Chronic city
a nice story book
CHRONIC CITY
By Jonathan Lethem
Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The narrator - a former child star named Chase Insteadman, who lives off the residuals from an insipid 1980s sitcom - is getting to know his new friend Perkus Tooth at a Second Avenue burger joint.
If you don’t recognize that last sentence (I didn’t), Lethem helpfully confesses in his acknowledgments that he has lifted it whole from “Humboldt’s Gift.” It’s a nifty tribute to another novel about a fraught tutor-protégé relationship, and an unsurprising flourish from Lethem, who once composed an entire essay about artistic appropriation by using sentences pilfered from other sources. Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate-reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human-interest stories. Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.
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.
Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed.
I do mean blank: in one of the book’s less subtle moments, a waitress misremembers his name as “Chase Unperson,” sending Perkus into a fit of giggles.) Chronic City is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self-determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction.
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