How can it possibly be big enough to knock down buildings?
Perkus, meanwhile, develops a fixation on "chaldrons". Spotted first in a picture in a doctor's treatment room, a chaldron is far more than just a vase-like receptacle, it's a mesmerising doorway hinting at something beyond its mere physical presence, perfect in its "sublime and superb thingliness". Yet when they try to buy one on eBay, the prices keep skyrocketing, well beyond the reaches of even Richard's wealthy girlfriend Georgina Hawkmanaji this is not the most whimsical name in the book.
Chronic City Poster — M+E / Michael Fusco Design
Janice is on the space station, trapped with Russian cosmonauts by an orbiting minefield put in place by the Chinese. Their supplies are running low, and Janice has developed a cancerous sarcoma in her foot. Chase knows all this because her letters are printed in the New York Times, and he has assumed the role of city hero, a surrogate for everyone's worry.
Let me say here that I have no idea whether Lethem lights up himself, but without even considering the possibility, I'd already thought the sparkiness of earlier work such as Gun With Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn had gone strangely awol in Lethem's last two novels, the wide-ranging but frequently dull The Fortress of Solitude and the misfiring romantic comedy You Don't Love Me Yet.
More About Chronic City
Chronic City is better than both of those, but it's still sometimes a struggle to see through the sheer haze of pot smoke. The plot ambles along, and slowly — too slowly — coincidences start resolving themselves, plotlines intersect, and larger themes emerge about validity and falsity, both in art and in life. What starts as a genial, if overly spacey, story gently darkens into something far more downbeat. But it's hard not to think that inside these amiable pages is a really corking page novel struggling to clear its lungs.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Take Janice's letters to Chase. Popping up every hundred pages or so, they're just brilliant. From the Russian crew struggling not to give in to despair, to the botanist who secretly brings bees from the space station's garden to sting Janice in an attempt at complementary treatment — "their dry little feet affixed with rubber cement so they won't drift" — these are told with a level of clear, devastating feeling that is too often diluted elsewhere in the book. The letters, in fact, are so compelling, they were a standalone short story in the New Yorker last year called "Lostronaut".
But is it really a tiger?
Or is it an out-of-control subway-tunnel-drilling machine? And is that any more plausible? A "gray fog" hangs over downtown, the fallout from some terrible and inadequately remembered event. The collapse of the World Trade Centre? Or perhaps the "gray fog" is too murky a metaphor to have a concrete analogue. The narrator, Chase Insteadman, is a retired child actor, gracing the fashionable dinner tables of the Upper East Side with his handsome and blandly charming presence. He's engaged to an astronaut, Janice Trumbull, who's trapped in a space station orbiting the Earth on the far side of an impenetrable field of Chinese mines.
- Truckers Tales?
- SOMA ULTE EP_OUT NOW.
- Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City?
- Chronic City!
- Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.
- Navigation menu!
She writes him letters, which he reads along with everyone else when they're published in the "war free" edition of the New York Times. Chase's life takes a new turn when he meets Perkus Tooth, an impish, agoraphobic, dope-smoking, freelance pop critic, who used to publish his work in cut-up collages he pasted on the walls of the city.
Chronic City Poster
Now he expounds his wacky theories to whoever drops in to his squalid apartment on East 84th Street. Perkus's friends include Oona Laszlo, a prickly ghostwriter with whom Chase soon starts having a clandestine ish affair, Richard Abneg, a former radical anarchist squatter who works for the mayor's housing department, and Ava, an affectionate three-legged pitbull terrier.
Variously and together they set out on a series of abortive adventures, by turns farcical and sad, always entertaining but adding up to an oddly plotless whole. This seems to be deliberate: The plotlessness is compensated for by some gorgeous writing and some very funny set pieces, such as when Chase and Perkus sneak out of a dinner thrown by Mayor Jules Arnheim, who's not unlike Michael Bloomberg, to get high with another has-been, Russ Grinspoon, who's not unlike Art Garfunkel.
One of Perkus's concerns is that the world he lives in is not the real world, whatever that might be, but a simulation, like an elaborate computer game.