Chronic City

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Overview

The bestselling and beloved author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude delivers a searing love letter to the city that has inspired his finest work.
 
Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories ...

See more details below

Overview

The bestselling and beloved author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude delivers a searing love letter to the city that has inspired his finest work.
 
Chase Insteadman, former child television star, has a new role in life—permanent guest on the Upper East Side dinner party circuit, where he is consigned to talk about his astronaut fiancée, Janice Trumbull, who is trapped on a circling Space Station. A chance encounter collides Chase with Perkus Tooth, a wily pop culture guru with a vicious conspiratorial streak and the best marijuana in town. Despite their disparate backgrounds and trajectories Chase and Perkus discover they have a lot in common, including a cast of friends from all walks of life in Manhattan.  Together and separately they attempt to define the indefinable, and enter into a quest for the most elusive of things: truth and authenticity in a city where everything has a price. 

One of the New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2009

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Signature

Reviewed by Arthur Nersesian

Jonathan Lethem's work has gone from postapocalyptic sci-fi to autobiographical magical realism. In Chronic City, he weaves these elements together, blending a number of actual recent events to create his own surreal urban landscape. The nearly mythological construction of the Second Avenue Subway spawns a strange destructive tiger that defies capture as it transforms the old city into a scary new one. A pair of eagles illegally squatting on an Upper East Side windowsill are summarily evicted. Best of all is the economic abyss that one once encountered above 125th Street. Here, Lethem has dropped a manmade fjord, a performance art chasm.

At the heart of this city is former child star Chase Insteadman. Lately, he is better known as a celebrity fiancé to fatale femme astronaut Janice Strumbull, who is stuck in orbit because of Chinese satellite mines. Lately, though, his greater concern is his friend Perkus Tooth. Perkus is a pauper scholar, a slightly delusional Don Quixote character whose windmills are called chaldrons, imagined vases that bring inner peace. Somewhat like the tragic poet Delmore Schwartz who Saul Bellow fictionally eulogized (and Lethem acknowledges) in Humboldt's Gift, Tooth cuts with equal parts genius and madness. Though he never really rises above a plasterer of "broadside" rants, he's a recognizable artifact of New York circa 1981. Between bong hits—yes, for you potheads, Chronic is his favorite brand—and downtown cultural references, conspiracy theories hiccup from Perkus's lips. A prevalent notion he has is that our reality is nothing more than a facsimile, a simulation of a hidden reality. Perkus'shyperactive brain only pauses when he lapses into his periodic "ellipse"—a kind of revelatory break. The only problem is his breaks are gradually increasing in frequency. Inasmuch as Perkus is a personification of the old New York and its highly endangered culture, Insteadman finds a moral duty to protect him.

If Perkus is Insteadman's moral conscience, Richard Abneg, an opportunistic politico, is Insteadman's naked ambition. Though Abneg started as an East Village anarchist, through intellect and arrogance he rose to become a powerful aide to Mayor Arnaheim (a Giuliani-Bloomberg hybrid). Now he's dismantling the rent stabilization laws he once championed. Eventually, these two work together to save Perkus.

Though Chronic City at times requires patience, it is a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, the book sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset. The key to his city lies in the very notion of reality: Chase Insteadman's moniker implies that this former actor is now just a stand-in for a greater (perhaps former) reality. By the conclusion, I found myself wondering if Lethem hadn't originally written a shorter simulacra of Chronic City, when it was just an Acute City. From him I would expect no less.

Arthur Nersesian is author of The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (book two of the Five Books of Moses). His next novel, Mesopotamia, a thriller, is due out next year.

