Life During Wartime: Domestic Surrealism in Jonathan Lethem’s <i>Chronic City</i>

This essay argues that Jonathan Lethem’s 2009 novel Chronic City is the product of 1) the author’s anti-Bloomian relationship to literary influence, as seen in his 2007 essay “Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (and elsewhere) and as worked out in his use of genre and the modes of realism and the fantastic, and 2) anxieties about the future characteristic of the author’s time. The result is an approach to representation the essay calls “domestic surrealism” and demonstrates this at work in the novel’s presentation of an unreal-feeling, spectacular New York City. At stake in Chronic City, the essay argues, is the question of whether the city’s/the world’s condition is chronic or terminal or if a time can be imagined that might be different from the current “wartime” and the dark future toward which we seem to be inevitably headed and, if it can be imagined, whether it is possible.