Interleaving Lives

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
2009, Doubleday


Two weeks ago, Mr. Lethem did a reading through the Brookline Booksmith at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. I am not especially familiar with Lethem's work (I've only read his collection of short stories Men and Cartoons and his collection of essays The Disappointment Artist.

I had already checked out Chronic City from the library and brought my library book for him to sign, after checking with the library director that this request was kosher. Mr. Lethem read the entire first chapter of Chronic City with incredibly charming enthusiasm.

After the reading, Mr. Lethem signed my library book, "To the Ispwich Library and everyone who will enjoy this without stealing it."

Chronic City is, like its writer, an incredibly charming book. It is, however, also an upsetting, ruminative, depressing book as well.

Early in the book the narrator, a washed-up child actor named Chase Insteadman, muses about how fondness for Manhattan as such:

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave... We only pretend to live in something as orderly as a grid.

Insteadman stumbles accidentally into one of those stranger realms, occupied by an eccentric cultural cataloguer named Perkus Tooth who takes it upon himself to educate Insteadman in the cinematic and musical touchstones which give some sense of rhythm to his world. Tooth suffers from what he calls "cluster headaches," which paralyze his thoughts and cripple his flamboyant idiosyncrasies.

Insteadman falls under his unlikely tutelage and their friendship serves as the ostensible plot of the novel and Tooth's acolytes populate Insteadman's life.

Tooth wakes Insteadman from a life of residually-fed complacency and, with the help of some powerful marijuana, enlists him in his increasingly odder and more paranoid obsessions, which progress from unhealthy appetites for Brando and hamburgers to the enslavement of the public by the font of the New Yorker to mystifying vase-like "chaldrons".

Eventually Tooth and Insteadman become consumed by theories regarding the aforementioned "interleaved realms" in the form of a Second Life-like game called Yet Another World. Tooth believes that there is no way to tell whether they themselves are members of some simulated world based on the real world (bringing to mind issues of meta-textuality that I really don't have the energy to write about).

The book seems to support this theory by its increasingly odd subplots, two of which recall a certain amount of 9/11-like imagery. For example, throughout the book, Manhattan is troubled by a loose tiger who appears randomly and decimates Korean supermarkets and hamburger joints. A minor character in the book continues this theme of destruction by creating installation art in the form of public chasms located throughout the island into which lonely souls fling themselves with abandon.

This theme of "worlds within worlds" or the fiction of life is continued in through the career moves of the protagonist and his lover. Insteadman, being a washed-up actor, occupies a nether-realm of personality where he embodies different people and never quite fully himself. As he puts it, in my favorite pop-cultural reference (of many) in the novel, "I winced [at the thought of being] Ralph Bellamy in a movie belonging to Cary Grant."

Insteadman's lover plays a similar societal role. Like an actor who dons characters, Oona Laszlo is a ghost-writer who pens others' autobiographies, adopting their lives as her own.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the issue of surnames. Lethem names his characters improbably compound words and unlikely combinations of vowels and consonants. Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman (who one character calls fittingly "Chase Unperson") as well as Oona Laszlo ("Laszlo" being a popular cinematic pen name) have already been mentioned. Other characters in the book include Richard Abneg, Grace Hawkmanaji ("The Hawkman"), and Strabo Blandiana.

In adding these curious elements to his otherwise emotionally poignant (and occasionally trenchant) narrative, Lethem brings a bizarre kind of levity to the text. I'd like to theorize that Lethem had some larger symbolic reasoning for the tigers and surnames and the stranded astronauts and chaldrons but it seems that these elements bring to mind nothing other than the unlikely peculiarity of life itself, as well as the meta-fictional motif alluded to above.

At the very least, these eccentricities, like Tooth himself, make the text incredibly endearing and prevent the reader from wallowing along with the characters in their existential marijuana-induced crises. Lethem's Manhattan is a strange place where his characters grapple with the pulsating rhythms of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal introspection no less strange, I guess, than the rhythms of our actual lives. The tigers and chaldrons seem to lend the book the otherworldly (if slightly alarming) sense of humor with which I, like Mr. Lethem, prefer to view the world.

Mr. Lethem's characters ultimately intersect in one anothers' lives in their multitude of assumed identities and brighten, however briefly, each other's lives. Each character wonderfully, maddeningly, haltingly receives some renewed sense of purpose in their odd lives in what one might wrongly assume to be a disconnected island.