From The Critics
The turbocharged plot of "Chronic City" is too intricate and seamless, and also too odd, to summarize easily. It involves migraines and hiccups and a luxury residence for dogs, and Perkus's quest for unattainable vaselike objects, called chaldrons, that hold an almost mystical appeal. Stripped to essentials, though, the story centers on the friendship between Chase and Perkus, and on their travels through Manhattan's social strata: a party at the billionaire mayor's mansion, a film project at a highbrow production company, all those hours at Jackson Hole. ...
"The Fortress of Solitude" was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl - it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. "Chronic City" is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme - but then, it's the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford's movie "The Searchers," that an actor "can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter." This is Perkus's lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality - even in a fiction - passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look.
—Gregory Cowels\
The Barnes & Noble Review
Before the sun dies and the Earth's core cools, before the zombies tear down the skyscrapers and all the pages are ripped from the library books, our species may already have long withered away in a virtual dystopia of failing beauty, faux terrors, and digitally-rendered hopes. Or if not all mankind, at least Manhattan. Such is the bleak path Jonathan Lethem lustrously figures in Chronic City. His subtly ambitious eighth novel explores the extent to which the virtual shadows of our postmodern world, interposed and clanging, proliferate and intensify even as they begin to cancel one another out.

Here is a Manhattan in frozen form, wintry and stilled, as if taxicabs, car alarms, and investment banking are already undergoing a kind of heat-death. Where Lethem's previous novels engage New York as a setting of memory and imagination, in Chronic City, Manhattan is almost a ghost town, not so much post- as peri-apocalyptic, the set of a zombified version of Seinfeld whose denizens are somnambulantly busy, exempt from the exigencies of avoiding disease or making money.

Earning a living certainly is no problem for narrator Chase Insteadman. A washed-up child actor, prematurely superannuated, he's a midlife pretty boy afloat on residuals. Dimly aware of his surroundings and the urges and expectations of the people careening through his life, Insteadman is but flickeringly alive. He exhibits a kind of determined disinterest in engagement, literally as well as figuratively: his fiancée, Janice, is astronaut marooned in space with her glowering coterie of Russian cosmonauts by a Chinese orbital minefield. The tense crisis drags at the heartstrings of the public, and renews Chase's place in the public imagination, a second chance he endures with knowing befuddlement. Chase seems as lost in space as his intended, dependent on the arrival of her letters from space to fill him in on the forgotten details of their affair.

But Chase trips over a warp in his personal space-time continuum in the form of Perkus Tooth -- writer of CD cover copy, former culture-critic wunderkind, and one-time punk pamphleteering phenom, with a lazy right eye that seems to want "to discredit (his) whole sober aura with a comic jape." The professorial left eye fixes itself on Chase, however, and won't let go; and by degrees, Insteadman falls under the Tooth spell. Soon he's holed up in Perkus's rent-controlled redoubt at all hours watching obscure (and incidentally apocryphal) Werner Herzog films, listening while his host unleashes casuistic diatribes describing the undying brilliance of Marlon Brando, and consuming toxic quantities of marijuana -- the latter supplied by Perkus's dealer in lucite boxes labeled with varietal names to a evoke a cracked consumerism: Funky Monkey, Blueberry Kush.

Pot, in Perkus's world, is more than a balm or a mindblower; it's a kind of muse; as much as Perkus's compelling oddities, it attracts worshipful others into his orbit. In the reek of Perkus's apartment, Insteadman is subject to the gravitational attraction not only of Tooth but other bodies: an angularly sexy, self-loathing ghostwriter; a delusional former revolutionary-turned mayoral apparatchik; an ethereal, evanescent presence of a homeless man. Together they are locked in an embrace of eccentric orbits, doomed to circle one another for eternity in the void of the Upper East Side -- a social echo of Janice's exile beyond the atmosphere.

At the opening of this review, I called Chronic City's a subtle ambition because so much of the novel describes a series of languorous, pot-fueled hangout sessions -- in the background of which the machinery of paranoia and destruction implacably close in on Chase and his oblivious friends. Everywhere they turn they're met by false idols, beguiling, evocative, and empty. The New York Times is available in a "war-free edition"; an heiress dies and leaves a building of furnished apartments not for the homeless, but for stray dogs to live in. The southern end of the island is enveloped in a gray fog; its denizens come and go like ghosts, people of ash. Manhattanites churn up and down the stilled streets or through the empty corridors of power, seeking motivation or solace. In a Blakean touch, there's a "tiger" on the loose -- a monster of dubious provenance, perhaps mechanical, perhaps primordial, feeding on the city's infrastructure -- its nature and reality the subject of gossip and debate. Is it a real creature, a robotic earthmover run amok, or merely a hoax? But even this fantastic creature is for most a topic merely of remote and curious peril.

