus reminded me of a friend my dad might have, if Perkus had moved to LA in the early-eighties and become a stand-up comedian, or gotten really into astrology. Or both. I can just see him sitting on the couch with my dad, dissecting movies on TCM, passing a joint, picking up and dropping with disdain the various magazines that litter the floor of the living room. In this scene, I'm in junior high, walking through with a big glass of Coke and a quesadilla on a paper plate, rolling my eyes.
I loved the chaldrons in this book, and I love that I Googled the word to find that Lethem had made them up. I love the Second Life-type virtual universe. I loved the New York Lethem created--finally, someone gets at the fakery of that town! Lord, am I sick of hearing about how geniune and raw and authentic New York City is. This alternate-reality Manhattan was gloriously rendered. All of this made the book a fun read.
A few times, the prose was a touch on-the-nose. Usually when Chase Insteadman (his name itself, a little on-the-nose) waxes poetic about his role: "I might love Janice, yes, but what I showed these people was a simulacrum, a portrayal of myself" (35). Duh! This line is like a 20-year-old English major's wet dream. Why don't you just write the paper for her, Jonathan?! Other times, the prose was difficult to read, clumsy. I'd read a sentence twice, and it dissolved before my eyes. A few just seemed overly complicated: "Richard bolted from his taxicab, punching black shoe prints in the dusty covering that had begun to whirl from the sky" (397)--there was real confusion for me here, with the use of "covering" to describe the layer of snow on the ground. And this one was just a mess: "Now she'd taken a new assignment, covert as ever: an autobiography of Laird Noteless, who'd received the commission for the Memorial to Daylight popular sentiment had demanded in reply to the gray fog downtown" (96). Huh? In both cases, I was yanked out of the fictional dream, so to speak--and if you're about to say, "But, man, that's Lethem's project! He wants to remind you that you're reading fiction, blah blah blah!" just shut the fuck up. Most of the time, I was in the fictional dream Lethem created--it was bizarre and complex and not-quite-real, but it worked, because the language was accurate and smooth, even if syntactically complicated. I wished the whole book had been flawless in this regard. Near the end, the language exhausted me, especially after a pretty upsetting event that I was emotionally affected by. I wanted to see the moment head-on, but the narration wouldn't allow it. Perhaps that was an aesthetic choice, but it's still one I didn't like.
But, overall, an incredibly fun and ambitious book, and I'm glad to have read it! -
During those infinite summers of junior high, I would spend two or three nights a week at friends and one night hosting others. Such led to largely nocturnal existence, collapsing towards dawn only to wake at noon and go swimming. Role Playing Games, junk food and the new portals of Atari and VCRs extended a rather free reign to explore. One evening we were at my friend David's house, eating frozen pizza and talking about Culture Club. or, maybe, Chuck Norris Suddenly around 1 a.m. David's very pregnant sister came over and said she was exhausted and that we had to go home. It was 1 a.m.! A younger guy, Jason said, no sweat, let's go to my house. This was strange as he lived across the street from my parents and this necessitated our crossing through our yard to access his house. It was around 2 by then and Jason walked in as if it was time for an after school film on ABC. His parents were watching cable and invited us in to gather around the sectional sofa. It was then I noticed they were smoking pot. Oh Shit. I had viewed Scarface (De Palma 1983) several times by then and I was convinced that some narco-hit squad was beginning its assault on the split level ranch house where I sat trembling. Undoubtedly, a few minutes thereafter I would be taken to the bathroom to be disposed of as an example with a chainsaw. I'm not sure i slept much that night.
A similar paranoia underscores Chronic City. Theories threaten the presented (projected?) order. All of NYC is actually a confidence game. Everyone is either an avatar or a bit actor. I was ready to give this two stars. I hated huge chunks of the novel.
I thought the astronaut dispatches were the best element of the novel. Those were quality. Somehow all the unfolding encouraged me. It was a modest reveal. No voila moments. Chronic City's conclusion appeared organic and thus palatable. -
“Conocí a Perkus Tooth en una oficina. No en una oficina donde él trabajara, aunque yo entonces estuviera equivocado al repecto. (Una situación insólita).
Fue en las oficinas centrales de Criterion Collection, en la calle Cincuenta y dos con la Tercera Avenida, una tarde entre semana a finales de verano. Yo había ido a grabar una serie de voces en off para una de las lujosas reediciones en DVD de Criterion, un film noir perdido de los años cincuenta titulado La Ciudad Es Un Laberinto”.
