CHRONIC CITY - Jonathan Lethem - Fiction

I was one of the few readers who enjoyed YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, the novel preceding CHRONIC CITY in Lethem's hipster-slacker-chic oeuvre. So it is with some actual sadness that I report, after four-hundred-some pages with Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman, that this novel at best resembles the first draft of a passably good novel. In tone and plot points, it owes a tremendous and unacknowledged debt to Bret Easton Ellis--GLAMORAMA in particular--yet fails to get its strange and guarded characters off the ground. Everything, from the muddled mystery of an underground tiger on the loose, to Chase's astronaut fiancee, stranded on a space station, to the quest for the impossibly beautiful chaldrons, is a massive let-down. Lethem attempts reversals on the order of M. Night Shyamalan--is it real? Is it fake?--and then doubles back on himself, sometimes giving two contradictory explanations for the same mysterious phenomenon, as though writing both potential endings to a set-up and forgetting to delete one. Is the tiger a runaway drilling robot, or an actual two-story-high phantasmic tiger? Both, we're told, with equal narrative sincerity. This doesn't work. This kind of narrative disarray doesn't make these characters more interesting, or their daily stoner peregrinations any more purposeful. It leaves us with a mess of loose ends and no sense that there was a cross-stitch pattern underneath. It hampers the suspension of disbelief: halfway through this novel, it became almost stressful to read, because I wasn't sure that Lethem was actually going to be able to finish a coherent narrative. And he didn't, really. He threw a few smoke bombs, killed a character, and escaped citing the unpredictability and ineffable nature of real life.

I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.

This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.

Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?

This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.