Novels, with their elaborately detailed other worlds, could be said to be modern culture's first attempt at virtual reality. But we somehow don't expect them to be able to handle the dislocations of digitally enhanced life. The universe in which text messages fling themselves from device to device, in which our avatars fly over metastatic landscapes of museums and sex clubs and crystalline shores, I've been told, is like a universal acid for the realm of fiction. But Lethem dramatizes that corrosive aspect of virtuality with diffuse precision, a kind of sleight of hand. The Internet is never named in Chronic City, but it's present as a source of obsession, endless distraction, and for some, brilliant success. Called Yet Another World, the virtual realm that catches the characters' fancy is no mere Second Life but one more in an infinite regression; once lives start budding and dividing like yeast cells, there's no stopping them.

But it's not just the wired life that causes dislocation -- words themselves are just as tricky. "All language seems this way," Chase observes late in the novel, "a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I'm helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don't. And yet I go around forming sentences." By this point in the novel, this is an unnervingly familiar evocation of the experience not only of language but the chronic city.

In the end, even nature -- the fleeting presence of which, in the form of a flock of birds or the keen senses of a dog, seemed like something of a still point -- proves an unsystematic system, a clamor of perspectives "satisfyingly continuous in their asymmetries and divergences." The aforementioned tiger, which for most of the novel looms at the edges of the action, begins toward the conclusion to strike -- a machina ex deum now mechanical, now burning bright with animal authenticity. It's but one of several ghosts in the machine, some called into being by one character or another, others haunting the works at their own bidding.

I'm familiar enough with some (by no means all) of the milieux Jonathan Lethem traverses -- virtual worlds habituated by science fiction mavens, comic impresarios, and punk rock scholars -- to believe in the syncretistic simulacrum he's built in Chronic City. The knowledge that ours are nested worlds is a postmodern convention; that we might learn to inhabit these circles-within-circles with all the energies of love and kindness arrives as a kind of wisdom, a discovery.

Chase Insteadman, for his part, makes his discoveries too late. Perkus slips down a wormhole. The truth about Chase's astronaut intended, Janice, when it emerges, is both shattering and more than slightly implausible. But plot machinations are not the heart of Chronic City, which in the midst of its grim evocations does the rarer work of dramatizing friendship's rare tenderness and bravery, its belated perfection. --Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History. He has written about language, technology, and history for such publications as The American Scholar, The Boston Sunday Globe, and Harper's.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780385518635
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 10/13/2009
  • Pages: 480
  • Product dimensions: 6.50 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Jonathan  Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem has a talent for bending literary genres. He has been entertaining readers since 1994's Gun, with Occasional Music, a debut novel that contained all the ingredients of his future career as a writer: science fiction, pulp detective noir, westerns, and award-winning coming-of-age stories.

Biography

The son of artists and activists, Jonathan Lethem has always been surrounded by art and archetypes. His father, avant-garde painter Richard Brown Lethem, ensured that the household was always bustling with fellow artists, live nude models, and a creative spirit. Despite the nurturing, artistic setting, Lethem's teen years were demanding -- his mother died of cancer when he was 14, and the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood forced him to toughen up at a young age.

Lethem's Brooklyn is rich with history and stories. Much of the world knows Brooklyn through the movies and television -- as an urban maze just outside the glitter of Manhattan. But Lethem's novels deliver a more emotional and brutal reality of the streets he called home (and still does). The Brooklyn culture of his childhood became the sidewalk on which he built his critically acclaimed Motherless Brooklyn, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lethem attended the High School for Music and Art in NYC, where he studied painting but began to hone his love of literature. An insatiable reader, he read the classic and the contemporary, including Kerouac, Mailer, Vonnegut, Chandler, Dostoevsky, Orwell, and Kafka. While still in high school, he finished a 125-page novel called Heroes. It was never published but is rumored to be the earliest form of what became The Fortress of Solitude.

