I have thought for some time now that the act of opening a novel and reading the first page should be marked by some spectacular and sensational act: a sonic boom, an explosion, or something audio/visual that wrestles the attention of the reader into the realisation that they are in the process of creating an alternative reality for themselves. Instead, we get nothing but the silent scratch-rustle of page-on-page friction.
Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City is more than an alternative reality - in fact it foregoes alt, immediately assuming itself to be worthy of the real. For the displaced, this work generates a nostalgia for the impossible. Oh, how I long to be a past-his-prime former child star with an astronaut girlfriend, with a discreet lover perpetually dressed in black, with a pop-culture guru friend with a dud eyeball, and a fiery mayoral aide for my comic relief! Lethem’s rich characterisation fools one into assuming intimate knowledge of these individuals, an illusion that the reader takes for granted: that these fictional friendships have been formed from a long line of anecdotes and worthy provenance.
I have now lived in a parallel New York city, and have been privy to a peculiar network of complicated relationships, and nemeses, and acquaintanceships and so on. A New York city terrorised by fog, mechanical creatures, extreme weather warnings, lies, role playing, apathy and nihilism.
“You’re leaving real culture behind!”
That might be the exclamation of Perkus Tooth, the magnetic keystone in the world of Chronic City, a man obsessed with schemes and plots and hidden agendas in uncanny pop culture references: trying to get Marlon Brando in as city mayor; pasting up culture-jamming broadsides around Manhattan; his fascination with chasing virtual artifacts through auctioneering cyberland E-Bay; not to mention dogs, cluster headaches, manic epiphanies and marijuana and coffee.
I also have collected stark memories of Chronic City when I realised that I wasn’t in fact some kind of omnipresent and eternally mute character within the book, but those other times, when I played the role of the reader. I will look back on the time fondly, yes that time when I was reading on the bus home, a chill wind outside but the nauseating dry-heat of a bus radiator system slightly turning my stomach, when the narrator’s voice discussed distraction from the act of reading - the realisation that you are in fact in the process of imagining - and urged me to look past the bounds of fiction, the edge of the page, and notice the presence of my own knee.
As dear as these recollections are, they are no match for the times I imagined myself as a silent voyeur with some or all of the old gang - Chase, Oona, Perkus, Richard and Georgina - at Perkus’ apartment smoking ICE, drinking Richard’s red wine, watching Chase fumble over Oona’s knife-edge retorts and Richard grasp at Georgina’s curvaceous form as she lay asleep on a tower of miscellaneous jackets and coats on the old sofa. The Jackson Hole will always make me salivate for those burgers I’ve never had, too. And that tiger: what a way to navigate a city. A peculiar force, a powerful suggestion against a wanderly situationist derive: no aimlessness, must check tiger watch and find the safest route to Perkus’ apartment so I’m not swallowed whole.
The astronaut: that’s how I had begun to feel as the weight of the book’s right half lessened and lessened. An astronaut orbiting the earth, my new reality of the chronic city, in isolation, watching the friends but unable to intercept. Investing my opinions, ideas, hopes, and forgiveness in these people proved to be an embarrassing realisation, particularly as I turned a page only to realise that, no, the one I have just read will be the last.
If we can not have our significant event as we create our new world to live in, we should at least have fireworks when we tear this new reality apart by reaching the final full-stop. Yes, that’s it: every time somebody closes a back cover shut at the its conclusion, a single firework should automatically explode in a great burst of blue, or orange, or red, or green, in the empty sky right above the spot where back cover hit final page.
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