Este es el comienzo de Chronic City, una de esas novelas que cuando la acabas, te obliga a replantearte todo lo leído, toda la historia, así que cuando la terminé, me fuí al principio de la novela. Quería leer ese primer párrafo con el ajuste mental hecho y planteármela desde ese punto de vista nuevo, y la verdad es que podría haber seguido y seguido, como si de una novela nueva se tratara. Pero no tengo ni el tiempo ni la energia para leerme una novela tan densa como ésta dos veces seguidas, aunque sí es cierto que ese otro punto de vista me llamaba y me abrió todo un mundo nuevo en lo referente a la historia que plantea Chronic City.
Ya de entrada empezar una novela y que comience en una de esas cuevas cinéfilas que son las oficinas de Criterion, fue un placer total porque intuía que el resto de la novela iba ser así, repleta de referencias culturales. El protagonista, Chase Insteadman visita las oficinas porque le tiene que poner voz a uno de esos extras documentales que tan bien definen las ediciones en dvd de esta distribuidora y alli conoce a Perkus Tooth, uno de esos personajes totales que se te quedan ya grabados para siempre. Tooth es un intelectual, ex critico de música, cine y de todo lo que huela a cultura con mayúsculas que cuando conoce a Chase lo acoge bajo sus alas, o viceversa, salvando las distancias, tienen mucho en común: ambos son ex de sus respectivas profesiones: Chase fue un niño actor que se rodeó de un aura buenista, popular y que encaja bien en todas las fiestas y Perkus es un ex critico reconvertido en paranoíco que vive medio aislado rodeado de libros, discos y de cintas de vhs viejas. Ambos de alguna forma viven de ese pasado que les ha dado un prestigio pero al mismo tiempo y aquí viene un conflicto eterno durante toda la novela, apenas sabemos nada de ese pasado. Solo conocemos el presente y la búsqueda de algo que flota en el ambiente y que no sabemos qué es.
" Tooth tenía razón. Mejor me sería reconocer que ejerzo de adorno para cenas. Tengo algo de agradable. Patino sobre cojinetes de encanto sin fricciones, emano un carisma mediocre que no amenaza a nadie. Como actor retirado, recuerdo las artes, si bien no revisto ninguna aura inquietante de descontento, afán o necesidad. Cualquier capta en un solo concepto de dónde procede mi dinero y que tengo suficiente."
Es complicado escribir sobre esta novela porque no tiene un argumento definido (aparentemente) y porque desde que comienza la novela el lector vive y se sumerge en una vorágine de personajes impactantes que aparecen y desaparecen y que lo envuelven todo casi sin dejar respirar al lector, que apenas se ve capaz de detenerse y reflexionar sobre de qué va exactamente Chronic City. Tampoco puedo comentar mucho al respecto porque de lo contrario desvelaría detalles que es mejor que se vayan descubriendo a medida que la novela avanza pero en momentos parece una novela de conspiraciones, en otros momentos ciencia ficción y la mayor parte del tiempo ni siquiera la puedes catalogar porque Jonathan Lethem ha creado una novela totalmente libre de etiquetas. Lo que si es cierto es que todo gira en torno a Perkus Tooth, el faro que ilumina al resto de los personajes, el personaje que va dando pistas sobre “lo que de verdad importa”. El lector a través de Chase, se siente totalmente fascinado y atraido por él, aunque haya momentos en que no entiendas nada de lo que está ocurriendo.
"Esa primera vez, encontré a Perkus Tooth sumido en uno de esos estados de ánimo que yo pronto aprendería a llamar -elipsistas-. El propio Perkus Tooth aportaría más tarde esa palabra tan descriptiva: elipsista, derivada de elipsis. Una especie de intervalo vacío, una cabezada o fuga en la que no estaba ni deprimido ni todo lo contrario, ni luchando por concluir el pensamiento ni tratando de comenzar otro."
Es una novela en muchos momentos agotadora por la cantidad de referencias culturales, que confieso, a mi me resultó imposible captar del todo, y por otra parte, es toda una experiencia en plena lectura hacer uso del móvil para consultar éste o aquel nombre ¿será real este director de cine o es pura ficción de Lethem? ¿será cierto que los calderos atraigan tanta demanda en ebay?? Florian Ib, Janice Trumbull, Meeker, personajes que tienen ecos a personajes reales…. Lethem mezcla personalidades reales con personajes de ficción, películas que existen con películas sacadas de su chistera, asi que solo por esos detalles, la lectura de esta novela se convierte en un prodigio de imaginación y de disfrute. Todo tiene un sentido, toda esta mezcla de ficción y realidad, y sin entrar en más detalles, es para mí lo realmente importante y la esencia de esta novela. Y quizás junto a Perkus Tooth el otro gran personaje de la novela es Manhattan.
