Has Jonathan Lethem, who started out as a masterful reconstructive surgeon building genre formulas into high literature, turned into our greatest exponent of the “buddy novel”? The signs were evident in Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and even more pervasive in The Fortress of Solitude (2003), but stand out all the more starkly in his Chronic City (2009), which also finds Lethem returning to the New York terroir of his best known work.
Then again, this is Jonathan Lethem we are talking about. So don’t expect a conventional story of budding friendship. This is not Tuesdays with Morrie or even Bouvard et Pécuchet. Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth — oddball character names not found in any phone directory are a trademark of this author — settle into an unconventional alliance after meeting in the offices of a DVD reissue house where both are helping on projects. Chase is a former child television star living off residuals who has been enlisted to provide voiceovers. Tooth is an extravagant cultural critic, formerly with Rolling Stone, hired to write liner notes. Together they form an odd couple, the critic serving as oracle and madcap mentor to the thespian.
As with The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem engages the reader with a scene-setting that appears to reside squarely in the realist tradition… but then gradually mixes in elements of the fantastic that shake the epistemological foundations of the narrative. At first, these details in Chronic City come across as merely peculiar in a National Enquirer sense: a tiger is loose in Manhattan, our actor has a well-publicized romance with an astronaut stuck in outer space, an inexplicable chocolate smell settles in over the city. But then these sidebar plots get stranger and stranger and threaten to take over the novel.
In a throwaway line, the reader learns that The New York Times now publishes two different editions, one that is “war-free” and the other that includes all the news fit to print. By the time Lethem alerts us to the Chinese high-tech war in outer space, we know that something strange is happening on the outskirts of our story. Gradually Lethem’s realistic central plot is counterpoised against paranoid conspiracy theories, virtual reality treasure hunts, rumors of predatory robots, and other increasingly outré elements. But the marvel is how Lethem keeps his intimate character-driven story, and the shifting sands of love and friendship, at the center of his novel, even as it veers into the unknown.
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