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Chronic City: A Novel
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Chronic City: A Novel
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Chronic City: A Novel
Audiobook15 hours

Chronic City: A Novel

Written by Jonathan Lethem

Narrated by Mark Deakins

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 13, 2009
ISBN9780307577269
Unavailable
Chronic City: A Novel
Author

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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Reviews for Chronic City

Rating: 3.548333266666667 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I think I am not a rare breed of reader. In many ways I think I read to assuage the disappointment of not having what takes to write. I read as an act of erasure, as though by eliminating all the books I like that have already been written I could stumble upon the outline of the one that's missing because I ought to have written it. In Lethem's Chronic City I felt like I he'd done what I once contemplated as a way to go about writing a novel: make a list of more or less random details you want to talk about (a tiger loose in NYC, a stranded space station, virtual worlds, non-profits providing furnished apartments for dogs, war-free editions of the newspaper, chocolate-scented smog) and then filling in a plot around them. I'm less interested in talking about how well accomplished that task than in mentioning a piece of reader's serendipity that occurred around my reading this book, mostly because I can't find part of it confirmed anywhere. I like to have multiple books going at once, both for the variety and because you end up accidentally encountering cool parallels. In the summers I like to set myself the task of reading 1 short story a day. While reading Chronic City I therefore happened to be also alternating between Kafka and Poe tales (which themselves pair very nicely). The first alignment with the novel was blatant. I had just read Kafka's Investigations of a Dog when Lethem's character Perkus Tooth began quoting from the story! Improbable enough, but the next one was crazier, if murkier. It has to do with the book's Bloomberg-stand-in Jules Arnheim. Poe has a short piece entitled the Domain of Arnheim about a wealthy man who expends his wealth on landscape gardening to create elaborate artificial landscapes. That parallel (for those who have read Chronic City already) can't be a coincidence, right? I googled the heck out of the terms Poe, Lethem, Arnheim, Chronic City and Domain but got nothing. In a scathing review of the book I even read a comment that Lethem's character's "names sound like riddles, which at first makes you think and, later, when you realize none of this is going anywhere, roll your eyes." This one name at least does seem to mean something, the key just happened to be hidden in one of a 209-year-old author's most obscure short stories. Weird. Also, I met Lethem once before I'd ever heard of him. Turns out he lived in my dorm room at my college before he dropped out, and he came to relive old times. I remember standing there awkwardly because I could tell I was supposed to know who he was.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't love this the way I loved Motherless Brooklyn, but I can't quite say why. Lethem's writing is beautiful, when it's not rather grotesque, but somehow the characters in Chronic City just seem like accumulations of tics and mannerisms, and perhaps that's the point, that they're all just paper dolls with put-on personalities, but even conceding that doesn't make it enjoyable or interesting to spend time with them. I found the premise hard to accept and the denouement to be both obvious by the time we reached it and (and perhaps therefore) disappointing. Perhaps two novels where a psychological or neurological disorder is the fulcrum on which the weight of the plot balances is two too many for me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A clever, memorable, New York tale featuring fascinating characters and excellent writing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    During those infinite summers of junior high, I would spend two or three nights a week at friends and one night hosting others. Such led to largely nocturnal existence, collapsing towards dawn only to wake at noon and go swimming. Role Playing Games, junk food and the new portals of Atari and VCRs extended a rather free reign to explore. One evening we were at my friend David's house, eating frozen pizza and talking about Culture Club. or, maybe, Chuck Norris Suddenly around 1 a.m. David's very pregnant sister came over and said she was exhausted and that we had to go home. It was 1 a.m.! A younger guy, Jason said, no sweat, let's go to my house. This was strange as he lived across the street from my parents and this necessitated our crossing through our yard to access his house. It was around 2 by then and Jason walked in as if it was time for an after school film on ABC. His parents were watching cable and invited us in to gather around the sectional sofa. It was then I noticed they were smoking pot. Oh Shit. I had viewed Scarface (De Palma 1983) several times by then and I was convinced that some narco-hit squad was beginning its assault on the split level ranch house where I sat trembling. Undoubtedly, a few minutes thereafter I would be taken to the bathroom to be disposed of as an example with a chainsaw. I'm not sure i slept much that night.

