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Chronic City

by Jonathan Lethem

3.41 · rating details · 2,952 ratings · 678 reviews

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 ...more

Hardcover, 467 pages

Published October 13th 2009 by Doubleday (first published January 1st 2009)

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14th out of 16 books — 12 voters

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Nov 12, 2009

Jimmy rated it

Shelves: fiction

Shortly after a bout of sobriety and a return to Portland, from Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan Lethem give a reading in the building where I work. I've expressed opposition to public readings before, or at least a considerable amount of disdain toward an interest in the celebrity status of certain authors; admittedly a preoccupation or opinion derived from William Gaddis's thoughts on the subject. I was in total agreement with this man about how irrelevant it was to endlessly...moreShortly after a bout of sobriety and a return to Portland, from Las Vegas, I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan Lethem give a reading in the building where I work. I've expressed opposition to public readings before, or at least a considerable amount of disdain toward an interest in the celebrity status of certain authors; admittedly a preoccupation or opinion derived from William Gaddis's thoughts on the subject. I was in total agreement with this man about how irrelevant it was to endlessly probe for questions about the personal life of an author and the relation between this life and their work. Gaddis's stance on this also had much to do with the ability of the work of fiction itself being more than capable of answering any of the questions that a reader could possibly have about it, thus single-handedly, in a theoretical sense, eliminating the need for Q and A sessions, and lengthy explanations given in public. What I overlooked of course, was that these events are typically fun, especially if you're stoned. And they're revealing, revealing in a way that I was happy to discover, was actually possible.

And especially if you're stoned and it's a book like Chronic City, and you find yourself in a constant state of wonder about whether or not the book is revelatory, or if it's just that you're stoned, and the story is about people who ostensibly smoke a lot of pot, and endlessly riff about pop culture, film, Manhattan, music, and cultural etc. And especially if you're a cinephile and the book is largely about film, and possibly even influenced by film, in a stylistic sense.

Lethem strolled up to the podium like a literary version of Max Fischer from Wes Anderson's Rushmore; astute looking, confident in a nerdy-almost-nebbish sort of way, attentive, and generally enthusiastic about explaining and narrating. He read the first chapter straight through. I was on the edge of my seat, mouth agape, completely immersed, at times of the feeling that someone was narrating a Preston Sturges film out loud to me. I loved it. I also loved Lethem's openness about influence, and his fondness of the cinema. After all, the two main characters of this particular story meet at the home offices of the Criterion Collection, and after all Perkus Tooth's character is an extension of Lethem's avowed interest in film, the side that has been expressed to an almost hyper-articulate degree in his collection of essays entitled The Disappointment Artist.

After he finished reading from his book, I felt inescapably compelled to ask my new, favorite, contemporary author a question about film and literature. This, after all, is a man, who to me, seems to be making a literary attempt to bridge the two artistic cultures. So I asked, following up on a previous question about the influence of film in Lethem's work (most of which, I'm admittedly unfamiliar with, but looking forward to reading through), "It seems that contemporary novelists, such as Pynchon, Dellilo, Wallace, etc, are more open about writing about film in their fiction, and not only writing about it, but letting the medium of film influence the way that contemporary fiction is narrated and told, this in mind, do you feel as though you're part of this community of these types of authors/cinephiles/(theorists almost)?" And he replied, "well, community is a funny word to use when you're talking about someone like Thomas Pynchon, but yes, I do find film to be a very important influence in my work, however, I would go even further back and cite Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov as heavier influences in the sense of novelists who openly write about, and are influenced by film, thank you."

What I really wanted to say after that was that I was stoned, and that in retrospect, yes, "community" was a poor word choice. Of course, there were other questions I had. But this was what I was most curious about, being somewhat new to Lethem's work. This is actually all relevant. Chronic City is after all, a book about people who live through and in circles of entertainment. And Chase Insteadman's character grows through his understanding of an art that he had only previously been a tool of. Perkus reveals this to him, in high-grade government marijuana induced rants about film in a diner down the street from his house, or in his apartment, one filled with the detritus of all of the obscure, fragmented culture that he so adores. Lethem's characters attempt to connect their relationship with art to their more "real" surroundings; i.e. Manhattan. The books' plotlessness may strike some as being devoid of intention or direction, but in the end it flows like one of Tooth's rants, written by an enthusiast of culture who wants to share this wonderful condition, to make it human, to make us all feel a little less shallow for just being voyeurs. (less)

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Dec 03, 2009

Eddie Watkins rated it

Long live Perkus Tooth! He must live, he is our Don Quixote, our post-9/11 innocent (even chaste) madman making of his own delusions (or, as I prefer, his own powers of imagination) a marvelously engaging and living world, the living world of this extremely entertaining novel.