"Vivir en Manhattan es asombrarse constantemente ante los mundos que se cobijan unos dentro de otros, el caos intrincado con el que se intercalan los reinos, como esos cables de la televisión y las tuberías de agua corriente y calefacción y aguas residuales y tendido telefónico y todo lo que sea capaz de cohabitar en los mismos agujeros intestinales que los obreros destruye pavimientos...." -
Extraña novela desarrollada en un Manhattan alterado.
Una niebla permanente en las calles y un tigre mecánico que surge del suelo derrumbando edificios son dos ejemplos como el autor juega con el límite entre la realidad y la fantasía.
Me costó entrarle. Es una novela de personajes. Los hay variados y son raros, odiosos la mayoría.
La traducción presenta deficiencias. -
It was inevitable, perhaps.
Chronic City is the book with which I acknowledge to myself that Jonathan Lethem has joined the ranks of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Joanna Scott, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and so many others -- which is to say, he has left the vaunted zone of Those Who (to Me, At Least) Can Do No Wrong, and he has entered the zone of Those Who I Still (Kinda) Really Like (Most of the Time). David Foster Wallace had made a similar move, around the time of Hideous Men, but his recent and premature death has sealed him, or at least his collected work, in amber.
Chronic City is the book with which I make the acknowledgement to myself, because the transition has been on my mind for several books, probably since Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. That book was his Underworld, his Spirited Away -- his "pretty darn good book" with which culture-at-large finally caught up and acknowledged as great, even if it wasn't really as great as what had preceded it. To use a phrase from Chronic City, it was the book with which he began to ride the "hegemonic bulldozer."
Chronic City is another of Lethem's SF-tinged realist novels. It takes place largely on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is familiar but slightly different. The Mayor is a combination of Bloomberg and Giuliani -- he's got Bloomberg's wealth and Giuliani's quality-of-life agenda. Marlon Brando may or may not be alive. In the long lists of pop-culture objects and individuals that make up much of the novel, mixed in are people and items that do not exist in our world. There is a Werner Herzog film he never made, there are directors who did not exist, and there are the Gnuppets, who seem to be the Muppets by by a different name.
Any novel that takes place on the Upper East Side will have a twinge of science fiction, because the predominant wealth of that region makes its residents' lives so different from those of most of the rest of the city, much of America, and much of the world.
And then there's the fate of an international crew of astronauts in Chronic City, who are caught in a web of Chinese mines, with little to no chance of survival.
Add then there are the paranoid rantings of a bachelor culture vulture named Perkus Tooth, who in Chronic City makes connections between cultural events that suggest some conspiracy, perhaps a conspiracy to cover up that the reality in which he, along the rest of the book's characters, exists is in fact a simulation.
That ranter and the narrator of the book, the latter a former child actor, become friends over the course of a story in which both a lot and very little happens. It's entirely worth reading, especially if you appreciate Lethem's eye for the way life imitates pop culture. It is fueled largely by conversations of individuals who are stoned out of their minds, which adds to the surreality and makes the paranoia palpable.
Given Lethem's association with Brooklyn, the setting of Chronic City in Manhattan is of particular interest. Early on, I came to read it as a novel expressing some small amount of antipathy -- there is no one in the Manhattan of Chronic City whom the reader would want to be. That doesn't hurt the novel; if anything, it makes the various characters all the more interesting. However, nothing as I read the book through to its conclusion made me think that the novel is anything other than Lethem, in essence, mocking Manhattan. That's fine by me; it's just never fully realized, if it is his goal.
What is fully thought out, though, is the story, which unlike so much contemporary fiction actually has a proper ending that not only satisfyingly explains things, but does so based on the logical constructs that served the novel up until that point -- specifically, that we cannot be sure that we're not in some Philip K. Dick alternareality, and that in the end it doesn't really matter; we just have to make due with what we have. I'm down with that philosophy; I just would rather live in the reality in which And She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, and his first short-story collection -- The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye -- were where Lethem's imaginative head was at. -
For a few days I thought of not reviewing this book. I was so angry with it I just felt it would be a review full of venom. But as the days have passed and I’ve moved on to another book and the duties of daily living, my anger has dispersed.
Chronic City is an exploration in a wordy world of meaningless. Jonathan Lethem has written books I really like. That’s why reading this book for me was so difficult to take. Lethem force feeds us the lives of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth. Yes those are real names only Lethem can summon. Chase was a child actor who now lives off the fame of his earlier years doing- well nothing. He meets Perkus a dope smoking, conspiracy loving ex-rock and roll critic through a common acquaintance. It’s this friendship that drives the story. But it’s a friendship based on nothingness.