After high school, Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont but dropped out after the first semester to work on his writing. He returned to Bennington briefly, but eventually made the move to California, hitchhiking his way across the country to arrive in Berkeley in 1984. This experience, and the years he spent in San Francisco, provided the inspiration for his first three novels, Amnesia Moon(1995), As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), and Girl in Landscape (1998).

In late 1996, Lethem moved back to Brooklyn and began writing the book that would put him on the lips of every publisher and reader in the country. When Motherless Brooklyn was released in 1999, readers fell in love with its fascinating lead characters, relentless plot, and detailed setting. It was an instant success and won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lethem's long-awaited next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, hit the shelves four years later, in 2003. He conducted a lot of research for the book, gaining yet another perspective on his beloved hometown. The novel is again set in Brooklyn, on Dean Street, where Lethem grew up. Over three decades, the two lead characters -- Dylan and Mingus -- experience the world through the prisms of race relations, music, and pop culture in a disturbing and compelling story of loyalty and loss, vulnerability and superhero powers.

Outside of novels, Lethem has published short fiction and lent his editing talents to a number of projects. Odd and shocking, This Shape We're In (an extended short story) is about an unforgettable trip to the hospital. The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye is a collection of seven short stories about everything from clones to professional basketball. Lethem and coauthor Carter Scholz have fun with the master of the bizarre in Kafka Americana: Fiction, a book of short stories with Kafka as the main character navigating absurd situations. Lethem edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, short stories about the art of forgetting by such authors as Philip K. Dick, Martin Amis, and Shirley Jackson. He was guest editor of The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, essays by writers on music.

Good To Know

Lethem's original artistic impulse was to be a painter. While he remains a talented graphic artist, he first acknowledged his deep desire to write while at Bennington, where fellow classmates included Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt.

Before he was a published writer, Lethem's only other jobs were in bookstores. His first bookstore job was at age 13, and he supported himself this way up to 1994 when his first novel was published. In San Francisco, he worked at the well-known Moe's Books, home of rare and antique tomes.

    1. Also Known As:
      Jonathan Allan Lethem (full name)
    2. Hometown:
      New York, New York
    1. Education:
      Left Bennington College after two years

Read an Excerpt

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.) his was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on Fifty- second Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon at the end of summer. I'd gone there to record a series of voice- overs for one of Criterion's high- end DVD reissues, a "lost" 1950s film noir called The City Is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that film's director, the late émigré auteur Von Tropen Zollner. I would read a series of statements culled from Zollner's interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I'd met at a dinner party.
In drawing me into the project they'd supplied me with a batch of research materials, which I'd browsed unsystematically, as well as a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I'd heard of Zollner, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half- life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. And I was curious to see the inside of Criterion's operation. This was the first week of September—the city's back- to- school mood always inspired me to find something to do with my idle hands. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go- between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the zones where Manhattan's veneer gave way to the practical world.

I recorded Zollner's words in a sound chamber in the technical swing of Criterion's crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room outside the chamber, where the soundman sat giving me cues through a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am Curious (Yellow). Afterward I was retrieved by the producer who'd enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and her colleague I'd met at the dinner party—unguarded, embracing people with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom I'd felt an instantaneous affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more lost films petitioning for Criterion's rescue.
Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an office to share. The glamour of Criterion's brand wasn't matched by these scenes of thrift and improvisation I'd gathered in my behind- the- scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner did Susan introduce me to Perkus Tooth and give me an invoice to sign than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

He was, that first time, lapsed into what I would soon learn to call one of his "ellipsistic" moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought nor to begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth's turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dress— trim- tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, moldering tennis shoes—I could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his fifties—still a decade wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a while. He was in his early forties, barely older than me. I'd mistaken him for old because I'd taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooth's whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored the gambit, trained on me.

"You're the actor."
"Yes," I said.
"So, I'm doing the liner notes. For The City Is a Maze, I mean."
"Oh, good."
"I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight . . . Recalcitrant
Women . . . The Unholy City . . . Echolalia . . ."
"All film noir?"
"Oh, gosh, no. You've never seen Herzog's Echolalia?"
"No."
"Well, I wrote the liner notes, but it isn't exactly released yet.
I'm still trying to convince Eldred—"

Perkus Tooth, I'd learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His mind's landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment Eldred—Susan—returned to the office.

