Double Fantasy

With all due respect to Camelot, Dickensian London, and Mort
Weisinger’s Metropolis, if I had to choose one fictional location in
which I had to spend the rest of my life, I would choose Jonathan
Lethem’s New York City. There’s plenty of room there for heroism (it’s
the kind of city where a detective with Tourette’s syndrome can unravel
an immense, shadowy conspiracy) and music (in The Fortress of
Solitude, 1970s Brooklyn seemed to be the set of an enormous
hiphop musical set to the lazy beat of shiny pink Spaldeen rubber balls
slapping against the sides of brownstones). It’s a city teeming with
life, from the gilt, smoky splendor of a Christmas party at the mayor’s
mansion to “a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various
tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries,
pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down
Eighty-sixth street.”

Chronic City, Lethem’s latest novel, is his best book yet,
in part because it features his best writing about New York. Unlike his
previous books, City stays almost entirely on the island of
Manhattan, not even venturing very much to the other boroughs, and its
citizens could all come from a central-casting call for Manhattanites.
There’s the famous child actor, all grown up and kept afloat in
socialite dinner-party circles on a cushion of half-assed celebrity
worship and generous residual checks; the grizzled mayor’s aide, his
cynicism made corporeal in the form of a bristly, unkempt beard; and
the delicate, semireclusive wall-eyed former music critic who
simultaneously loves and fears the world.

The critic’s name is Perkus Tooth (almost all of the characters in
City have gloriously ridiculous names—the former child
actor who narrates the book is named Chase Insteadman, and the mayor’s
aide falls in love with a socialite named Georgina Hawkmanaji, who
quickly becomes nicknamed The Hawkman). He has fallen down the rabbit
hole of criticism that transforms the world into a gnarled mass of
language and heterodoxies—in short, somewhere along the line, he
started believing his own bullshit. Like every pretentious critic,
Tooth watches movies (including Steve Martin’s 1982 detective spoof
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid) and listens to music expecting to
find some sort of key that will unlock the text and reveal the answer
to all the mysteries of life, but all he finds are more mysteries.

Lethem has packed City with those unanswerable mysteries of
symbolism, in the form of plot threads seemingly pulled through the
book from other texts, making his New York City a kind of paranoid
science-fiction landscape in a world not quite our own. Lethem has said
that he intended City as an homage to Philip K. Dick (Lethem
is a tremendous fan of Dick’s, recently championing and editing the
Library of America editions of the science-fiction master’s work).
There is some sense of The Man in the High Castle–style
alternate-reality playfulness in City. Manhattan is being
terrorized by an enormous escaped tiger that can seemingly tear up
subway tracks with its teeth. Insteadman’s lover is an astronaut who is
trapped in orbit by insidiously placed Chinese space mines. The United
States is busy trying to ignore the fact that it’s in a war with a
malevolent, mysterious foreign power (the New York Times even
publishes a “War-Free Edition” for people who don’t want to worry about
foreign affairs). Marlon Brando hovers in the weird purgatory that only
celebrities can be consigned to—the kind of tragic existence
where nobody, including Wikipedia, can really recall for sure if he is
dead or alive. And Tooth and Insteadman become obsessed with a kind of
vase called a chaldron, believing it to be an object too perfect to be
anything but otherworldly.

City‘s disparate plot threads don’t tie up
neatly—like Tooth, the reader discovers that not every striking
image in a work of fiction can be cleanly unlocked to reveal a greater
truth. But City does attain something magical. Even as
characters in the novel begin to wonder if they’re in a simulacrum of
New York City (which, of course—being characters in a
novel—they are), Lethem begins tearing his beloved
City to pieces, via the aforementioned giant tiger (who
socialites speculate may be a lovesick pneumatic drill or an evil
robot). In the latter part of the book, a character develops an awful
case of the hiccups, and each hiccup is ingeniously represented as a
hole in the line of dialogue: “She kept wanting me to try these stupid
cures. I swallowed so much water I bloated like a tick.” To the reader,
it gives the appearance that even the words on the page are falling
apart, like static encroaching on a far-off pirate radio station. By
poking at these holes in his own simulacrum of New York City (in the
way that you simply can’t stop tonguing at the coppery socket left
behind when you lose a tooth), Lethem explodes some ideas of what
fiction can and should be. This isn’t just a giddy young writer
prodding at the bounds of genre in literary fiction; this is a talented
author who is tugging on the loose ends of fiction—not just
books, but the countless fictions that surround us and make our lives
bearable every day.

Lethem is clearly continuing Dick’s theme of a fabricated reality
messily overwriting a “real” baseline reality, but City feels
tethered to something solid in a way that even Dick’s best work never
was. Lethem’s love of New York, his heartfelt appreciation of the city
and its boundless possibilities, enables him to not get lost in the
ether in the way that Dick (who, it must be said, was absolutely a
child of Los Angeles) almost always did. Dick’s work was always plagued
by an underlying nihilism, which inspired in a reader the sense that he
could simply shrug and destroy it all—protagonists, antagonists,
and planet—at the end of every book. But Lethem refuses to get
wrapped up, Tooth-and-Dick-like, in the fuzzy academics of his own
concepts. Jonathan Lethem believes in New York City, and he believes in
the fictional New York City, too, and he doesn’t see a difference
between the two. The original, he knows, simply couldn’t exist without
the simulacrum.