Chronic City

This seems to be the year in which my favorite writers publish novels that don't make any sense. I'm talking about the new Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City, an exhaustingly unmoored narrative about weird male friendship, set in an alternate-universe Upper East Side. There's lots to like here, especially if, like me, you like Lethem--an escaped tiger wreaking havoc, giant urban conceptual-art pits in the ground, a chocolate wind, a mayor with apparently magic powers, a 9/11-like event that left the towers standing but covered downtown completely with a mysterious gray fog. This is a world that mingles real pop cultural referents (Lou Reed, Marlon Brando) with familiar-sounding simulacra: A 1000-page novel called Obstinate Dust, by someone named Ralph Warden Meeker; a band called Chthonic Youth; a children's TV program called The Gnuppet Show.

Our guide through this world is washed-up child TV star Chase Insteadman, whose first person narrative focuses primarily on a doomed former rock critic named Perkus Tooth, and all his wild ideas. They pal around with Richard Abneg, former squatter and presently the mayor's real estate fixer. There are some women for these guys to moon about (Chase's doomed (again) astronaut fiance Janice, and his earthbound bitchy ghostwriter girlfriend Oona; Richard's socialite lover Georgia; Perkus's doomed (yet again) waitress crush), but mostly this is a book about guys being friends in New York.

Oh, yeah, and pot. There's lots of it. Almost everyone is high almost all of the time. While high, they bid on stuff on eBay, get acupuncture, discuss conspiracies, and eat hamburgers. It is a bit like a baked Seinfeld.

If that doesn't sound so bad, it isn't. Lethem is funny and inventive, and as with Lorrie Moore's incomprehensible novel, I found myself perfectly happy to return to Chronic City and read a few more pages. But when you get right down to it, this is a stoner book. It just goes on and on, folding over on itself, referring to itself, creating mini-mythologies out of its intricate, chaotic parts. We hear of mysterious detail after mysterious detail, conspiracy after conspiracy, and it will not surprise you to learn that Everything Is Connected, and Nothing Is What It Seems. The problem is, nothing seems to mean anything outside the smoky self-refential boundaries of the book. Here is a typical late passage:

In my brain Sterling Winston Hobo was to Ralph Warren Meeker as Florian Ib was to Morrison Groom. Or maybe they were all the same person! Was Noteless involved in designing the tiger? [...] The secret lay outside my understanding. Oona Laszlo might have my existential puzzle's edge pieces hidden on her person somewhere, but I'd never make her admit it. I could only forumlate bizarre accusations: for instance, that Oona was preventing anyone from reading Meeker's Obstinate Dust. This was obvious, since she'd tricked me into chucking one copy into Urban Fjord, and then pretended to forget the title when Perkus requested a second.

You can tell why Michiko Kakutani hated it. It's as if Lethem set out to create the book that would most offend her sensibilities--a postmodern, self-mythologizing Dork Side Of The Moon. She actually called it "lame," right there in the Times!

I wouldn't go that far--as a Lethem superfan, I am happy to take the bad with the good. There is something perversely satisfying about these 467 pages, in their audacious unlikeliness; you almost can't believe what you're reading. Personally, I lived Chronic City on the sofa, laid up with the flu, and it has inhabited my dreams and disrupted my sleep for several days...you can't, in all fairness, call such a novel a failure.

As She Climbed Across The Table

I haven't read this Jonathan Lethem novel in years, and to my surprise, it's even better than I remembered. It's a love story, it's a science fiction novel, it's an academic comedy. I wish I'd written it.

Here's my favorite bit--one of my favorite bits of anything, when you get down to it:

Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blong wig. He could be seen hurrying between the English department and his car, an enormous leather briefcase gripped in both arms as if it were the cover of a manhole from which he had just emerged. Or sitting in faculty meetings, silent and pensive, chewing on the stem of an unloaded pipe, often held with the bowl facing sideways or down. The library housed a dozen or so of his slim, unreadable volumes, as well as a thick anthology of savage attacks by his enemies. He lived in a room at the YMCA. He had for fifteen years.

That's perfect, in my view. Lethem, like all great writers, is uneven, and I've kvetched about his stuff here before--but when he's good, he's great. This book actually has more heft than I remember--not physical heft, mind you--and I had completely forgotten the ending, which accomplishes the near-impossibility of living up to expectations.

