A Geek Grows in Brooklyn

Chronic City

By Jonathan Lethem

(Doubleday, 432 pp., $27.95)

My heart sank when I read the opening line of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel. “I first met Perkus Tooth in an office,” it reads. Oh no, I thought, not that again. Is he really going to drag us through the kind of genre exercise a cutesy name like “Perkus Tooth” connotes? Lethem’s career was not supposed to be going like this. After banging out four sciencefiction novels in as many years, he had graduated, with Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, to a more mature realism. Genre elements still clung like packing chips to both works--detective fiction in Motherless Brooklyn, the last remnants of sci-fi, or so it seemed, in Fortress--but so stunning was the latter despite its flaws, so dense its every phrase with feeling and implication, that there seemed to be no going back. After successively closer approximations, the introverted boy from Boerum Hill, who flung himself into prodigies of pop-cultural absorption after the death of his strong-willed hippie mother a short while after his fourteenth birthday, had come home to his subject. Family dynamics and adolescent friendships; comic books and rock and roll; the word on the street, the throb of the city, the wounded edge where black meets white. Brooklyn sang, and Lethem vibrated like a reed. You Don’t Love Me Yet, a facile rom-com set amidst the L.A. hipoisie, was a beach vacation we could have done without, but Chronic City promised a return to New York and, at more than four hundred pages, a resumption of high ambition.

And then, right off the bat, “Perkus Tooth.” Still, the rest of the opening is reassuringly plausible, and squarely within the vein of its author’s recent obsessions. Perkus turns out to be a stock Lethemite figure, the geek genius who inhabits a mental universe as jumbled with books, movies, music, and marijuana smoke as the grotty Batcave hideaway in which he passes most of his time. The adolescent Mingus in his Fortress basement, turning Dylan on to comics. Dylan himself, the novel’s protagonist, who grows up to be a rock critic. Bedwin from You Don’t Love Me Yet, who avoids eye contact, curls around his electric guitar like a salted slug, and spends his days re-watching Fritz Lang’s Human Desire in a room “whose every surface was crazed with media,” searching for secret messages.

Above all, Lethem himself, whose collection of personal essays, The Disappointment Artist, had copped to the omnivorously obsessive geekdom his novels everywhere imply. There seems to be little in twentieth-century art, high or low, that he hasn’t absorbed and doesn’t have an articulate opinion about: not just rock and comics and sci-fi, but soul and jazz, Hollywood and the art house, modernist fiction from both sides of the Atlantic, even painting (his father is an accomplished artist). The volume’s penetrating but often candidly self-involved disquisitions on Star Wars, The Searchers, Cassavetes, Philip K. Dick, and much more finally suggest a person who saves his deepest emotional attachments for cultural artifacts. “Between marriages,” he confesses, “I’ve reached such fevers of acquisition that I twice resorted to sleeping on mattresses laid not atop a box spring but a pallet of cartons.”

Whatever the personal roots of Lethem’s compulsions in temperament and trauma, geekdom also responds to a wider history. It is not simply fandom and was not fully possible before the 1970s, the decade in which Lethem grew up. Its scholarly posture awaited the erasure of high/low distinctions and the rise of a popular culture that thought enough of itself to elicit a corresponding critical seriousness. (The emergence in the academy of film studies and the like is a parallel phenomenon.) All of a sudden it was intellectually respectable to spin out theories about Spiderman or I Dream of Jeannie. And not just respectable, but necessary. The ’70s also marked the moment when media culture reached a kind of saturation point, the age by which we found ourselves, as George W.S. Trow famously put it, within the context of no context. What Warhol intuited and Sontag theorized was now universal--and for children of the ’70s, congenital. All media, all the time: commercials, billboards, boom boxes, Muzak, cable; hooks, jingles, icons, slogans, logos. Marilla, in Fortress, is a jukebox of musical catchphrases. Lionel Essrog, the tourettic narrator of Motherless Brooklyn, spits a steady stream of cultural detritus. Geekdom resists the informational avalanche through the impossible strategy of seeking to master it--hence both its theoretical drive and the infinitude of its quest.

So it is with Tooth. Like Lethem’s alter ego in Fortress, Perkus is, or was, a rock critic. Like Lethem himself, he writes liner notes for Criterion Collection re-releases of highbrow film classics. Having made a minor name a decade earlier as an auteur of sidewalk broadsides, hybrids of cultural critique, guerrilla theater, and public art, he is now holed up in an East 84th street sublet, obsessing about Mailer, Brando, the typography of The New Yorker (“to read the New Yorker was to find that you always agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself”), and just about everything else, doing battle against complacency, conspiracy, and consensus with scissors, glue, and copious amounts of cheeba. If he can just connect enough dots, he can figure out what’s going on behind the Potemkin flats of official reality.

Into his world and under the spell of his dialectical brilliance falls the novel’s narrator, Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who has been killing time since he was about fifteen. A third soon joins their cabal of all-night bull sessions, Richard Abneg, tenants’-rights tummler turned mayoral flunky, clinging to his street cred while working for the Man. Three guys, then, two of them essentially unemployed and a third resisting maturity with facial hair and a Richard Hell ring tone. Perkus is a virgin; Chase sleeps around. Like Reg Loud in “Interview with the Crab,” a 2005 short story, over forty but “still too young to be an adult”; like Lionel Essrog, well past his twenties but stutteringly stuck in lost-boy confusion; like Dylan Ebdus, stretching his umbilicus from Brooklyn to Berkeley--and yes, like their creator, as he is always the first to point out, and indeed, like just about everyone else in his (and my) generation (and the next one, and the next)--these men are failed adults, aging adolescents who still haven’t figured out how to grow up:

We were always … on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. … We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if [sic] it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.