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.
