Jonathan Lethem is currently one of those young favorites of the East Coast literati crowd who, like Michael Chabon, was influenced early by genre fiction. And unlike Chabon, Lethem keeps a much tighter reign on this influence in his own works, although he did edit the popular Library of America reissues of Philip K. Dick.
CHRONIC CITY, Lethem’s latest, is by no means a genre novel. Yet a few of those influences seem to creep along its edges. It’s narrated by Chase Insteadman, a former child star of a hit TV series. Chase hasn’t acted since the show ended production, and subsists these days mostly on residual checks and as a popular fixture at upscale dinner parties in New York City.
His current claim to fame is that he is the estranged fiancée of Janice Trumbull, an astronaut on an international space station whose reentry orbit is blocked by debris floating in the upper atmosphere. Janice writes aching love letters to Chase that are published in the national press and followed like a popular ongoing romance series.
One afternoon, while recording a voiceover for the accompanying disk of a DVD reissue collection — the closest thing to an acting job he’s had in years — Chase meets Perkus Tooth, a shaggy, wall-eyed pop critic who was once much celebrated for his essays in ROLLING STONE, as well as his hand-painted broadsides that he used to post around the city. Chase is immediately fascinated by Perkus’s encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric films, books, recordings and other media, and soon becomes a fixture at his cluttered apartment. There, Perkus entertains and challenges Chase with his rants on culture and conspiracy, fueled by high-grade marijuana, strong coffee and the frequent greasy cheeseburgers and shakes from a nearby burger joint.
Chase soon meets some of the other individuals who know and occasionally hang out with Perkus. They include Oona Laszlo, a prolific and self-important ghostwriter who ends up as Chase’s lover, and Richard Abneg, a former radical for who now works for the city mayor. Together and individually, these characters set out on short-term adventures in the city, or spend long hours arguing or discussing various and far-flung topics, all in a quietly desperate search for some kind of meaning or truth. Or so it seems.
In addition to the recurring theme of Chase’s astronaut fiancée — a Dick situation if there ever were one — Lethem occasionally slips in references to his other genre heroes, such as the funeral Chase and Oona attend for a popular and wildly prolific science-fiction author whose mutton chops and string bolo ties suggest a dead ringer for the late Isaac Asimov.
But beyond that, the overall appeal of CHRONIC CITY is its quirky, eccentric characters. By the middle of the novel, however, this appeal wears thin as Perkus and company’s endless pontifications and pronouncements on works of art and culture, both real and imagined, seem to go on without end.
Still, there are moments of absolutely wonderful writing to be found, with phrases that you’ll want to read over again and write down for future reference. This is especially true in the first half, where, for example, Chase describes his Upper East Side neighborhood: “If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead.”
Recommended? Yes, but cautiously, especially for those aren’t used to stories where nothing happens beyond the observations and thoughts of its characters. CHRONIC CITY delvers its rewards slowly and over long stretchs of exposition and dialogue. But they are there to enjoy for those with the patience to discover them. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• FOUR NOVELS OF THE 1960S by Philip K. Dick, edited by Jonathan Lethem
• VALIS AND LATER NOVELS by Philip K. Dick, edited by Jonathan Lethem