    A similar paranoia underscores Chronic City. Theories threaten the presented (projected?) order. All of NYC is actually a confidence game. Everyone is either an avatar or a bit actor. I was ready to give this two stars. I hated huge chunks of the novel.

    I thought the astronaut dispatches were the best element of the novel. Those were quality. Somehow all the unfolding encouraged me. It was a modest reveal. No voila moments. Chronic City's conclusion appeared organic and thus palatable.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    was dying to read this book, so many good reviews, cult status etc. Self-indulgent, pointless, stoner boring, waste of paper!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have loved many of the books that Jonathan Lethem has written and I wanted to love this one. But the pieces didn't quite come together to give me the book I was hoping for. One of the blurbs on the book, from Entertainment Weekly magazine, says that this book is "a feverish portrait of the anxiety and isolation of modern Manhattan, full of dark humor and dazzling writing", so maybe the problem is that I no longer live in Manhattan and left, in part, because although I thought that isolation was something I went there seeking, I found that the truth of it was too crushing for me.
    This book follows Chase Insteadman as he comes to know Perkus Tooth. Chase is one kind of typical New Yorker, in that he has money that seems to come from no where and spends his days attending society lunches and being pretty. Perkus is another kind of typical New Yorker, holed up in a tiny rent controlled apartment that he largely can't afford, clutching to the cultural relevancy that he once had and seeking the intellectual fire works that he no longer puts out into the world.
    In addition to the friendship of these two men, there is also a sort of sci-fi story that winds around, as there are in much of Lethem's writing, but I found that these elements were not sci-fi enough to feel like a good sci-fi story and were too sci-fi to not disrupt the rest of the narrative.
    Although I felt that there was something missing in this story, I would recommend it for people who are fans of Lethem or those who enjoy books who are drenched in the atmosphere of Manhattan.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is all Lethem, but I just didn't buy it as much as I did "Motherless Brooklyn", "Fortress of Solitude", or "You Don't Love Me Yet", not to mention "Girl in Landscape" and "Gun, with Occasional Music". Maybe it's just Manhattan...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My theory is that this novel, which is about the distinction between real and ersatz, takes place in a virtual world like our own, created by author Jonathan Lethem. Of course, isn't that true of any fiction? At any rate, you'll enjoy getting to know Perkus Tooth, Chase Insteadman, and the rest of the oddball New York characters in this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book deserves another high 4 stars...as in more like 4 1/2 stars. I liked it just as much as I liked Lethem's Fortress of Solitude though there are many differences between the two (I do need to go back and re-read the former, though, as it has been about 6 or 7 years since I read it)

    In any case, this novel is also another example of experimental fiction done well. When it works, it's a fascinating adventure. When it doesn't work, it's a hot mess that sounds sort of pseudo-intellectual and missing the point. This skates the line nicely, threatening to dissolve in points yet still managing to hold everything together.

    One thing that is wonderful about the novel, besides all the postmodern situations of a tiger on the loose in NYC, a child actor grown up who is supposed to be in love with a Cancer ridden astronaut, Gnuppet movies, terminal hiccups, a rich shelter for homeless dogs, urban fjords, Marlon Brando death conspiracies, simulated worlds, and the many chauldrons that appear in Drs photographs and on EBAY is the characters themselves. Lethem really has a knack for the quirky who are struggling to manage in this post-modern world where anything can and does happen. There's both a really nice contrast between all of the characters who are distinctive and refreshing and a sense of likability to many of them, which makes it seem essential to keep reading in order to figure out where they all end up. Lethem succeeds with this one and it comes well recommended. This book is a little bit grueling in parts but it's a gruel you'll enjoy swallowing bite after bite. NYC is indeed a Chronic City and its disease is definitely terminal.


    I will re-read this book a few times before I die hopefully, unless I visit NYC and am precariously eaten by a tiger.

