CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

CHRONIC CITY By Jonathan Lethem

Another World

By GREGORY COWLES
The New York Times, October 25,2009

By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Let an early scene stand in for the astonishing whole. 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. Perkus is a cultural critic with a recognizably New York sort of résumé: he achieved underground success with a series of broadside rants pasted around the city, then went mainstream with a column in Rolling Stone before fading back into dissolute obscurity. Yet he has never abandoned his wide-ranging obsessions, which echo Lethem’s own: film, literature, music, media. Now, in a booth at Jackson Hole, he holds forth to the affable, vacuous Chase in a stoned seminar that even in summary takes three pages to relate, jumping from Greil Marcus to Chet Baker to Marlon Brando to the insidious effects of The New Yorker’s choice of typeface. It’s a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

“Can we have discussed so much the very first time?” Chase wonders. “The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved.”

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. But don’t read too much into it. With its broad brush strokes and bright primary colors, “Chronic City” owes less to Bellow (a scrupulous realist, after all) than to antic postmodern fabulists like Pynchon and Rushdie and DeLillo — or, as Lethem also puts it in the acknowledgments, to “everywhere else forever and ever amen.”
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. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.) Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.

Here’s Chase, newly recovered from the flu, describing his first post-fever dalliance with his ghostwriter girlfriend, Oona: “That night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.”

And here he is again, arriving with Perkus at the site of a building collapse that may have been triggered by the tiger, “milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparkling red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades.”

In Lethem’s earliest work the tricks and extravagances and gymnastic prose sometimes seemed arch or mannered — merely clever — but they have grown steadily more confident, and here they serve the higher purpose of flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy. When style and subject merge, tics recede into invisibility.

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.

Chase is in demand at dinner parties not only because of his days as a child actor but also because of a more recent claim to celebrity — his fiancée, the astronaut Janice Trumbull, is stranded on the International Space Station, from which she sends him long love letters that are excerpted in the war-free Times. This space opera is, to tell the truth, kind of a drag on the narrative, but it does create a useful love triangle: Chase needs to hide his affair with Oona lest he disappoint his adoring public. There are other characters too, representing variations on the theme of idealism and corruption, but never mind them. This is really a buddy novel, no less than “The Fortress of Solitude” was. Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. They eat messy burgers; they watch cult movies; they smoke potent weed and indulge in the kind of paranoid conspiratorial philosophizing that can be tedious in real life but thrilling in dorm rooms and fiction (where, after all, somebody else really is pulling the strings). And, improbably enough, we want it to last forever — or at least long enough for Chase and Perkus to save each other.

That won’t happen, of course. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed. But if they can’t be rescued, they can and do help each other; Chase, especially, starts to wake up and cast aside his blank torpor. (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.

“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 Cowles is an editor at the Book Review.

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A WOLF AT THE TABLE: A Memoir of My Father By Augusten Burroughs

Returning to the Past and Finding the Bogeyman Is Still There

When Augusten Burroughs wrote “Running With Scissors,” he regaled readers with hilarious tales of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. “A Wolf at the Table” is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map.

It’s a bad sign when a book’s cover graphic packs more of a wallop than the text does. But “A Wolf at the Table” startles from afar by depicting a demonic-looking red fork, its tines bent like evil claws, seeming to point menacingly at some hapless victim. Enter the baby Augusten: the author channels his frightened 1 ½-year-old self. He does this with a burst of psychodrama that seems to have been editor-proof.

“Through this pinprick hole I could see the world,” he writes about sitting in his high chair, peeking through the perforations in a saltine cracker. Well, at least he’s not writing in fragments. But by the next page he is. “The thick slippery feel of my bottle’s rubber nipple inside my mouth,” he recalls verblessly. “The shocking, sudden emptiness that fills me when it’s pulled away.”

Well, at least he’s not invoking his toddler years in the present tense. And at least he’s not displaying Joycean affectations. But a line or two later, he is: “High above me is my crib, my homebox, my goodcage, but it’s up, up, up.” And: “I am alone in the awake-pit with the terrible bright above my head.” In case the cause for this free-floating distress is not apparent, Mr. Burroughs soon fingers his culprit. “On the other side of the door,” he writes, “He is laughing.”

He may find twisted humor in little Augusten’s situation, but it’s hardly clear why. “A Wolf at the Table” is as vague as it is hyperbolic about whatever was wrong with the author’s wicked father. This book indicates that the father drank heavily and quarreled with Augusten’s mother (to the point that they separated, and the father was a mere psoriasis-plagued memory by the time of Running with Scissors"). He was away from home a lot and was none too glad to see Augusten when he got back, not even when Augusten greeted him in a homemade dog costume. Don’t even ask what the old man did to Ernie, Augusten’s beloved pet guinea pig. But beyond that, the nature of this book’s indictment is unclear.

A photograph of Mr. Burroughs’s father, accompanying a recent article in The New York Times, depicted a fierce-looking, hollow-eyed man. Unfortunately for “A Wolf at the Table” that image was much more disturbing than anything Mr. Burroughs has put on the page.

Sometimes the book reduces the child to cartoon-character indignation. (“My hatred for him nearly caused my skin to steam, and I was constantly plotting revenge for one thing or another,” he fumes about his older brother.) Some of it exaggerates the simplest details to make them sinister. (The belts in the father’s drawer are said to be “coiled like snakes.”) And some of it pumps heavily metaphoric importance into minor-sounding incidents, clumsily ratcheting up the drama of the boy’s early life. Why was he too filled with dread to eat red velvet cake at a birthday party? Can the answer have been interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this book?

Since it can’t, “A Wolf at the Table” plants the dangerous idea that Mr. Burroughs’s story is a life milked dry. “Dry” was another of his memoirs, detailing a history of substance abuse; “Sellevision” was about his experiences in the advertising business; “Magical Thinking” wasn’t about much of anything. “Possible Side Effects” described the writer’s experience of being on a book tour, something that is also mentioned in the epilogue to the new book.

Prose about book tours attests that Mr. Burroughs has exhausted his vein of autobiographical nonfiction, just as surely as the fate of Ernie (“rigid in his sludge, his feces-caked mouth open in a scream”) proved Mr. Burroughs’s father to be a lousy rodent custodian.

Once it escapes the high chair and begins casting about for material, the author’s recovered memory yields a few stories about his parents’ turbulent and doomed marriage; little Augusten’s crush on a workman (“I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl”), a few phantasmagorically violent daydreams about the harm Augusten’s father might inflict; and scenes of wild, over-the-top action, written with an assonance (“the jabbing slash of his flashlight”) that bodes badly for a Burroughs move toward poetry. No less strained are this book’s efforts to animate the universe in ways that foreshadow the boy’s burgeoning sexuality: “There were cunning little birds in brazen colors that flashed about like wild thoughts and perverse impulses.”

By the time “A Wolf at the Table” reaches its foregone conclusion — that the father will die and leave his son in some mournful semblance of peace — there is a new kind of suspense in the air. It involves Mr. Burroughs’s literary future. He remains a writer with a large and loyal following, a fluent and funny storyteller whenever he actually has stories to tell. Maybe those stories needn’t be so personal. Maybe his range can expand beyond tales of dysfunction. And maybe some thoughts belong on the page more than others do. No matter how plagued he is by the abuses of the past, he needn’t have confessed here to having had an erotic dream about visiting a mass murderer on death row.

From: Books of The Times: By JANET MASLIN: May 1, 2008