Mitch Wagner's Blog: Reading "Chronic City," by Jonathan Lethem

I just finished reading Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, a novel about life in present-day New York, which starts out at least somewhat ordinary and becomes weirder and more wonderful with every page.

The main character and storyteller is Chase Insteadman. The Amazon review correctly describes Insteadman as a "genial nonentity." He's a former child star -- and oh, what a great freight of dysfunction and weirdness those three words convey! He was the lead in the wildly popular 80s sitcom Martyr and Pesty, and earns an income from residuals from that show, enough to live comfortably if not lavishly in Manhattan. People still recognize him as his character when he meets them. He's avoided the criminal record and violent eccentricity of some former child stars. He's just this dull guy who lives in Manhattan and who used to be interesting.

He's handsome and somewhat charming, which means he gets invited to a lot of dinner parties and cocktail parties thrown by Manhattan's very, very rich. At one point, we see him enter a brownstone house that's actually inside an apartment building; the house came first and the building was built around it. The condos cost tens of millions of dollars each, and the occupants are, therefore, filthy rich. But the occupants of the brownstone are even more wealthy than that.

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And yet Chase's insanely wealthy friends never seem to do anything. They're the very picture of the idle rich, they do not run companies or exert power, they just exist, fed and groomed by armies of servants.

Chronic City is Chase's story of his friendship with the bohemian eccentric Perkus Tooth. Tooth is a pop-culture critic, specializing in long, angry rants about movies and music. Like Chase, Perkus Tooth's best-known years are far behind him. Perkus formerly posted his rants on handmade posters that he stealthily pasted on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He calls the posters his "broadsides." The posters made Perkus famous in the small Bohemian culture of downtown Manhattan a long time ago. Later, he wrote for Rolling Stone. Tooth, a wall-eyed ectomorph, favors shabby three-piece suits.

Chase's other major relationship at the opening of the novel is with Janice Trumbull, his heroic astronaut-fiance who is stranded on the International Space Station by a barrier of orbiting Chinese land mines.

Chronic City is a pothead novel. Chase, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg smoke massive amounts of pot, and a major part of the novel deals with the misperceptions and compelling conversations that occur when frequently stoned. Chase goes to Perkus Tooth's apartment, they listen to music and argue and drink coffee and go around the corner to the Jackson Hole diner for hamburgers and chocolate shakes. Perkus Tooth's apartment reminds me a lot of some of the rooms in my college dorms, shabby places decorated by conversations and music and a constant, familial flow of people stopping by to get high. There's a lovely, warm friendliness to that kind of life, even if nobody ever gets anything done.

Chase, Perkus Tooth, and another character, Richard Abneg are people whose best years, in some respects, seem to be behind them: Chase's acting career, Perkus Tooth's broadsides. Even Richard Abneg, now a powerful fixer for the Mayor of the City of New York, is uncomfortable in that worldly success; he still sees himself as at the outsider, the wild-haired revolutionary he was as a young man.

The novel is populated by mentions of real-life celebrities, as well as celebrities with made-up names who are clearly based on real famous people. The mayor of New York, Arnheim, is a media billionaire. Emil Jumrow is a science writer who seems to be an amalgam of Isaac Asimov and Richard Feynman. In the novel, Jumrow gets credit for the "simulation argument," developed in real life by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University.

The simulation argument, which becomes central to the second half of the novel, argues that we're not living in the real world--we're almost certainly living in a computer simulation of reality.

Reality is a major theme of "Chronic City"--the old, epistemological question, how do we know what we know? The characters of the novel seem to be based on real people: Chase is an amalgam of every former celebrity we've ever seen on TV. Perkus Tooth reminds me very much of one of my real-life friends (although, while Perkus is too crazy to live in the world, my friend is actually successful). I suspect you might well know someone like Perkus too. Likewise, I feel I know know someone like Richard Abneg, another character--a few people, as a matter of fact. The world of Chronic City doesn't have the Muppets in it, but it does have the Gnuppets.

And as time goes on, Chase and Perkus Tooth begin to wonder whether they, and the world around them, are real. They can't even come to an agreement on whether Marlon Brando is dead or alive--they go to Wikipedia, and at first it says he's dead. But when they visit later it says his death was just a hoax, and t he page is decorated with one of those big, Wikipedia disclaimers that says the factuality of the page is in dispute.

Because I am a Second Life enthusiast, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Second Life plays a big role in the second half of novel. It's called Yet Another Life in the novel, and it serves as an example of the whole epistemological theme--could we be avatars in a massive simulation of the world, without knowing it? Lethem gets the details of Second Life right, except for those which appear to have been consciously changed by the author for purposes of the story.

Lethem draws the readers into the whole epistemological game; because Chronic City is filled with in-jokes and mentions of real places and celebrities, it's inevitable that the reader will wonder how much of it is based in reality and how much of it is pure fiction. It's unclear how much the novel is even set in our universe--details like a different mayor of New York, fictional astronauts, and even a tiger running loose in downtown Manhattan are the kind of thing we expect in mainstream fiction. On the other hand, there's a reference to the World Trade Center still standing, and think of how much the world would be different if those two buildings were still up! Alternately: I could only find one reference to the WTC still standing, and the person who references them is by then shown to be unreliable, so maybe this is our universe after all.

The reality games in Chronic City had me hitting Google hard while reading. The characters spend a lot of time trying to acquire a type of ceramic pot called a "chaldron," Lethem describes it so vividly that I was surprised, when Googling, to find that there is no such thing. In real life, a "chaldron" is "a British imperial capacity measure (liquid or dry) equal to 36 bushels."

Jackson Hole, the burger joint where Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth spend a lot of time, is a real place--or places, it's a New York chain of burger joints. One of them is located near where my parents' condo was, in Flushing, Queens, and I ate there a few times. The burgers are, as advertised in the book, big and tasty. Jackson Hole has a restaurant where the one in the novel is: 2nd Avenue in New York, around the corner from Perkus Tooth's East 84th Street Apartment. It's appropriate for Jackson Hole to figure so prominently in a novel about reality not being what it seems; it's a place in New York named for a place in Wyoming, and it seems like a local diner, but it isn't--it's part of a chain.

Is Perkus Tooth real? He's on Facebook. I flipped through his friends list to see if I know anyone, and came across a name I recognized: Emily Gould. I was sure for a second that I knew her, but then I realized I don't; she wrote in a confessional style on the blog Gawker.com, and then wrote a confessional article in the New York Times Magazine about the liabilities of publishing confessionals. Although I don't know Emily, I blogged about her. So it feels like I know Emily, even though I don't. This reality thing is kind of tricky.

"Chronic," in the title, is a real-life nickname for marijuana, and Chronic City is one of the names of the brands of pot that Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman are partial too. "Chronic" also describes long-lasting or recurring medical conditions; that meaning becomes important at the very end of the novel.

I liked Chronic City a lot. It's a little slow and meandery in the middle, but it's paced fast enough to keep me going, and I gulped down the second half of the book in a single day.