    Memorable quotes:

    pg. 196 "Enduring a flu alone in an apartment has always included a certain psychedelic aspect, it seems to me."

    pg. 266 "Perkus had Kafka for his veterinarian, Serling for his meteorologist "

    pg. 370 "I mix metaphors so I know I'm alive."

    pg. 372 "In his dog's haircut, lips softened by drink, he looked more and more the bit player from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

    pg. 388-389 "All memories are replacements...Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous rather than referring back to some stored 'original.' We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performances on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. We have no sugar mountain to journey backward toward, Chase! Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, and imagine you feel its weight at your back. All we've got is our working draft, no more final than the last, just as ready to be discarded. Memory is rehearsal for a show that never goes on."

    pg. 399 "Perkus, kidnapped by his own theories, had then suffered Stockholm syndrome, in which one preferred a jailer to oneself."

    "Everything stood for itself. Perkus hiccuped violently to rupture the silence and an exclamation mark of drool decorated his chin."


    pg. 401 "I didn't want to think about the snow, though in our cab we were surrounded at all sides by a theater of white chaos. The snow seemed to be thinking about us."

    pg. 436 "Now, too vain not to use this mirror to judge the results, I couldn't locate the disenchanted and fearsome character I wanted to believe the night had made me.

    It wa my curse to look unruined in my ruins. If the bereaved had no language for speaking to the unbereaved, my own bereavement had no language for making itself known on the outside of me."


    pg. 440 "By the time I crossed Park and Madison, retracing the tiger's park-ward pilgrimage of the night before, the city had accustomed itself, struggled to a half life, snow dredged right and left, most parked cars only sculpture.

    ...

    The great building housing the art museum was an island city itself, or a virtual universe or space module, operating according to its own necessities, perhaps with its own mayor and it wasn't hard to picture it plunging onward unchanged through the surrounding city might be in ruins, as Perkus Tooth had imagined New Jersey or Staten Island already to be.


  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    liking this. great characters. funny. a little too listy with the pop culture refs but i think that's intentional; so far, lethem gets a pass.

