By force of will I finished Chronic City in a late night reading binge. I had read what I now consider to be the best sections of the book--the Janice Trumbull epistles--compiled into an affecting short story in Tthe New Yorker a while back. The short story told of a way-long-distance romance between Janice Trumbull, stranded in a failing orbiting biosphere-space station and her boyfriend in New York. Chronic City is narrated by that boyfriend, Chase Insteadman. It turns out that he is an idiot cypher. Oh well.
All of it is hollow, false, ephemeral. Chase is a nobody, wandering the Big Apple aimlessly, buoyed by the residuals checks from his time as a child actor on a sitcom, Martyr and Pesty. (Honestly, I could barely get past that one. I do not consider myself overly sensitive to names that are so post-modern their obviousness is part of the joke, but in this book, even that latitude is exhausted. Richard Abneg? Please.) Janice's situation is somewhat better than Chase's: Janice and her plight are both entirely fictional (make that meta-fictional). Janice and Chase's romance is a soap opera (but with a flesh and blood hero walking the Upper West Side streets and gracing gubernatorial soirées) perpetrated to distract the public by persons unknown but presumed to be public officials in cahoots with some meta-fictional production company. Awesome in the right hands, but...
Perkus Tooth (god, I was so tired of the stupid fucking names by the end) is the vessel of the plastic world. "Perkus" lives on coffee and marijuana. "Tooth" is a devouring mouth. If he were a mouth that issued forth creations, his last name would have had to be "Tung" or "Lipp," or, god help us, "Glottus." (Admit it: that is far less absurd a suggestion that it ought to be.) Perkus is nothing without his cultural touchstones and conspiracy theories. When he finally expires, the ER physician finds inside him only a "slurry"--no heart, no liver, no stomach. Nothing, in short, essentially, or even mechanically, human.
If your book is going to be entirely about your bullshit ideas, fine. But make it interesting enough that I don't care if all your characters are cyphers, or painfully obvious metaphors. Lolita's obvious flaws notwithstanding, I will admit to being so taken with the talent and voice in the novel that I would easily take a Humbert Humbert and Vivian Darkbloom over Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg any day.
Not fair to compare him to Nabokov? Sure. But he's also not: DeLillo, Pynchon, or even that bore Auster.
His ideas are weaker than his characters. And I loathe his characters.
Does the MacArthur Foundation ever retract a "genius" grant? Chronic City makes a strong case for an annual list of Take-Backs to go along with the awards.
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