"So," he said to her, "have you got that tape of Echolalia
around here somewhere?" He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. "I want him to see it."
Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. "I don't know where it is," she said.
"Never mind."
"Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?"
"What do you mean?"

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, then we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown edifices, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumbwaiter—there was no margin for pretending we hadn't just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn't some dapper retro- fetishist. His shirt collar was grubby and crumpled. The greengray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor's bucket.

"So," he said again. This "so" of Perkus's—his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk—wasn't in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. "So, I'll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it."
"Sure."
"It's a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Groom's Nowhere Near. Groom's movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzog's attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Groom's set. Brando doesn't want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog's said . . . you know, echolalia . . ."
"Yes," I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth's torrential specifics.
"But it's also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near. Morrison Groom destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film—"  Why "ironically"? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question.
"It sounds incredible," I said.
"Of course you know Morrison Groom's suicide was probably faked."
My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: "You first—"
"Oops—" "After you—" "Sorry." We faced each other, mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn't harassing me.
"So, I'm off."
"Very good to see you." I'd quit using the word meet long ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the thousandth time someone explained to me that we'd actually met before.
"So—" He ground to a halt, expectant.
"Yes?"
"If you want to come by for the tape . . ."
I might have been failing some test, I wasn't sure. Perkus Tooth dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret calipers. I'd never know when I'd crossed an invisible frontier, visible to Perkus in the air between us.
"Do you want to give me a card?"

He scowled. "Eldred knows where to find me." His pride intervened, and he was gone. For a phone call so life- altering as mine to Susan Eldred, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was, dialing Criterion's receptionist later that afternoon, asking first for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan's volunteer, that's me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about Echolalia, or Morrison Groom's faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth's intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye's gaze? All of it and none of it, that's the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I'd drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I'd come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred's office or that elevator.

"Your office mate," I said. "They didn't recognize his name at the front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong—"
"Perkus?" Susan laughed. "He doesn't work here."
"He said he wrote your liner notes."
"He's written a couple, sure. But he doesn't work here. He just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I'm sort of Perkus's babysitter. I don't even always notice him anymore—you saw how he can be. I hope he wasn't bothering you."
"No . . . no. I was hoping to get in touch with him, actually."
Susan Eldred gave me Perkus Tooth's number, then paused. "I guess you must have recognized his name . . ."
"No."
"Well, in fact he's really quite an amazing critic. When I was at NYU all my friends and I used to idolize him. When I first got the chance to hire him to do a liner note I was quite in awe. It was shocking how young he was, it seemed like I'd grown up seeing his posters and stuff."
"Posters?"
"He used to do this thing where he'd write these rants on posters and put them up all around Manhattan, these sort of brilliant critiques of things, current events, media rumors, public art. They were a kind of public art, I guess. Everyone thought it was very mysterious and important. Then he got hired by Rolling Stone. They gave him this big column, he was sort of, I don't know, Hunter Thompson meets Pauline Kael, for about five minutes. If that makes any sense."
"Sure."
"Anyway, the point is, he sort of used up a lot of people's patience with certain kinds of . . . paranoid stuff. I didn't really get it until I started working with him. I mean, I like Perkus a lot. I just don't want you to feel I wasted your time, or got you enmeshed in any . . . schemes."People could be absurdly protective, as if a retired actor's hours were so precious. This was, I assume, secondhand affect, a leakage from Janice's otherworldly agendas. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone's Rolodex, her every breath measured out of tanks of recycled air. If an astronaut made room for me on her schedule, my own prerogatives must be crucial as an astronaut's. The opposite was true.
"Thank you," I said. "I'll be sure not to get enmeshed."

Perkus Tooth was my neighbor, it turned out. His apartment was on East Eighty- fourth Street, six blocks from mine, in one of those anonymous warrens tucked behind innocuous storefronts, buildings without lobbies, let alone doormen. The shop downstairs, Brandy's Piano Bar, was a corny- looking nightspot I could have passed a thousand times without once noticing. BRANDY'S CUSTOMERS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBORS! pleaded a small sign at the doorway, suggesting a whole tale of complaint calls to the police about noise and fumes. To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement- demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth's door buzzer to sound and finding my way inside, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floor's lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of the superintendent's disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes, and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling bootheels. I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.

