Chronic City: Summary and book reviews of Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, plus links to an excerpt from Chronic City and a biography of Jonathan Lethem.
Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
Hardcover: Oct 2009,
480 pages.
Paperback: Aug 2010,
480 pages.
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.
If Jonathan Lethem's novels were food they would pile the pounds on those who consume them, not from empty calories but from a rich feast of extravagant fare, like lobster in drawn butter or Eggs Benedict swimming in creamy hollandaise. It invariably takes me a long time to read his books because every page bursts with lush language. Lethem uses words and tosses reality around with awe-inspiring creativity. With the possible exception of Motherless Brooklyn (which I loved and re-read to savor the sheer sumptuousness of its prose) Chronic City is his best yet. (Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
The Washington Post
[U]ltimately, these perfectly choreographed sentences compose a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity.
New York Magazine
Lethem has often sought to interweave the realistic and the fantastic; in Chronic City the result is nearly seamless.
The Wall Street Journal
[A] prosopographical investigation of New York City by way of a handful of strange, unclassifiable characters (and some remarkable writing).
Entertainment Weekly
The book's zonked philosophizing about the nature of reality wears a little thin, but Lethem's claustrophobic vision of a world where everything is connected and nothing is as it seems proves both funny and frightening.
Esquire
The novel functions much like Manhattan used to – a mad scramble of connections made and, more often, missed…make(s) a reader ache for a city long gone.
Vanity Fair
Poly-genre-loving fanboy Jonathan Lethem blasts readers into the fantastic realm of Chronic City.
The Daily Beast
A sprawling book about pop culture and outer space…realistic and fantastic, serious and funny, warm and clear eyed. One of the new generation’s most ambitious writers, Lethem again offers a novel that deals with nothing less important than the difference between truth and lies. And some stories about good cheeseburgers.
GQ
A stellar, multi-layered novel.
Publishers Weekly
Though Chronic City at times requires patience, it is a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, the book sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset.
Library Journal
[F]ans of Lethem's work (e.g., Motherless Brooklyn) will be rewarded for their patience with insight into the truthfulness of reality.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Lethem's most ambitious work to date, and his best since Motherless Brooklyn (2001).
Touring New York City
Everyone knows New York! Even if you've never visited you've probably read about it in books such as Jonathan Letham's (which are all set in the City). If you haven't read about it, the chances are that one of the countless TV shows such as NYPD Blue, Friends, and Sex and the City has introduced you to a variety of its streets, apartment buildings, alleys and restaurants. Even if you missed these, you've probably seen it portrayed in some of the hundreds of movies filmed there, from classics such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and Barefoot in the Park to more recent films such as the Spiderman movies. At the very least, the chances are you've had your present and future financial status affected by Wall Street!
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Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.
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(884 words).
The Washington Post
There is so much more to be known about NYC than can be found by visiting the main tourist attractions, although they are certainly as good a...