    i'm still cringing from all of the pop culture in my workshops in grad school.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was really looking forward to this because I really like some of his other stuff, but it was a bit of a slog. I felt very disconnected from the characters and the Manhattan, but not quite contemporary Manhattan, setting. There was a payoff in the last quarter of the book, that somewhat explained and mitigated this disconnectedness, but it wasn't enough for me to recommend this wholeheartedly. If you like Letham's style though, it is certainly worth a look.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Probably 3rd best Lethem book behind Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. His previous book, the atrocious You Don't Love Me Yet, soured me on Lethem's loser-geek-rock critic contemporary bathos crap. While Chronic City falls back into the same territory as YDLMY it does so in a less offensive way. Chronic offers some (almost) interesting thoughts on the authenticity of contemporary urban life but mostly it serves as an important reminder: name dropping arcane artists does nothing to enrich the lives of those around you nor does it make them desire to speak to you. No one enjoys the guy who feels compelled to inject his esoteric music/film/literature knowledge into every conversation. Hopefully Lethem has figured this out and he can get back to creating more meaningful characters and stories.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Es fängt damit an das ein alternder Kinderstar mit Namen Chase Insteadman, bekannt auch geworden durch seine Verlobte Janice, die haltlos im All schwebt umgeben von Minen aus dem es kein Entkommen gibt. Janice schreibt an Chase der sie auf der Erde vertritt wunderbare Liebesbriefe. Die ganze Welt nimmt Anteil an sein Schicksal, welches er gar nicht vertreten möchte.Er lernt den Kulturkritiker Perkus Tooth kennen und schätzen. Was sie verbindet? Allen voran rauchen sie gern mal einen Joint und kümmern sich um Kaldrone und Tigern. Chase lernt Orna kennen, eine Frau die Ihn fesselt und in die er sich verliebt. Doch was wird aus Janice an die er sich kaum noch erinnern will, denn Janice wird krank und brauch seine Unterstützung.Die Männerfreundschaft steht im krassen Kontext, sie kiffen sie schauen alte Filme, reden über Tiger und über das ominöse Kaldron. Die Freunde versuchen alles in ihrer Macht stehende, um an dieses Kaldron zu kommen. Perkus verliert sein Apartment an den Tiger und zieht um. Dort trifft er Ava, ein Hund der Schluckauf hat. Sozialarbeiter kümmern sich um Ava bis Perkus die Pflege übernimmt, eine kleine Freundschaft beginnt.So grob erzählt geht es in etwa um das. Mein Fazit: Das Buch fing schon etwas konfus an, viele Namen Begegnungen und viele Personen und Fremdwörter. Das Buch zieht sich wie Kaugummi. Ab und an kommt mal wieder etwas nettes zu zwischendurch lesen. Was das mit dem Tiger auf sich hatte hab ich leider immer noch nicht begriffen. Eins ums andere Mal hab ich überlegt was mir dieses Buch eigentlich sagen möchte. Viel unsinniges Zeug wurde geredet, viele Joints wurden in diesem Buch geraucht. Zwischen drin hab ich immer wieder gezweifelt ob ich je fertig werde mit dem Buch, aber ich hatte immer Hoffnung das noch was kommt was ich vielleicht unbedingt wissen muss. Naja durchgehalten hab ich, aber nichts gefunden was ich unbedingt noch wissen musste. Ich sag mal so, jemand der anspruchsvolle Lektüre sucht ist hiermit hoffentlich bedient, zumal es immer noch genügend Stoff gibt um zu diskutieren. Viel Spaß Euch
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is everything I want in a summer book: weirdness, sex, drugs, and vicarious glamour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn native and de-facto chronicler of life in the borough, caught a lot of flak for placing his last novel (gasp!) in Los Angeles. In Chronic City he casts his gaze back to the city that never sleeps, although his version of Manhattan is, as you might imagine, a little off.Lethem has a gift for blending literary genres; his fiction always has a smattering of science fiction, his noir has a metaphysical bent. In between 2007’s geographically maligned You Don’t Love Me Yet, and this novel, he even took a stab at reviving the forgotten superhero Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics, and it is the comic book that informs this novel; it’s characters are, by choice, two-dimensional, and play out all the necessary New York archetypes against a flat back drop of apartments, diners, taxi cabs, and improbable not-so-random violence.The novel’s protagonist is an empty vessel named Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who lives off of royalties and making the scene with Manhattan’s rich and even richer. His latest claim to fame, and the one that instills him at all the important parties, is his engagement to an astronaut who is marooned on the International Space Station due to a carpet of space mines that have been sowed underneath its orbit by the Chinese. Like a lot of things in the novel, this is taken for granted and nobody seems that interested in doing anything about it. Perhaps, and just perhaps, this is Lethem’s dig at the place the international community finds itself in relation to China’s rising prominence on the world stage. At this point, what could we do if they decided to mine the heavens? Write a strongly worded letter? Stop buying … oh, I don’t know, everything?Insteadman’s “lostronaut” writes him letters that are reproduced in the New York Times (albeit in the War-Free edition that seems to be favored by most) so that most people know more about what is going on than he does. Insteadman’s problem is that he can’t quite remember his fiancé or how he became an ornamental table setting.There are clues from the beginning that all is not right with Lethem’s island, for one, Lower Manhattan has been enveloped in a mysterious dense fog that never dissipates. Like DeLillo’s “air-borne toxic event,” there is a disconnect between what’s real and what is simulated. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (whose position as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona, Lethem is due to inherit) has become Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, another overly long book that no one finishes. Muppets have become Gnuppets, which may just be a wink at Gnosticism, loosely defined by Wikipedia as “consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that the material cosmos was created by an imperfect god.”The root of Gnostic belief, gnosis, is further defined as “a form of mystic, revealed, esoteric knowledge through which the spiritual elements of humanity are reminded of their true origins within the superior Godhead, being thus permitted to escape materiality.”Insteadman’s catalyst, and a fount of esoteric knowledge, is Perkus Tooth, a stand-in for an aspect of Lethem’s own personality in much the same way as Kilgore Trout took the heat for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Tooth is a twitchy, well-stoned cartoon in the Lester Bangs mold, and although he bristles at being called a rock critic, is as remembered for a stint at Rolling Stone than for a series of intellectual commando-style broadsides that papered the Bowery back in the day.The chronic in the novel’s title, is an allusion to the high-grade marijuana that Tooth, Insteadman, and a former activist-turned-mayoral-fixer, Richard Abneg, imbibe with stunning regularity. The trio’s pot-driven cultural insights and conspiracy theorizing are either the best parts of the book, or the worst, depending on one’s own proclivities. I, for one, loved Tooth’s Marlon Brando obsession and manic drive to “connect the dots.”Almost exactly halfway through the book, a game-changing possibility is introduced that ties directly into Gnostic belief and, like religion, either explains everything or nothing at all. Tooth’s homeless associate Biller finds work designing “treasure” for a virtual universe called Yet Another World, created in turn by Linus Carter, a brilliant but socially inept designer—an imperfect god.A description of Carter’s online universe reads like a Lonely Planet guide to Manhattan itself, a “… paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever.” The line between real and unreal becomes even more blurred as Insteadman realizes that “Yet Another World wasn’t the only reality that was expansible. Money has its solvent powers …”In the end, our empty hero comes to realize it doesn’t really matter if the island that he knows is indeed real, or if anything actually exists on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. He learns the hard way that what is important is the real relationships that we form with other travelers.As for Tooth, he is finally permitted to escape materiality through losing everything and finally finding a kindred spirit, in this case a massive three-legged pit bull named Ava. The dog continues to work healing magic on Insteadman after his own collapse into his own footprint. Having inherited the responsibility of walking her, he finally abandons Manhattan’s ubiquitous taxis for a street-level view of his world.“… it occurred to me how Ava’s paces, her bold and patient pissings, must have been immensely comforting to Perkus, and in a sense familiar. Ava’s a kind of broadsider herself, famous within a circle of correspondents, invisible to those who don’t care.”
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really feel I would have rated this higher if I hadn't found the ending so unsatisfactory. It felt weirdly cliched and tacked on; an afterthought at best. Lethem's writing was gorgeous, though, and I loved the characters (even with their ridiculous names; I mean really? Chase Insteadman? Perkus Tooth?!), and I enjoyed how the book asked you to think about what is and isn't "real." How we know what we know, why we trust that knowledge, whether or not things can be true and untrue at the same time. It felt a little like The Truman Show, or a Charlie Kaufman film, and I mean that in a good way. I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and even had a moment with a paragraph in chapter six, but the ending was a disappointment. Lethem is an author I would love to read more of, though, and that's saying something.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a wonderful book with very arch insights. ".........Terms like Greek Orthodox, Romaneque, and flying buttress etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition...." Don't we all have pockets of arcane knowlege in our brains with no point of reference. It just seems like the randomness of real life. The hero is a has-been child actor of a syndicated sit-com who meets an iconoclast named Perkus Tooth. Character is so satisfying in this novel and it's very enjoyable. It's almost dream like with a tiger wreaking havoc on Manhattan. Worth the read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" is one of my favorites. I had high hopes for "Chronic City" and was a little disappointed. As usual, the novel is filled with quirky characters which are Lethem's stock-in-trade. Lethem takes the bit with a "tiger" too far and it becomes tiresome. with that said, I still enjoyed getting to know the ensemble of characters and how they interact. I found the item-of-the-moment mentality true to life. Collective ADHD. I look forward to Lethem's next contribution.