It's not even worth saying what this novel is about. I could be a wag and say it's about nothing--way more about nothing than Seinfeld ever was--but that, as No. 2 used to say, would be telling. Suffice it to say that it's about a physics experiment that turns into a philosophical conundrum that turns into a romance. And that it contains the beautifully awful line, "Something happened to my penis."

New Harper's

There's lots of interesting stuff in the February Harper's -- not the least of which is a story by Alice Munro. Whoa! I've been watching her stuff like a hawk since about 1989, and I don't think she's ever been in Harper's before. Does that mean the story was rejected by the New Yorker? They don't take everything of hers, nutty and depressing as that may seem (if they reject her, the rest of us might as well close up our lemonade stands and go home). I think I saw AM in the Atlantic, before they quit publishing fiction, and I read a marvelous something of hers in the Guardian magazine this summer.

But I'm saving that for later. Jonathan Lethem has an intriguing, if excessively clever, essay on plagiarism (it's plagiarized!) and Ian Jack, soon-to-be-ex-editor of Granta, asks why so many young novelists feel the need to thank page after page of people in the back of their books. (His idea is that writing has become a collaborative effort these days; I would argue instead that's it's all about a growing sense that publishing is a fancy cocktail party you should be grateful you got invited too -- and if you don't write your thank you notes, you can forget about another invitation.)

I also really enjoyed reading the Notebook (which used to be where Lewis Lapham posted his crazy/brilliant screeds) which is by Barbara Ehrenreich this month. Listening to her promote her new book on NPR, I thought she'd gone all soft (it's about "collective joy," which I don't doubt exists, but which I certainly can't vouch for) but no: she's as acerbic and smart as ever. The most recent NYT Magazine has an article on a new academic discipline: "Positive Psychology," which instead of focusing on problems and pathology, teaches students ways to be happy, like taking yoga and volunteering. Though I certainly don't want to knock volunteering (or yoga) I found the whole thing disturbing for reasons I couldn't quite put a finger on, but to my relief Ehrenreich does it for me.

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering...If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.

The older I get, the more I admire bad-ass middle-aged ladies.

Indie Meets Lit

I recently got my hands on a galley of Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming novel. (This post isn't a review of it, but for the record, I don't think it's his best stuff. Like all of his books, however, it's an enjoyable read, very smart and funny, and if you liked the style of As She Climbed Across The Table and Girl In Landscape, you'll dig it.) The book is about the short life of a nineties rock band, and at one point there's a brief quotation from a song by the New-Zealand-based indie group The Verlaines.

I have to confess that this moment kind of broke my heart, and there are many others like it. Indeed, one character has a mix tape of New Zealand bands stuck in the cassette deck of his car, and though Lethem never names those bands, I can promise you that I know every single one of them (The Clean, The Bats, Look Blue Go Purple, etc.) Why did these references drive me to despair? It isn't Lethem's fault. It's indie-rock's fault.

When I'm not writing or teaching, I have a hobby on the side, writing and recording music, for fun. And while I like all kinds of music now, I came of age as a musician in the late eighties indie scene, and listened to this music almost exclusively at the time. I still like it pretty well, but it meant something particular then; it was the soundtrack to white, middle-class alienation, an expression of interiority and a rejection of mass culture. It was insidery and cool to listen to.

But more importantly, indie turned the pop model inside out. Whereas pop made you feel like some little part of the world understood you at last, indie made you feel like you were the only person in the world who understood it. Part of its charm was the way it allowed you to think, while listening to it, that all the other people who had never heard of it were idiots. Never was this more bluntly expressed than in Kurt Cobain's liner notes to Incesticide:

At this point I have a request for our fans. if any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.

Oh no! The idiots have discovered us! Run for your lives!

I don't think many people, reading a piece of contemporary literature, would cringe upon encountering a reference to, say, Bob Dylan. Dylan, by his very nature, belongs to everyone. He rose to fame during an era in which the most popular music was often the most accomplished; the counterculture Dylan helped create eventually became a part of mass culture. Not so with indie rock. You can't start a revolution by looking at your navel, shapely as your navel may be. The bands that survived the era have evolved, become art-rock mainstays, are no longer "indie"; indie itself is basically dead.

The weird thing about Lethem's book is that, unlike books that use sixties counterculture as their setting, it works better if you don't know anything about its cultural context, and instead treat it as a self-contained world, like the one in Girl In Landscape. For my part, though, alas: I know too much.