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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LUSH LIFE By Richard Price.

Neighborhood Watch

By WALTER KIRN

From The New York Times(nytimes.com)

Publish March 16, 2008

No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the “urban baby” or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city’s very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants — be they real or fictional — resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair. The walls of such rooms are dull, their lights are harsh, and hunkered down in most of them are a jittery suspect and two clever cops, one of whom tends to act hostile and volatile, the other one solicitous and calm. Over this trio hangs a plain round clock.

Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they’re controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too late, too late. That’s the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what’s done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?

In “Lush Life,” Richard Price’s eighth novel, the resurfacing project that caps the same old potholes (and threatens to collapse in certain areas, potentially creating immense new craters capable of swallowing small crowds) targets the tangled, once tenement-lined streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. In Realtor-speak, the district is “in transition,” which means in Police Department terms that its college-educated young renting class and bonus-gorged co-op-owning elite can still score narcotics from the old-guard locals, whose complexions are generally darker than the new folks’, making them easy to spot on party nights but tricky to ID in photo lineups come the red-eyed mornings after.

Keeping such bloody collisions of class and color to an acceptably inconspicuous minimum is the job of the so-called quality-of-life squads that Price — a consummate stalker-realist who seems to have written the book from stoops and doorways; his gaze is that pathologically focused, his ear that tuned — portrays as a nincompoop nouvelle constabulary whose stakeouts are so light on lock-and-load moments they’d put even the Hardy Boys to sleep. Down on newly hip Orchard and Eldridge Streets, among the exclusive no-signage clubs and Zagat-rated fusion eateries, what was once an authentic urban jungle has almost themed itself out of existence, turning a lot of the cops into park rangers.

But once in a while the cooped-up cats still pounce, tempted by so much slow-moving, pampered prey, all sodden with money and novelty martinis. The lights go on in Price’s interrogation room after just such an ambush.

The victim — the one who lives — is Eric Cash, in his own mind an emerging writer but known to the world as a veteran restaurant manager. In his mid-30s, the descendant of Jewish ghetto-dwellers who lived and died on the same city blocks where Eric is riding out his undiscovered phase along with 20,000 other tip-dependent would-be screenwriters, he heads out one night with two pals into the Disneyhood and suddenly finds himself in Scorceseland. A gun comes out, a brown finger on its trigger, and the next thing Eric knows he’s in the ugly room recounting the mugging and murder of his friend Ike to a female officer, Yolanda, and a more traditionally male and Irish fellow, Matty Clark. Eric thinks he’s a witness but really he’s a suspect, and Price provides the taut, triangular dialogue, which at first sounds a bit like standard noir talk (Price writes for the cable crime drama “The Wire”) but soon grows bushier, thornier and taller in a way the screen can’t quite contain because of its horizontal orientation but which fits with the verticality of the page and sometimes, as the book goes on, climbs clean off it and up into the sky.

Here’s a restaurant owner, Eric’s boss, griping about the hypersensitive neighbors who’ve been bugging him to keep the noise down or risk the cancellation of his liquor license. “The whites. The, the ‘pioneers. ... The Latinos? The Chinese? The ones been living here since the Flood? Couldn’t be nicer. Happy for the jobs. The thing is, the complainers? They’re the ones that started all this. We just follow them. Always have, always will. Come down here, buy some smack squat from the city, do a little fix-up, have a nice big studio, rent out the extra space, mix it up with the ethnics, feel all good and politically righteous about yourself. But those lofts now? Those buildings? Twenty-five hundred square feet, fourth floor, no elevator, Orchard and Broome. Two point four mil just last week.”

If fiction writing were a fairer profession, the price of such hearing would be blindness, but the hell of it is that Price can also see — even in the dark and at great distances — and not only with his ordinary two eyes but with a wider, clearer third one that’s set between them and an inch above them. “The Clara E. Lemlich Houses were a grubby sprawl of 50-year-old high-rises sandwiched between two centuries. To the west, the 14-story buildings were towered over by One Police Plaza and Verizon headquarters, massive futuristic structures without any distinguishing features other than their blind climbing endlessness.”

Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price’s skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings, but in the enormous, cross-sensory architecture of the last three words above, one detects Saul Bellow’s vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn’t just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too. The past is rendered mostly as an absence, though, as a set of caverns, a hive of catacombs. Some of his characters’ ancestors are down there, but the main way we know this is through the hollowness of the new neighborhood built over their crypts.

Should it even be called a neighborhood now? Price asks. That’s the grand question the book sets out to answer by way of a thousand other tiny questions about who did it; who saw it; why it happened; and whether — in the case of Ike’s stricken, delirious father, who is the novel’s master character even if he doesn’t dominate its stage — its human consequences can be endured.