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    (Adding this to my library now though I read it some time ago--this title just now showed up as a recommendation and I want to confirm that yes, it's a good recommendation. ;-)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Probably the ultimate dystopian novel is one in which neither the characters nor the readers realize that they are in a dystopia -- at least, not until the end. This is what Jonathan Lethem has done in Chronic City. The novel is set in a New York City that's almost, but not quite, our New York City (more on that later). The narrator, Chase Insteadman, is a former child actor whose current occupation is tragic fiance to a heroic astronaut stranded on the space station by Chinese low-orbit mines. Chase is also a useful decoration at the dinner parties of the super-rich. He is not, however, a particularly ambitious or thoughtful person. He is most like an empty vase, waiting to be filled (vases figure prominently in Chronic City, by the way).Then he meets Perkus Tooth. Perkus is a character we should recognize instantly. He exists at the fringes of society, set apart by his squalid apartment and weird vintage clothing, subsisting on a diet of coffee, pot and cheeseburgers. His brain is stuffed with obscure facts about pop culture, which he obsessively spins into a complicated conspiracy theory suggesting that all of reality may be manufactured. He pours his theories into Chase, who absorbs them raptly, although he doesn't fully grasp them.But there is something decidedly off about the alternate universe that these characters inhabit, not the least of which is that Muppets are called Gnuppets there. In Chase and Perkus's New York, the Twin Towers still stand but are permanently enshrouded in gray fog. A tiger -- whether real or mechanical or both is unclear -- randomly destroys buildings around Manhattan. Yawning chasms decorate downtown as abstract art, while also providing a convenient location for suicides. Sometimes the aroma of chocolate hangs over the city for days.When the tiger demolishes Perkus's favorite cheeseburger restaurant, reality begins to rapidly unravel, calling into question everything we have been told so far as readers. Indeed, Lethem seems to be challenging us to take a close look at our own personal realities. Everything we see on the news, all the stories we tell ourselves -- couldn't they merely be comfortable fantasies that prevent us from seeing how fragile everything really is? Delusions we created to protect ourselves from looking down into the chasms in our own world? But as Perkus points out, before you tell a friend that he is living an illusion, you have to ask yourself whether the illusion makes him happier than knowing the truth would.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This science fiction novel is set in a Manhattan of the near future much like our own but with odd differences like a no-war edition of the New York Times, a tiger rampaging the Upper East Side, and a mysterious mist covering lower Manhattan. Former child actor Chase Insteadman lives on residuals and his engagement to an astronaut becomes a daily feature of celebrity news when she is trapped on the International Space Station. In the course of the novel, Chase becomes acquainted with several new people, most of interesting of which is cultural gadfly Perkus Tooth. Chase and Tooth smoke pot (the "chronic" of the title) and have philosophical debates about cultural icons like Marlon Brando and seek to acquire the elusive vase-like chauldrons from eBay.There's a lot I like about this book in it's little deviations from reality and how Lethem uses them to comment on our world. On the other hand there isn't a real plot to this novel and there are a lot of red herrings. *SPOILER* I'm particularly disappointed by the cliched conclusion where Chase comes to the realization that there is no reality in his world. *SPOILER* Still, it's a fun, quirky little book, especially to listen to the great voices on the audio book rendition.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved the book for its originality and creativity. It kept me entertained and it was a challenge. It was not an easy read, but was worth it. I will continue to read more Lethem.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A surreal and dystopian portrait of Manhattan and of life in our times, whose strangeness only sharpens the accuracy of its representation.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book was sort of interesting, but I couldn't really relate to it. It's mostly about outlandishly obtuse people that live in New York. It kept me entertained for about half of a day. Moving on...