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Not Yet Another World: Ecopolitics and Urban Natures in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City

Jonathan Lethem’s 2009 novel, Chronic City, features an eclectic group of New Yorkers whose unexpected friendships and unusual circumstances thrust them into situations where they encounter an increasingly threatened nature and a diminished urban infrastructure. The satirical novel provides offbeat portraits of post-9=11 Manhattan, foregrounding the struggle to create meaning in a landscape undergoing rapid social, economic, and environmental transformations. Highlighting the challenges posed by globalization, hyper-capitalism, digital labor, and widespread ecological decline, Chronic City examines the obstacles preventing the characters from developing deep connections with each other and with what David Abram calls ‘‘the more-than-human world’’ (6-8). In doing so, Lethem’s novel centers on members of the city’s chronically under-employed. The list includes a former child star who remains somewhat adrift in his post-celebrity adult life as he searches for ongoing meaningful work, a pop culture critic whose sporadic intellectual labors in the form of drug-inspired musings propel many of the random and humorous meanderings in which the characters find themselves, and a displaced member of the creative class who is left homeless in a time of skyrocketing Manhattan real estate and corporate downsizing, but who manages to stay linked to the working world by finding clever ways of obtaining a steady supply of free coffee and the means for recharging his computer while living on the streets. In his review of the book, Hari Kunzru locates the novel in a literary tradition situated somewhere between James Wood’s ‘‘hysterical realism’’ with its ‘‘hyperactive plotting,’’ minimal interest in psychology, and ‘‘general atmosphere of conspiracy and connectivity’’ and the ‘‘systems novel,’’ Tom LeClair’s term for fiction offering a ‘‘fierce intellectual engagement with the