Perkus Tooth lived in 1R, a half- level up, the building's rear. He widened his door just enough for me to slip inside, directly to what revealed itself to be his kitchen. Perkus, though barefoot, wore another antique- looking suit, green corduroy this time, the only formal thing my entry revealed. The place was a bohemian grotto, the kitchen a kitchen only in the sense of having a sink and stove built in, and a sticker- laden refrigerator wedged into an alcove beside the bathroom door. Books filled the open cabinet spaces above the sink.

The countertop was occupied with a CD player and hundreds of disks, in and out of jewel cases, many hand labeled with a permanent marker. A hot- water pipe whined. Beyond, the other rooms of the apartment were dim at midday, the windows draped. They likely only looked onto ventilation shafts or a paved alley, anyway. Then there were the broadsides Susan Eldred had described. Unframed, thumbtacked to every wall bare of bookshelves, in the kitchen and in the darkened rooms, were Perkus Tooth's famous posters, their paper yellowing, the lettering veering between a stylish cartoonist's or graffitist's handmade font and the obsessive scrawl of an outsider artist, or a schizophrenic patient's pages reproduced in his doctor's monograph. I recognized them. Remembered them. They'd been ubiquitous downtown a decade before, on constructionsite boards, over subway advertisements, element in the graphic cacophony of the city one gleans helplessly at the edges of vision. Perkus retreated to give me clearance to shut the door. Stranded in the room's center in his suit and bare feet, palms defensively wide as if expecting something unsavory to be tossed his way, Perkus reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting I'd once seen, a selfportrait showing the painter wide- eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes. Which is to say, again, that Perkus Tooth seemed older than his age. (I'd never once see Perkus out of some part of a suit, even if it was only the pants, topped with a filthy white T-shirt. He never wore jeans.)

"I'll get you the videotape," he said, as if I'd challenged him.
"Great."
"Let me find it. You can sit down—" He pulled out a chair at his small, linoleum- topped table like one you'd see in a diner. The chair matched the table—a dinette set, a collector's item. Perkus Tooth was nothing if not a collector. "Here." He took a perfect finished joint from where it waited in the lip of an ashtray, clamped it in his mouth and ignited the tip, then handed it to me unquestioningly. It takes one, I suppose, to know one. I drew on it while he went into the other room. When he returned—with a VHS cassette and his sneakers and a balled- up pair of white socks—he accepted the joint from me and smoked an inch of it himself, intently.
"Do you want to get something to eat? I haven't been out all day." He laced his high- tops.
"Sure," I said.

Out
, for Perkus Tooth, I'd now begun to learn, wasn't usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger palace around the corner on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red- vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon we were pretty well alone there, the jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused, befogged talk. It had been a while since I'd smoked pot; everything was dawning strange, signals received through an atmosphere eddied with hesitations, the whole universe drifting untethered like Perkus Tooth's vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkus, but he didn't greet her, or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe and a Coca- Cola. Helpless, I dittoed his order. Perkus seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion's offices, indifferently, obliquely, as if he'd been born there yet still hadn't taken notice of the place.

In the middle of our meal Perkus halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Groom to announce what he'd made of me so far. "So, you've gotten by to this point by being cute, haven't you, Chase?" His spidery fingers, elbow- propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and cantilevered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. "You haven't changed, you're like a dreamy child, that's the secret of your appeal. But they love you. They watch you like you're still on television."

"Who?"
"The rich people. The Manhattanites—you know who I mean."
"Yes," I said.
"You're supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan," he said.
"Because of the astronaut who can't come home."
So, no surprise, Perkus was another one who knew me as Janice Trumbull's fiancé. My heart's distress was daily newspaper fodder. Yes, I loved Janice Trumbull, the American trapped in orbit with the Russians, the astronaut who couldn't come home. This, beyond my childhood TV stardom, was what anyone knew about me, though some, like Susan Eldred, were too polite to mention it.
"That's what everyone adores about you."
"I guess so."
"But I know your secret."

