The jungle

A surreal satire of a savage dystopia, controlled by a corrupt few who manipulate the rules and the media

October 11, 2009|Richard Eder

Manhattan, some few decades into the future. There are snows in August. The New York Times puts out double editions, one of them “war-free’’ for its more financially high-minded readers. And a fabulous tiger two stories high stalks the streets demolishing buildings, ostensibly at random, though they just happen to occupy properties coveted by one or another well-connected, real estate group.

So, not really at random; nor is “Chronic City,’’ Jonathan Lethem’s swirl of a novel, really about the future. It is, like Anthony Trollope’s “How We Live Now,’’ the sharply observed evisceration of a present manipulated and corrupted by money and power. In place of Trollope’s realism, which places certain constraints on the writer, Lethem has chosen to adopt a free-form, mythical style, not always fortunately.

It frees him to go anywhere and everywhere with a set of self-deconstructing stories, a menagerie of shape-changing characters, and an oddly didactic moral. The reader, less freed, breathes in the exhaust of such exuberant literary revving.

Lethem posits a universe of fakery; one in which the few arrange to deceive and exploit the many. They use the press, the media, crooked official measures, and the expansion of the Internet’s power to simulate reality (Facebook’s surrogate friendship, Twitter’s deceptive immediacy, Wikipedia’s twitchy facts, text-messaging to neuter the grit of voice-to-voice).

“Chronic City,’’ named for a brand of pot whose smoke envelops the novel in suffocating clouds, deploys a trio that conducts a vastly outmatched struggle for truth against the powers that be. Chief of these powers is Jules Arnheim, a billionaire mayor plainly modeled on New York’s Michael Bloomberg.

The chief resister is Perkus Tooth, a shrunken, glitter-eyed, angry figure whose posted critical broadsides once enthralled the cultural scene and who is now reduced to obsessively deconstructing obscure old movies. A second is Richard Abneg, a radical activist turned mayoral aide but still an angry man. The third, who is also the narrator, is the curiously bland Chase Insteadman, a former child actor on a TV series and now a social celebrity as the ostensible fiancé of an astronaut fatally trapped in space.