Fierce, fanciful, witty skewering of Manhattan

Chronic City
nolead ends nolead begins By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday. 467 pages. $27.95 nolead ends

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Jonathan Lethem is immensely productive and ambitious. There is little debate that he has emerged as one of the most prominent working U.S. novelists. Long a passionate Brooklynite, in the settings of his two most celebrated novels as well as residency, he now penetrates Manhattan's Upper East Side, more or less as an extraterrestrial. That invasion yields an astonishing book.

One of Chronic City's two central characters is Chase Insteadman, a onetime child sitcom star - long ago simultaneous cover boy on both TV Guide and People - who's still living, gropingly, off royalties. The other is his freshly acquired mad mentor, Perkus Tooth, a culture critic who has lost his edge, or anyway his following. He is an unrelenting collector and purveyor of pop culture's deeper riches and a marijuana mystic.

Insteadman, long past his childhood stardom, has fresh celebrity status based on his engagement to astronaut Janice Trumbull, who is "trapped in orbit with the Russians, the astronaut who couldn't come home." Their International Space Station is isolated by an immense field of Chinese mines, orbited to prevent their return. Trumbull's long, eloquent letters to her fiance are published in daily newspapers. He can't respond because of Mission Control's communications restrictions.

Many, perhaps most, of the characters smoke vast quantities of marijuana, often while quite drunk. (Chronic is a favored marijuana brand name as well as a diagnostic characteristic of New York City.) Throughout, there is a "gargantuan escaped tiger that [is] ravishing sections of the East Side." Never seen, it may actually be a maverick tunnel-digging machine, or perhaps simply a symbol for everything that arbitrarily goes wrong in Manhattan. Writhing in the background of much of the action is an entity called "Yet Another World," an alternate society in cyberspace that millions of people are joining.

If that were not enough, the New York Times publishes a daily, very popular, "War Free" edition.

There are many other challenges to the reader's capacity to carry a basin overflowing with archly intentional ambiguities.

Almost everybody here leans toward the lunatic. Richard Abneg, previously a major anarchist leader, now serves Jules Arnheim, diffident billionaire mayor of New York City, as a top aide, assigned to managing "the undoing of our rent stabilization." As it has for years, a thick gray fog hangs over the financial district. Insteadman, the principal narrator, notes that "I live in capital's capital, but I root against the Dow." There is no end to such quippery, attenuated, fleeting, flipping.

There's nothing but folly in trying to bring these touches into definition. The same must be said of the plotline. Why is all of Manhattan suffused with an odor of fine but powerful chocolate? I ponder. Then it disappears.

This is Lethem's eighth novel. His first was Gun, with Occasional Music in 1994. Eight additional books include collections of essays, criticism, and short stories, many originally published in the New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. He has edited many other books, including three collections of the work of Philip K. Dick for Library of America editions, pop music writings, and an anthology of writing on amnesia. Beyond that, he has written lots of introductions for others' books. He's now 45, and quantity alone puts him somewhere between the prodigious and the profligate.

Chronic City - and indeed all of Lethem's fiction I have read - is not for the persnickety or fainthearted. It swings and swerves, pops and bobs amid observable reality and the fantastic and fanciful. Lethem's narrative is incessantly ironic. He has a marvelous affection for words and their backsides and sharp elbows. He plays with them, flirts, pirouettes, jiggles about for the pure delight of it - his own and the engaged reader's. But for all his mystic and multileveled side, Lethem is a precise, clear, and direct writer.

Late in the book, Insteadman internalizes a passage that might be taken as what the book is about: "The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions."

Finally, Chronic City is amazingly moving, a grand work. These are mad characters, enmeshed in a multilevel, playful, and deadly serious fugue. Lethem has an imagination and a mastery of narrative technique that are extraordinary. But whether, for any reader, this book connects is a much more elusive question than it would be for many novels, both great and small.