I was startled. Did I have a secret? If I did, it was one of the things I'd misplaced in the last few years. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten from there to here, made the decisions that led from my child stardom to harmlessly dissipated Manhattan celebrity, nor how it was that I deserved the brave astronaut's love. I had trouble clearly recalling Janice, that was part of my sorrow. The day she launched for the space station I must have undertaken to quit thinking of Janice, even while promising to keep a vigil for her here on earth. I never dared tell anyone this fact. So if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret.
Perkus eyed me slyly. Perhaps it was his policy to make this announcement to any new acquaintance, to see what they'd blurt out.

"Keep your eyes and ears open," he told me now. "You're in a position to learn things."
 

From the Hardcover edition.

Foreward

1. When do you think the action of the novel occurs? Is there a reason the time was left vague? Is this the "real" New York City?

2. At what point did you begin to suspect that Chase Insteadman was living a fiction? At what point in their story do you think Perkus Tooth understood that Chase had been deceived about his role?

3. Can you accept that Oona Laszlo is responsible for the letters attributed to Janice Trumbull? Is it possible, as a writer, to create another human being more generous, large-hearted, and responsive than yourself?

4. What is the meaning of the wild animals that intrude on the lives of these Manhattanites — the eagles, the tiger? Do they have anything to do with the weather?

5. Have you ever felt that the place where you lived or grew up was being turned into a 'simulacrum' of itself?

6. Have you ever tried to care for someone impossible? Are you now? Does Perkus Tooth remind you of anyone in your own life, or did you find Chase's decision to befriend him misguided?

7. At different points in CHRONIC CITY Perkus Tooth seems to attempt to sustain himself completely on culture and language, then, alternately, to try to leave culture and language entirely behind and live a "pure" life. Do you think either approach is possible?

8. The author's working title for CHRONIC CITY was "MANHATTAN". The Woody Allen film by that name was often criticized for depicting a Manhattan consisting only of the white upper middle class. Is CHRONIC CITY self-aware about the limitations of its characters? Does Chase Insteadman's response to the black kids he meets near the Urban Fjord, or to the black man inthe jail cell imply another version of Manhattan creeping into view?

9. What does the gray fog hide?

10. Was Chase unfair to Oona? Should he give her another chance?

Reading Group Guide

1. When do you think the action of the novel occurs? Is there a reason the time was left vague? Is this the "real" New York City?

2. At what point did you begin to suspect that Chase Insteadman was living a fiction? At what point in their story do you think Perkus Tooth understood that Chase had been deceived about his role?

3. Can you accept that Oona Laszlo is responsible for the letters attributed to Janice Trumbull? Is it possible, as a writer, to create another human being more generous, large-hearted, and responsive than yourself?

4. What is the meaning of the wild animals that intrude on the lives of these Manhattanites -- the eagles, the tiger? Do they have anything to do with the weather?

5. Have you ever felt that the place where you lived or grew up was being turned into a 'simulacrum' of itself?

6. Have you ever tried to care for someone impossible? Are you now? Does Perkus Tooth remind you of anyone in your own life, or did you find Chase's decision to befriend him misguided?

7. At different points in Chronic City Perkus Tooth seems to attempt to sustain himself completely on culture and language, then, alternately, to try to leave culture and language entirely behind and live a "pure" life. Do you think either approach is possible?

8. The author's working title for Chronic City was "Manhattan". The Woody Allen film by that name was often criticized for depicting a Manhattan consisting only of the white upper middle class. Is Chronic City self-aware about the limitations of its characters? Does Chase Insteadman's response to the black kids he meets near the Urban Fjord, or to the black man in the jail cell imply another version of Manhattan creeping into view?

9. What does the gray fog hide?

10. Was Chase unfair to Oona? Should he give her another chance?

(For a complete list of available reading group guides, and to sign up for the Reading Group Center enewsletter, visit www.readinggroupcenter.com)

Customer Reviews
Average Rating 3.5
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  • Posted December 19, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Bizarro New York

    Jonathan Lethem really has a talent for capturing the quintessence of what it is to be a New Yorker. His characters in Chronic City encapsulate the history of the city and the types of people that inhabit it. Worn out downtown hippies, child actors, the intelligentsia, and the elite unveil the joy and pain of living life on a frigid grid of streets and avenues.

