First in 1999’s “Motherless Brooklyn” and later in 2003’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” he mapped out the streets and parks, the schoolkids and the shady characters, the street ball games and the back-alley deals that once defined the borough where he grew up and currently lives. He is, however, interested in realism only insofar it provides a backdrop for his often fantastical tales about henchmen with Tourette’s or music critics with a superhero dreams.
For his latest novel, “Chronic City,” Lethem moves the action northwestward to Manhattan, which has the feel of a video game or an alternate universe. Allusions to real-world celebrities and movies mix with obviously fictionalized artists and television shows. A former child actor named Chase Insteadman befriends an eccentric cultural critic named Perkus Tooth, who holds forth on Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer, and Stanley Kubrick, all while smoking different blends of weed nonstop. Thus, the title.
“Chronic City” is Lethem’s most otherworldly novel since 1998’s “Girl in Landscape,” and while it may not carry the grit and grime of his Brooklyn books, it nevertheless shows him to be a deeply imaginative and adventurous writer. For his appearance in D.C., we asked Lethem to discuss the boroughs and help us decode the book.
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» EXPRESS: What led you to set this particular book in Manhattan?
» LETHEM: The thing about being an outer-borough New Yorker is that you have this kind of complicated double consciousness about Manhattan. The city’s big shining greatness — all that stuff that everyone projects onto it — you’re under that same spell, almost in a John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” sort of way. You’re aspiring to get to Manhattan and make it yours, and all the images still apply that everyone has about New York City, but you know, you’re also right there, and you grew up with the idea that the city has five boroughs, and you’re a New Yorker, and you’re allowed to feel this kind of proprietary connection to all that Manhattan stuff. So you can take a subway and walk around and buy a slice of pizza — as I did as a kid — and go into free museums, and it’s sort of right there at your feet, so it’s sort of real and unreal at the same time. And then later on, if you’re like me anyway, you do kind of make it your own. I’ve lived in Manhattan recently, I went to high school there, and ended up having lots of friends there, and so I made it more part of my own precinct.
» EXPRESS: What has the reaction been to this new milieu?
» LETHEM: A lot of people have been struck by my choice of the Upper East Side. It doesn’t seem like my typical kind of territory, but the thing about the Upper East Side is, it’s like a microcosm of all the paradoxes of New York City, right up there, because you have all that Madison Avenue/Park Avenue power and the seductive, odious glamour and money of New York City, all that stuff. But on the other side of the Upper East Side — 2nd Avenue, 1st Avenue, where most of this book is set, actually — it’s very podunk, it’s like a real backwater part of the city very unchanged from the way I remember it in the ’70s. A lot of shops are still the same poky little stores, a lot of people clinging to their rent-controlled apartments. So it’s kind of got an interesting quality of having all of the extremes of Manhattan in one little area.
» EXPRESS: Did writing about Manhattan pose any challenges that were different from writing about Brooklyn?
» LETHEM: You know, the Brooklyn books are so particularly grounded in memory material for me. Certain parts of “Motherless Brooklyn” and almost all of “The Fortress of Solitude” were about trying to re-enter the past like a reconstruction, to make a kind of diorama of a certain street in Brooklyn on a certain summer’s day in 1971, or whatever it was exactly, and re-enter it. And this book is a New York book, but it’s not grounded in that attempt to recapture a lost world. It’s more about the present day, the bewildering quality of present-day life, I guess in the United States in general, certainly in urban American in general, and in Manhattan in particular. So it really is a very different kind of project from those Brooklyn books, and in some ways more connected almost to a couple of my earlier books, something like “Amnesia Moon,” where I’m writing a slightly fantastical version of everyday life in order to kind of bring out the absurdities that I see in present-day existence.
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» EXPRESS: There’s a lot of real world pop cultural references in here, and also a lot of thinly disguised ones as well. Can you tell me about why certain things you wanted to talk about explicitly and others you wanted to disguise that way?
» LETHEM: Well, “disguise” is a funny word, because the disguise is never one that would ever fool anyone. I guess it’s a gesture that has more to do with giving people that disconcerting feeling of being in their own recognizable world, but different. And so those little shifts are a way to create what I guess I would call the “estrangement effect,” where it’s like a dream, where things are recognizably themselves, but not themselves. Like you see somebody you know, and they look different, but you know it’s them. And I guess ever since “Motherless Brooklyn,” when I started putting a lot of real-world material into my books — like real street names, “Mad Magazine,” songs by Prince, and other stuff that I ended up wanting to talk about — I’ve gotten more and more interested in the strange friction of invented cultural material and real cultural material brushing up side by side in my writing, and so I wanted to take this ingredient to the extreme in “Chronic City” and see how much of that kind of friction the book could tolerate. I thought it was adding a nice effect, and of course it’s one that’s very relevant to the concerns of the characters, who are constantly trying to sort out real things from simulated things. So it sort of puts the reader in a relationship to that material that is similar to the one the characters are in.