I’ve had a recent e-mail conversation with someone else who has also unfortunately spent time with this novel. We both feel like we missed something. Like what the hell was the point of Chases girlfriend being trapped on a space station, a two story high tiger running amok in the New York subway system or the most infuriating sections of this book, the pages and pages of a search for a chaldron. The chaldron and the pages about it made me so hopelessly angry that I wanted my dog to eat this book right out of my hands and just tear it to bits.
I’m not even going to touch on the ending of this book. Some of you will find this book years later in it’s soft cover form and think to yourself “it can’t be that bad”. You’ll buy it and start to read it and go ” it’s going to get better, it just has to”. You will finish it and say ” did that just happen, can this book be that pointless”.
I’m sorry Mr. Lethem I don’t carve up that many books when reviewing, but you wasted my time, you made me angry as reader and you failed to engage me the reader into your Chronic City. Please come down off your high horse and write a book with feeling. Feeling Mr Lethem you have the talent stop screwing around. -
A floating fresco of urban renewal, outsider cultural criticism, and the puppet-strings of power. Lethem's Manhattan is an island of literalized metaphor and dreamlike sets, one which he is nonetheless able to convey with a sort of conviction through an often thoroughly believable cast (all improbably Dickensian names and satiric caricatures aside). As usual, he's immensely readable, his plotting incongruous but ultimately convergent. Perhaps a little overly convergent, as after a while it starts to become clear how certain threads must inevitably turn inwards. And those convincing characters have a very real rudderlessness, that can at times set the story seemingly adrift. Even so, it's probably his most ambitious novel to date, and earns many of the accolades it seems to be getting.
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Consapevole che non sia la mia cup of tea, mi sono lasciata trascinare comunque con interesse in questo mix di paranoia allucinata e mirabolanti stravaganze, direi la quintessenza di New York.
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Mai infrangere le illusioni degli altri se non si è certi di poter offrire loro un'alternativa migliore di quella a cui li si vuole strappare.
Poteva esser molto di più per me questo romanzo, ma alla fine è mancato qualcosa, quel TIC che scatta nelle opere di cui ci si innamora, ma in questo caso è rimasto in canna.
La storia è veramente intrigante, così come i personaggi, ma forse la costruzione del tutto è un pò moscia per i miei gusti, poco incalzante e dato che il romanzo è anche abbastanza lungo, dopo un pò mi sono stancato.
Non voglio fare paragoni, ma è abbastanza lontano da La fortezza della solitudine.
Ciò non toglie comunque che Lethem sappia scrivere veramente bene.
Queste parole indovinello si trovano accatastate nel mio cervello secondo le più improbabili giustapposizioni, come faldoni sistemati a caso su uno scaffale da una segretaria scoraggiata e senza la minima cognizione di quel che sarebbe potuto tornare eventualmente utile, un giorno.
Ho spesso l'impressione che il linguaggio verbale, il suo complesso, sia soltanto un mostruoso compendio di storie incastrate una nell'altra, che io non sono in grado di capire.
Impiego la lingua così come un cane guiderebbe un'automobile, senza comprendere in che modo l'esistenza dell'automobile o il funzionamento del motore a combustione sia possibile. Se la guidassero, l'automobile...... Ma non la guidano! Eppure io continuo ad andare in giro a formare frasi. -
Dazzlingly ambitious! Breathtakingly insightful! Flawlessly, flawlessly written!....And an absolutely unbearable slog to read. This book made me so angry. Lethem is clearly a genius -- he writes like no other and thinks like no other -- but a good novelist he is clearly not. Jonathan, listen to your editor (or get a good one)! This should have been a collection of essays/stories or connected thought-pieces on city life (like his fellow Brooklytterati Colson Whitehead's great
Colossus of New York), it would totally have killed. As it stands, all the fantastic ideas and insights (seriously, passages in this book will leave you gasping) are drowned out by the rambling, useless plot, tiringly unnecessary details, and the almost offensively unlikeable ciphers Lethem tries to pass off as actual characters. There's so much in this book that I want to talk about with my friends, but I would never forgive myself for actually making them suffer through it. -
Well, I've been wary lately of Jonathan Lethem, who I hear has put out a few clunkers since the stunning Fortress of Solitude. But here's a quote of his about this book from an
interview with Brooklyn Based: "One of my thoughts to myself when I started this book was that it was kind of an interminable and nightmarish Seinfeld episode–the three guys and the girl hanging out in the apartment having these self- obsessed conversations about nothing."
Sign me up!