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 11, 2010

    Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

    I had read the Times review of the Top 10 books from 2009 and that drew me to this book. I'd never read a book quite like it - complex and full of thoughtful discussions and contemplations. It really captured New York and New Yorkers (for good and for bad!). The book has surreal elements (a subway drill that eats street buildings) and a three-way love story between a female astronaut (trapped in space station), a former child star (male), and a ghost writer (female). There are lots of other primary elements in the book, but you'll have to read it to find out. Highly recommended!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 5, 2010

    Chronic Pointlessness

    The only reasons I'm giving Lethem's novel three stars rather than two are that (1) it's very well written; and (2) parts of it are quite humorous. That said, I got so sick of the book that I stopped reading it two-thirds of the way through. It was simply too difficult for me to connect or sympathize with the characters, and I was sick of the novel's pervasive sense of meaninglessness. A few pages into the novel, I was overcome by a "Philip Roth feeling," and I mention this because I suppose _Chronic City_ may be a very good book choice for folks who love Roth. As for myself, I stopped reading Philip Roth after _Sabbath's Theater_ for much the same reason I will likely not read Lethem again: the characters were just as immature at the end of the novel as they were at the beginning, and I came away with an overwhelming sense of futility. No, thank you.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 2, 2009

    Chronic Disappointment

    If you are seeking an entertaining read, this book is not for you.
    I finished it because I cannot bring myself not to finish a book, but it was bizarre from beginning to end.
    I do not know what the author's purpose was to engage readers in entering this fictional realm but it does not appear Mr. Lethem wanted to entertain us and hold us spellbound in this realm.
    It was a book I could put down anytime and not be anxious to return to read what would happen next.
    The character's names were foolish and did nothing to endear me to their plight.
    A very great waste of money. I would not be tempted to read anything else by this author.

    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 22, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    chronic slog

    Fortress of Solitude is one of my favorite novels of the 21st century. So when I pushed through the first 50 or so pages of Chronic City trying unsuccessfully to care about any of the characters, I held out hope that some sort of connection awaited me further into this disappointing book.

    My patience was rewarded for a brief period.Without giving away too much, I became immersed and enthralled as these characters chased after something special on EBay and wondered if a certain acting legend was dead or alive. But then, it was as if something, perhaps a thick fog right out this story(there are way too many Airborne Toxic Events in this book) came over me and caused me to start resenting the hell out of Lethem for taking me this far. I am now at page 250 and do not see myself finishing this book. If Lethem's goal was for me to hate and wish violent endings on all of the characters and the city, he has succeeded. If someone can convince me that this book gets better, I will hang in there.

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  • Posted June 18, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    My first foray into Lethem

    I have always been intrigued by this author. Lethem offers a wide range of subjects and styles in his novels and the descriptions of his books that have been related to me by friends always seem thoughful and sufficiently off kilter. I decided to try this one first because it was available as an e-book. I was totally enthralled with this book. The plot premise is unlike anything that I could have thought up and the characters are incredibly intriguing. The whole book is laced with conspiracies, plots, and so many metaphors and symbols that it becomes hard to keep all the connections straight. But I think that is somehow the point. Perkus gets lost in a world of random cultural connections, and Lethem buries the reader in the same kind of details, connections, and theories that overtake his characters. What is real? What is fake? What is genuine? What is contrived? It is difficult to decide, but fun to contemplate. I finished reading several days ago and I am still thinking about the book. I think what I ultimately took away from this novel was the idea that it can be difficult to tell if we are being genuine in our choices and lifestyles or if we are being directed by those who create a "simulated" world around us. However difficult this may be, we can create our own small world within the simulation by fostering close relationships and being true to those who need us. This is probably a gross oversimplification, but I am running out of space so I will let it go at that. I just want to close by saying that this is a great unique read for people who enjoy a book that is more about the characters and how they react and develop than it is about what happens in the plot.

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    Posted November 7, 2010

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