Tooth is at war with illusion, using his own illusions as weapons, and it’s this clashing of culture’s false illusions and Tooth’s real illusions that creates life. There is nothing real, or rather the real exis...moreLong live Perkus Tooth! He must live, he is our Don Quixote, our post-9/11 innocent (even chaste) madman making of his own delusions (or, as I prefer, his own powers of imagination) a marvelously engaging and living world, the living world of this extremely entertaining novel.

Tooth is at war with illusion, using his own illusions as weapons, and it’s this clashing of culture’s false illusions and Tooth’s real illusions that creates life. There is nothing real, or rather the real exists at basic levels – exemplified by a dog’s sniffing and shitting in the novel – but reality at the higher levels of the human intellect, and by extension human society, is crowded with nothing but illusions; and what this novel reveals is that there is something within engaged humans that creates human truth, and that this truth (besides sniffing and shitting) is the only truth we have.

Chase Insteadman, the blank slate non-entity and narrator of this novel, learns what this something is through his progressively deepening involvement with Tooth. He learns that there is no objectified grail, i.e. some tangible Truth of revelation, and that Truth is not even contained within objectified human activities and pursuits, but, again, that it’s through engagement (a deep inner process that manifests externally) that Truth is revealed, yet still it remains ever-elusive. It is up to each individual to discover the lineaments of their own engagement.

Sound like a self-help book? Well, it's not, but there is a warm humanism evident, and an earnestness, but it's never treacly, remaining tacit, informing and enriching the novel from below.

So these are the basic ideas of the book, but the problem is that as an idea-man Lethem isn’t quite up to the task. I know of his love and admiration for Philip K. Dick, and this book does investigate some Dickian preoccupations, but he doesn’t add anything to them, in fact he dilutes them to a Truman Show level; there is none of that patented and authentic Dickian metaphysical dread. But what Lethem does he does very well and on a much larger canvas (or at least in much greater detail) and with a verbal panache beyond PKD’s wildest dreams.

There is also a problem with Insteadman’s being such a non-entity, in that for him to learn something is something of an anti-climax (and as an aside, his “romance” with his astro-fiance is a bit juvenile (though maybe that's intentional?)), so at a character level his “re-birth” falls just a bit flat, like what he learned he should've learned long ago, though still it made me feel good. But on a symbolic/allegorical level, with Insteadman representing post-9/11 Manhattan starting from scratch and going through a process of re-birth, there is potent resonance and significance.

Some could accuse the book of being bloated with verbal pyrotechnics, and Lethem does get too enamored with his own voice and wit and humor at times, but it’s only the narrative that’s fatty, on the verbal level it’s pure sinew, so if one keeps one’s nose to the page and forgets being epi-critical for a moment, the reading experience is pure pleasure, and a wild ride.

But this problem of book bloat comes to the fore when considering this as the possible masterpiece that Lethem seems to’ve intended. As grand entertainment, there’s no problem, but as a masterpiece to be read and reread with each rereading offering fresh unfoldments and insights there is. Part of the problem is that Lethem has a problem with letting things remain ambiguous and trusting that the readers get his allusions and meanings through storytelling alone. Too many times he offers expositions of what he means in order to tie little happenings to his larger themes. For instance – he talks of dogs creating maps of invisible worlds through their sniffing as they navigate Manhattan, but then he feels the need to make what he really means even clearer by paralleling these doggy olfactory worlds with the larger theme of virtual worlds on-line. This reminded me of that horrible plastic bag scene in American Beauty. It feels like a violation, like our minds have been rummaged and our private epiphanies made public. Instead of revealing the beauty, these tendencies actually steal them from us. Trust your readers! Trust your viewers! If they don’t get what you’re getting at then fuck ‘em, the beauty and epiphanies are there, in potentia.

Anyway, long live Perkus Tooth!

