They’ll Take Manhattan, Isle of Whimsy and Virtual Reality

Book review by Michiko Kakutani

Books of The Times

CHRONIC CITY

By By Jonathan Lethem

467 pages. Doubleday. $27.95.

In one of the many marijuana-fueled conversations in this tedious, overstuffed novel, the hero Perkus Tooth asserts that it’s “common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares.” And another character named Oona replies that we’re probably already living in one of many parallel universes created as “a series of experiments just to see how things will develop” — whether “we’ll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever.”

Like so many stoned exchanges, these observations might seem terribly significant to the participants at the moment, but in sober retrospect, they are revealed to be nothing but a lot of pompous hot air. Unfortunately for the reader, this is true not only of this one scene in Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Chronic City,” but also of the entire book, which pretentiously — and clumsily — tries to create a kind of virtual-reality game version of Manhattan.

This fictional Manhattan has none of the energy or keenly observed grittiness of the real-life Brooklyn that Mr. Lethem captured with such verve in his 2003 novel, “The Fortress of Solitude.” It lacks the fierce, hallucinatory power of truly imagined places conjured by magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino. And it lacks the larger-than-life heroics and over-the-top wickedness of Batman’s Gotham City or Superman’s Metropolis.

Instead, Mr. Lethem’s Chronic City seems like an insipid, cartoon version of Manhattan: recognizable in outline (with snooty Upper East Side dinner parties, a wealthy businessman turned mayor and all manner of eccentric artists and has-beens, socialites and socialists), but garnished with odd details (snow in the summertime, a tiger roaming the streets, an apartment building for dogs) that feel more like whimsical embroiderings than genuinely interesting or illuminating inventions.

“The Fortress of Solitude” demonstrated that the gifted Mr. Lethem did not need to rely on the postmodernist pyrotechnics and cutesy special effects that had animated much of his earlier work, and that when he dispensed with these framing techniques, he could write vividly and movingly about regular people — about fathers and sons, about friends who grow apart, about people trying to grapple with the thorny issues of race and class and social change.

In these respects “Chronic City” represents a curious move backward. It is coy where “Solitude” was earnest, juvenile and mannered where “Solitude” was deeply felt. Though it has passages of dancing wit and keen observation, it is, over all, a strangely detached and lackadaisical production that sorely tries the reader’s patience.

To begin with, the characters turn out to be an annoying and tiresome lot. Although Perkus made an engaging enough debut in a short story some time ago (the story can be found in a collection called “The Book of Other People,” edited by Zadie Smith), he completely fails to sustain a full-length novel. The narcissism and obsessive-compulsive behavior that made him an intriguing figure in that earlier tale turn him here, in a 400-plus-page novel, into an irritating bore.

A former rock critic and autodidact who lives in a bohemian grotto on the Upper East Side, Perkus is forever prattling on, while stoned on high-grade pot, about things like Marlon Brando’s being “the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era.” He leaves his apartment only to gorge himself on burgers at a local burger joint, expects his friends to stay up all night listening to his stream-of-consciousness rants and has temper tantrums when his wishes are ignored.

In the course of the novel, Perkus becomes fascinated with a rare sort of vase that he calls a “chaldron” and that he hunts obsessively on eBay, and later with a three-legged pit bull named Ava who becomes his roommate and constant companion. He suffers bout after bout of cluster headaches and develops what may be a fatal case of hiccups.

As for the narrator of “Chronic City,” an actor with the Pynchonian name of Chase Insteadman, it’s impossible to understand why he finds Perkus so entertaining or compelling. Chase, a former child star on a television sitcom, is supposedly the grief-stricken lover of a beauteous astronaut named Janice Trumbull, who is trapped aboard an international space station that has gotten stuck in outer space.

But while Chase is known as “the saddest man in Manhattan,” he doesn’t seem terribly concerned about Janice’s plight — even when she develops foot cancer and faces the prospect of amputation. Instead Chase spends his time chasing after a ghostwriter named Oona Laszlo, who is purportedly working on the autobiography of an avant-garde artist named Laird Noteless, who specializes in big, Christo -like public installations.

Members of the novel’s supporting cast have deliberately odd names, comic-book personalities or curious vocations. There’s Richard Abneg, a former radical who now works for the mayor, “managing the undoing of rent stabilization,” and Abneg’s wealthy lover, Georgina Hawkmanaji, who looks like an ostrich. There’s Sandra Saunders Eppling, who played Chase’s mother on the sitcom “Martyr & Pesty,” and the more modestly named Linus Carter, the designer of a virtual-reality game called “Yet Another World.”

Will Chase be forced to choose between Janice and Oona? Is the tiger rampaging through the city streets a real one or a mechanical contraption that’s part of a government plot? For that matter, are Chase, Oona and all the others playing out roles in a bigger performance-art-like game? Or maybe they’re really avatars in a variation on that old city-building simulation game, SimCity?

In the end the reader simply doesn’t care: these creatures inhabit neither a real flesh-and-blood Manhattan nor a persuasive fictional realm, and they’re so clearly plasticky puppets moved hither and thither by Mr. Lethem’s random whims that it’s of no concern to us what happens to them in this lame and unsatisfying novel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/books/13kakutani.html