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A Sardonic Look into the Wasted Lives of Manhattanites--According to Lethem: To read Chronic City, one might as well say that Manhattanites are clueless, pot-smoking, wool-over-the-eyes patrons of Nihilism. And according to Lethem, you'd be correct. So the question becomes not what is this book about, but instead, why did Lethem take the time to write such a meandering sprawl that lays waste to one of the best cities in the world? Lethem rips on writers, agents, marketers, rock critics, movie critics, book critics, critic-critics, ghost writers, pot smokers, the New York Times, the New Yorker, architecture, animals, machinery, TV shows and actors (so I'll side with him on this one), endangered animals, hamburgers, The Lonely, the Smug, Manhattanites, ...hmmm...who did I leave out? There's more, but you get the picture. What bitterness drove the writer to create a bloated, episodic work, that clearly lacks a plot as well as a heart? To Lethem, is this what our culture is? Episodic and metaphoric to authors who live in NY (and Maine)? Where is the hope? (Not hope and change, just our humanist optimism?) Perkus Tooth, the 'metaphor' for the author and his friends, fails. Insteadman is purposeless, and at points, the author refers to him as Chase Unperson. In the end, Lethem leaves me feeling empty. I don't need to read to feel someone else's emptiness. Time waster. But yes, Lethem does have some beautifully emotionlessly constructed sentences. But why? To write a sprawling Seinfeld episode for the literary is a colossus waste of time and life.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not my favorite Lethem novel. It tries to be current, but its references to eBay, buying virtual items with real money and an on-line community like Second Life are all carefully explained in a way that makes the characters feel dated and out-of-touch with the modern world. The novel is weird fun, like William Gibson's novels, but not as visionary. This is not a book for those who like an emotional connection with the characters. It is much more like hanging out with your weird, stoner friends from college. The kind that ultimately evaporate from your life -- to your relief.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Man, I just love Lethem. I could write a cohesive review of this book, but I'd rather just sit with it a few days. It's funny, it's serious, it's deep, it's shallow, it's a gas.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't finish it. Lethem is a good writer, but his stories are so heavily NYC-centric that I miss most of the references. If I wanted to know NYC better, I'd persist. But I don't want to devote that sort of time just now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I just finished reading this book and really enjoyed it. I'm not sure why it hasn't received better reviews overall as I really loved the originality of the story and the things you end up pondering because of it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What is real? What is true? And, how can you really know for sure? That is the theme of this book.The “City” is Manhattan, and “Chronic” is a brand of marijuana as well as having its ordinary meaning. Chase Insteadman is famous for being famous. He is at home among the super-rich denizens of Manhattan's Upper East Side. He is a former child actor, who is collecting his residuals from an insipid sit com that is forever showing on cable TV re-runs, Martyr and Pesty. At the start of the book, he meets Perkus Tooth at the offices of the Criterion Collection, which produces classic movies on DVD's. Insteadman is there to record voice-overs. Tooth writes liner notes for the company on a free-lance basis. They strike up a friendship. Tooth is an oddball intellectual to say the least, with his esoteric tastes in pop culture, his conspiracy theories, etc. Here's a sample from early in the novel, with Insteadman describing one of Tooth's running commentaries: “Did I read The New Yorker? This question had dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand.” So did I. Insteadman and Tooth are typical of the humorous names often given to the book's characters. When I first read the name Perkus Tooth, I immediately thought of Laszlo Toth, the man who attacked Michaelangelo's Pieta statute with a hammer, and the name Don Novello used for his phony correspondence with famous people. But, that is just how my mind works; so, it was probably only a coincidence when shortly later, another character, Steadman's sex/love interest, was introduced, named Oona Laszlo.The story is something out of a Charlie Kaufman movie. Steadman's girlfriend is trapped in a space station with mostly Russian cosmonauts, after the Chinese place mines blocking the way back to earth. Her letters to him are published in the newspapers after being screened by the government. An escaped tiger is roaming the streets of Manhattan, causing extensive damage and fear in the residents, who track its path on the Internet. The New York Times publishes a “war free” edition. Tooth's rants contain many references to Marlon Brando (is he dead or is that a myth?), Norman Mailer, John Casavettes, The Gnuppets (yes, not the Muppets) and many only marginally known cultural figures of the second half of the 20th Century (if they are real at all; I'm not certain (Morrison Groom and Florian Ib can't be). An artist, Laird Noteless, is constructing another of his giant pits in the ground of the island. The Southern part of Manhattan is permanently enshrouded in a thick gray fog, but the World Trade Center is still there. Tooth discovers the enchanting, almost addictive properties of chaldrons, a type of vase or cauldron, while getting an acupuncture treatment for his cluster headaches. A chocolate smell permeates the city. And, then it starts snowing. And so much more. I must say that I enjoy this kind of absurd madness. I found the book entertaining in way that I have enjoyed books by Pynchon, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Robbins and Wallace, and Kaufman's movies. If you like their works, you should find this book a satisfying read.