Stoned in Manhattan

Getty Images Jane Ciabattari talks with Jonathan Lethem about his new novel, Chronic City, the allure of Manhattan, and his knowledge of pot smoking.

I first saw Jonathan Lethem in January 2005, as he stood in near darkness on the balcony at a bookstore in New York to announce the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction. Lethem, a solemn-eyed hipster, was a former NBCC award winner, for Motherless Brooklyn, his Tourette’s-inflected 1999 noir detective novel. He had just completed the triumphant launch of The Fortress of Solitude, his ode to 1970s Brooklyn, and won a MacArthur “genius” grant.

“The quality of pot that dealer would bring around would never have had so many seeds in it. Credit me with deniability. It shows I’m not dabbling in illegal substances."

NBCC president John Freeman made the introduction: “And now to announce the big kahuna…” The crowd hissed. Lethem took the microphone. “The meek and humble fiction category?” he improvised. After a smattering of applause, he read the list of finalists. Then he squeezed through the packed crowd and made a quick exit onto the icy streets.

At the time I figured Lethem was a cool customer who had headed across the bridge from Brooklyn to speak his lines but who wasn’t caught up in literary celebrity. There was more to it than that. “That was the Brooklynite approach to Manhattan,” he said when we spoke recently about his new novel, Chronic City. “Showing up and getting out of there. You never do just one thing. You’re going to meet a friend later, once they get you under the river.” We spoke by phone: He was shedding a cold, I was in the midst of one.

Chronic City: A Novel. By Jonathan Lethem. 480 pages. Doubleday. $27.95. Lethem, who now splits his time between Brooklyn and Maine, was raised in the 1970s in the area now gentrified into Boerum Hill, an era and setting evoked in The Fortress of Solitude. With Chronic City, he claims Manhattan. “This book comes out of stuff that I’ve always wanted to say about being in the shadow of the great empire,” Lethem says. “When you’re from Brooklyn, it might feel, in my generation, you’re supposed to aspire to Manhattan. As it is for a lot of the rest of the universe, it’s the place to get to. It’s a much more intimate and chasing relationship because it’s right there, you can see it—so close and so far. Saturday Night Fever describes it perfectly.”

He describes a lifelong love-hate relationship: “The thing about being from Brooklyn and caring about Manhattan is that it belongs to you and it doesn’t. You’re a New Yorker, programmed to feel an immense proprietary thrill at anything New York has ever accomplished. You can be an overdog if you want, you can be a Yankees fan and get a job on Wall Street. But there is another legacy, the Brooklyn disenfranchised castoff resentment.”

Chronic City is set in a futuristically tweaked version of the Upper East Side. A giant tiger is on the rampage, destroying buildings. A pervasive fog has settled on a declining Wall Street, and Manhattan is suffering through a “ceaseless winter.” The narrator, Chase Insteadman, is a bland former child actor, an ornament at dinner parties who briefs socialites on his astro-fiancée, Janice, who is stranded in orbit (readers gobble up her heartfelt letters to him in the tabloids). Chase takes up with Perkus Tooth, a one-time rock critic whom Lethem describes as a “fugitive ecstatic” prone to “whirlwind intertextual eurekas.” Then there’s Oona Laszlo, a “bizarrely productive” ghostwriter who insinuates herself into Chase’s bed but won’t allow him into her own lair, and Ralph Abneg, a former Tompkins Square squatter turned mayoral aide (the tiger is his own personal urban-renewal nightmare).

Chronic City is by turns gorgeous, haunting, edgy, self-conscious, melancholy, murky, goofy, and fond. There are chewy passages about the subway system (“The New York subway is a vast disordered mind, obsessing in ruts carved by trauma a century earlier…”) and the Bloombergian mayor’s residence: “Money had its solvent powers, could dissolve the rear walls of a 19th-century townhouse to throw a dining room into what must have been the backyard, under a glass atrium that now worked as a blizzardy planetarium.”