» EXPRESS: Some of these things seemed very specific to New York. Can you talk about these local ones a little bit?
» LETHEM: Well, I like to evoke the world that we all know, but I also really don’t want anyone to just take reality as a total default setting. I always think that creates a lot of boredom or complacency on the part of the reader. So I wanted the experience of this book to be one where you identified with a lot of stuff, but were also constantly provoked to examine whether you were right to.
» EXPRESS: In that regard, there’s a lot of pop-cultural accumulation in this book. It’s almost like it’s become too much to take in with any sort of depth.
» LETHEM: Well, it’s a common experience these days. I think cultural overload — especially for anyone who’s on the Web very much — it’s a basic condition, and one that fiction finds it very difficult to talk about. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I wanted to try to just get some of that sense of background chatter of constant cultural engagement into the texture of the book. It’s always a novelist’s job to try to figure out how to make a version of fictional life that keeps up with contemporary life, and so that was my way of trying to get there.
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» EXPRESS: As somebody who writes both fiction and some criticism, or some nonfiction, do you find that you’ve become sort of a packrat like Perkus Tooth?
» LETHEM: I identify with Perkus in a lot of ways. I’m a collector and prone to obsession and even with a degree of over-identification with my cultural totems, but I’m also not as helpless in the face of that dynamic as Perkus is, and lucky not to be. I guess I have a few more tools for relating to my environment. He’s sort of reduced to his record collection or his clippings file, those are like his only means of making contact with reality anymore. I’m not in quite such distress as that.
» EXPRESS: Were there any obsessions along that line that informed this novel or helped shape it?
» LETHEM: Oh, sure. When I give my characters obsessions, it’s usually ones I share, because I want to enjoy writing about those things. A lot of the names that are dropped in as keynote obsessions for Perkus are things that have been consuming interests of my own — Marlon Brando, Chet Baker, Norman Mailer — whether recently or at some point in the past, and I guess I would just make the distinction that I haven’t had the tendency to confuse those things for being the secret to understanding the entire universe.
» EXPRESS: I wanted to ask about was the idea of the ellipsistic — that’s a really hard word to say, by the way …
» LETHEM: I know, I’ve had to say it at my readings, and it’s not easy.
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» EXPRESS: Can you tell me about where that idea came from and how you wanted to use it in the novel?
» LETHEM: Actually, there’s one source that I think of. It has to do with performance, with the idea of putting stops in a performance, and it comes from John Cassavetes, from an interview that he gave, where he was talking about the actor’s situation when he’s in a script that is uninteresting — or worse than uninteresting, that’s banal in some way — and how the actor can induce some meaning or some authenticity in their performance. And he said what you have to do is insert stops, and you can make almost anything an opportunity as an actor, or the possibility of paradox, or a degree of resistance to the banality, or the banal assumptions, that are in the material. And I got very interested in this thought because it made me think about storytelling, and how much I value storytelling, but how much I also like writing to find a way to open up other kinds of space, to stop time, and not always just be giving you information or storytelling plot points, but to induce a kind of mind-state of some kind.
And so the equivalents in my book are those moments when Chase is looking out the window and thinking about the tower and the birds that are circling around. Those are the kinds of stops that I inserted in that story to try to create similar mental openings. And I guess in a way it also reproduces Chase’s ultimate fate in the book; he’s an actor stuck inside an aggressively manipulative script, but he’s looking for ways to create some resistance to it or find some meaning from within it.
» EXPRESS: It almost seems like an idea derived from comic books. I remember seeing the dialogue balloons that were only ellipses, and trying to figure out what that meant.
» LETHEM: Right, right. It’s like when someone goes “huh” or “um” or makes a certain gesticulation that indicates that they’re going to say something, that they have something on their mind but they don’t manage to come out with anything. Which is actually sort of perfect, that idea of the inexpressible — the impulse to express the inexpressible.
» Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St., SE; with Stacey D’Erasmo; Mon., Nov. 2, 7:30 p.m., $15; 202 544 4600. (Capital South)
Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
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