For quite a while the answer is “no”; the Lower East Side is a real estate designation, an emotionally vacant quality-of-life zone that used to be woven together by kinship ties, religious, racial and familial, which have since been dissolved by the acids of selfishness. That’s been the true transition in the precinct, from an ethic of mutual survival to an obsession with personal enjoyment. The delinquents from the projects, the crooks and the perps are more durably unified, one feels at times, than the unattached brats whom they pick off one by one as these slummers vomit $12 cocktails into the gutters after nights out with friends they met only yesterday and who moved into town only the week before.

Tentatively and gradually, however, fragile, improvised bonds begin developing like laundry lines strung between apartment windowsills. Catalyzed by a miniature crisis that means nothing in the scope of history but everything down on the sidewalks and the streets, detectives align themselves with victims’ families, freed suspects with the officials who once suspected them, managers with the workers whose tips they skim. The transient, self-serving affinities that pass for affection just before the bars close and the showy displays of grief that intensify when the media are around melt and trickle away over the curbs, where they’re splashed into vapor by the trucks and cars supplying the place with its goodies and its shoppers. There’s an orthodox leftist sentimentality here mixed up with a certain primal conservative yearning, but they react in solution toward the end to form a raw and slightly unstable new compound that Price isn’t shy about valuing higher than mere gold — which, despite its shiny, alluring heft, ultimately weighs us down until we can only stand in place, envious, anxious, cocky and alone.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is “the Unbinding.”

THE FUTURE OF LOVE By Shirley Abbott.

Brownstoners

By CLAIRE DEDERER
From The New York Times(nytimes.com)
published March 16, 2008

Like most readers, I know too much about New York. I live on a mountaintop in Colorado, and yet I know that on the streets of Manhattan Maclaren baby strollers are becoming passé. How do I know this? Because New York pours into my house through newspapers, magazines and novels. That overexposure puts heavy demands on the author of the Manhattan novel. So many people know so much about New York life that each detail must be spot-on, note-perfect. Which is to say, I wish Shirley Abbott hadn’t set her wise, funny, generous first novel, “The Future of Love,” in New York.

Abbott, author of the celebrated memoir “The Bookmaker’s Daughter,” has assembled a multigenerational cast. Mark Adler has lost his job and found adulterous love with his child’s preschool teacher. His wife, Maggie, works as a book editor and worries about food additives. Maggie’s mom, Antonia, a former radical, is having an affair with Sam, a publishing executive. Sam’s wife, Edith, cloisters herself at the couple’s country estate, sexless as a nun. They’re all caught short by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Although everyone continues much as before, their major weaknesses have suddenly been exposed.

Both before and after 9/11, Abbott’s people pursue love and goodness in equal measure. They can’t seem to decide if the moral imperative is more crucial than the pleasure principle, or the other way around. They’re deeply, amusingly ethical about small things, especially when it comes to food: “With her, it was a moral imperative to be lactose intolerant,” observes Sam. Antonia, meanwhile, is baffled by the younger generation’s obsession with organic produce and environmental cleanliness, “this determination not to dirty up the world or be dirtied up by it.”

Antonia is by far the most interesting character. The perspective of this aging, widowed lefty is deeply idiosyncratic, whether she’s discovering AARP sex with Sam or marveling at what she calls her “strange green conservative” of a daughter. Antonia is real and fresh, believably surprising.

But when Abbott abandons Antonia’s perspective the novel is less convincing. Abbott’s younger people talk and think like old people — or like the younger people of a bygone era. The book opens with Mark sitting on a park bench admiring his 4-year-old daughter: “His little Toni was a picture in a dotted-Swiss sundress.” Dotted Swiss is a muslinlike fabric that was popular in the middle of the 20th century. It has been resurrected in the current fad for retro-chic children’s clothes, but it’s far from a common term, and I find it hard to believe that Toni’s 40-year-old father would know what it’s called. When I asked my husband, who’s roughly the same vintage, he thought dotted Swiss was something you’d eat for lunch.

Meanwhile, Toni’s mother, Maggie, worries about one of her authors, who’s nursing a cocaine habit. “ ‘Bolivian marching powder,’ he called it.” Couldn’t an editor have gently explained to Abbott that no one has used this term since Jay McInerney’s protagonist hoovered the stuff in “Bright Lights, Big City,” back in 1984?

I’m not teasing out a few isolated instances: these false notes and anachronisms abound. Good novels discipline us to recognize character through fine points. The form Abbott has chosen — the Manhattan comedy of manners — demands a constant supply of ruthlessly exact detail in order to place characters socially, economically and even emotionally. Abbott gets a lot right: She elegantly weaves together her lovers’ stories. She deftly pokes fun at what we call morality. She allows her characters to be both lovable and ugly. But it’s the truth in the details that gets away from her.


Claire Dederer is a contributor to the Arts & Leisure section of The Times.