chronic city

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The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase’s cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus’s countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem’s masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique……..
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– ISBN13: 9780385518635
– Condition: NEW
– Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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 “” a Big Idea”" 2009-11-20
By Charlotte Pen (USA)
Back around 1912 or so, Augustus John, the painter, commented on the avant-garde painters in Paris. So much was happening in Paris as the turn of the century. He was English and took a somewhat detached view of everyone and everything. But he did make one important observation – it was about Henri Matisse, the French painter, who had by 1912 gone from being a painter, copying old masters at the Louvre, to impressionism, then fauvism, and finally cubism. John very wryly said of Matisse, “He has a big idea, but he has not yet been able to express it.” Even almost 100 years later, some people think that the jury is still out on Matisse’s work. Others, of course, consider him the most important painter of the 20th century.

All of which makes me think of Lethem’s new book, “Chronic City” and how much I feel Lethem is so close to Matisse in how he is viewed by his literary public, and in how similar he is in having a “big idea.” And, like John’s comment on Matisse, I do think that his work hasn’t yet achieved what he is finally after, though I am neither a literary critic nor a writer. But strangely enough, after finishing “Chronic City”, I happened to watch “Night at the Museum” on DVD, starring Ben Stiller, who is, coincidentally, Lethem’s doppelganger. When the movie was over, having enjoyed and accepted all the fantastic goings on, I thought, “Now I understand Lethem’s challenge but can he achieve it?” The written image and the visual image are miles apart, mostly. But what a great idea it would be if the written image were cleverly structured so as to be as totally accepted as are the images in movies, without falling into the fantasy land of sci-fi’s, comics or gothics. If so, then he will have accomplished a marvelous breakthrough.

 “Tiresome” 2009-11-15
By Bill Petillo (Portland, OR)
I loved Lethem’s “Motherless Brooklyn” and enjoyed “Fortress of Solitude”, but this attempt really misses the mark. The main characters are has beens on the periphery of art, fame, money and high society in New York City. Their lives are boring and pointless, but they spend their time together to mutually reinforce their false sense of importance. The book moves at a dreadfully slow pace, or perhaps it just seems that way because the story and characters are so uninvolving. This book is a real dud.

 “chronic city” 2009-11-15
By old traveler (sayre PA USA)
This is basically Seinfeld with the entire cast on pot. It would have been a much better book had the author not insisted on using ten words when two would have done the job. I finally lost interest half way through. Where is the editor when you need one?

 “Interesting if not always engaging” 2009-11-11
By Wiggly (California, USA)
I was aware of Jonathan Lethem only through one of his previous novels ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ which I remember being an entertaining read. ‘Chronic City’ is certainly a lot more abstract, some may say it’s mature, but I found it a little wanting to be honest.

For the first 200 pages or so, we meet a collection of characters living in some kind of parallel Manhattan to the one we know and love, what with its strange chocolate smell in the air, giant tiger on the loose, and incessant fog. It’s an interesting place, and Lethem throws in many cultural references, some of which I understood, other which passed over my head. Our chief characters however, appear rather selfish and unlikeable — perhaps that was the point, as they laze around and don’t really do anything but celebrate themselves. The only saving grace are the beautifully emotional letters from Janice Turnbull, our lead character Chase Insteadman’s estranged fiancee, who finds herself trapped in space. These letters bring a soft touch to proceedings which helped me warm to the novel somewhat.

Just when things seem to be going awry, Lethem produces a major event about halfway through the novel, and all of a sudden, the emotional frailties of most of the main protagonists are finally revealed, and the novel turns from being fairly humdrum to being quite readable. From there on in, we begin to learn more about this strange quasi-real Manhattan, and Perkus Tooth’s descent into despair and helplessness is brilliantly written if perhaps not always too well explained.

But this seems to be the key thing with ‘Chronic City’: Not everything is explained. The fine lines between reality and virtual reality are blurred throughout. What’s real and what’s an illusion is a constant theme, despite some explanation using the familiar Linden Lab ‘Second Life’ virtual reality software here entitled “Yet Another World” to help illustrate that we may, indeed, all be just merely part of a simulation and not in control of our own destinies as we like to believe.

I was rarely bored while reading ‘Chronic City’, but neither was I as engaged as I would’ve liked. There’s no denying that Lethem is a great writer, full of interesting ideas, but the novel seems to work more on a level as a piece of experimentation, rather then a tightly-plotted and exciting story. However, perhaps, that was the point.

I find it hard to recommend this book, hence the three star review, but it is still, strangely enough, well worth reading. How’s that for a parallel universe?

 “Friendship” 2009-11-07
By Stephen T. Hopkins (Oak Park, Illinois)
Jonathan Lethem moves his skills to Manhattan in his new novel, Chronic City. Amid the anxiety and loneliness of life in this tense city, protagonist Chase Insteadman, a child actor now middle aged and living on residuals develops a friendship with quirky cultural critic Perkus Tooth. In part, Chronic City is a finely written satire on life in our challenging times, and the struggle of individuals to find a way to move forward with their lives amid setbacks and challenges. The notion of a war-free edition of The New York Times made me laugh out loud. In other respects, Chronic City is the story of the power of love and friendship in the most unusual relationships. Chase, for example, in addition to being recognized for his child acting fame, is the fiancé of an astronaut who is stranded in space. Readers who enjoy fine writing and literary fiction will find many levels of pleasure on the pages of Chronic City.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

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