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Nov 13, 2009

Krok Zero rated it

Shelves: fall-2009

I thought I was done with this simulacrum bulls**t. Really, I did. One of the reasons why Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY failed to impress me as a mind-blowing masterpiece was its (to my mind) lazy employment of this most common of postmodernist tropes, this tired hand-me-down from Dick and Ba(udri)llard and The Matrix and eXistenZ and etcetera whatever nevermind. I wished for a moratorium on films and books incorporating the idea that WHAT IF REALITY IS JUST, LIKE, AN ILLUSION, MAN, and all i...more

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Jan 05, 2010

Edan rated it

This is my favorite of Lethem's novel thus far. Fortress of Solitude had moments of brilliance, but the language felt too wanna-be DeLillo. Motherless Brooklyn was a bit dull for me, though others I know really love that book. I resent his novel about Silver Lake--I have not read it, nor will I. I realize it's merely "an entertainment" in an ouevre of more serious books, but after spending a whole novel complaining about the gentrification of Brooklyn, why go and write a novel about ...moreThis is my favorite of Lethem's novel thus far. Fortress of Solitude had moments of brilliance, but the language felt too wanna-be DeLillo. Motherless Brooklyn was a bit dull for me, though others I know really love that book. I resent his novel about Silver Lake--I have not read it, nor will I. I realize it's merely "an entertainment" in an ouevre of more serious books, but after spending a whole novel complaining about the gentrification of Brooklyn, why go and write a novel about an east-side LA neighborhood, post-gentrification, without being sensitive to the area's fraught history? Not cool.

Mike Reynolds wrote a terrific review of Chronic City, which I urge you to read right away. Just skip my stupid musings.

I found this book dazzling in its strangeness. I love books about stoners, I think. Perkus reminded me of a friend my dad might have, if Perkus had moved to LA in the early-eighties and become a stand-up comedian, or gotten really into astrology. Or both. I can just see him sitting on the couch with my dad, dissecting movies on TCM, passing a joint, picking up and dropping with disdain the various magazines that litter the floor of the living room. In this scene, I'm in junior high, walking through with a big glass of Coke and a quesadilla on a paper plate, rolling my eyes.

I loved the chaldrons in this book, and I love that I Googled the word to find that Lethem had made them up. I love the Second Life-type virtual universe. I loved the New York Lethem created--finally, someone gets at the fakery of that town! Lord, am I sick of hearing about how geniune and raw and authentic New York City is. This alternate-reality Manhattan was gloriously rendered. All of this made the book a fun read.

A few times, the prose was a touch on-the-nose. Usually when Chase Insteadman (his name itself, a little on-the-nose) waxes poetic about his role: "I might love Janice, yes, but what I showed these people was a simulacrum, a portrayal of myself" (35). Duh! This line is like a 20-year-old English major's wet dream. Why don't you just write the paper for her, Jonathan?! Other times, the prose was difficult to read, clumsy. I'd read a sentence twice, and it dissolved before my eyes. A few just seemed overly complicated: "Richard bolted from his taxicab, punching black shoe prints in the dusty covering that had begun to whirl from the sky" (397)--there was real confusion for me here, with the use of "covering" to describe the layer of snow on the ground. And this one was just a mess: "Now she'd taken a new assignment, covert as ever: an autobiography of Laird Noteless, who'd received the commission for the Memorial to Daylight popular sentiment had demanded in reply to the gray fog downtown" (96). Huh? In both cases, I was yanked out of the fictional dream, so to speak--and if you're about to say, "But, man, that's Lethem's project! He wants to remind you that you're reading fiction, blah blah blah!" just shut the fuck up. Most of the time, I was in the fictional dream Lethem created--it was bizarre and complex and not-quite-real, but it worked, because the language was accurate and smooth, even if syntactically complicated. I wished the whole book had been flawless in this regard. Near the end, the language exhausted me, especially after a pretty upsetting event that I was emotionally affected by. I wanted to see the moment head-on, but the narration wouldn't allow it. Perhaps that was an aesthetic choice, but it's still one I didn't like.

But, overall, an incredibly fun and ambitious book, and I'm glad to have read it!
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May 30, 2011

hcelvis rated it

· review of another edition

Chase Insteadman ist ein gern gesehener Gast auf Dinerpartys in New York, allerdings weniger wegen seiner Person, sondern in erster Linie, weil er mit einer im All verschollenen Astronautin verlobt ist und bei ein paar Leuten vielleicht noch, weil er als Kind der Star einer Fernsehserie war. Seither lebt er von seinen Tantiemen und hat sonst nicht viel vorzuweisen, außer eben seiner Verlobten Janice. Diese schreibt ihm Briefe, die in der kriegsfreien Ausgabe der New York Times abgedruckt werden ...more

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Jun 15, 2009

Mike rated it

Coming into this novel as a Lethemite, a devotee, I'm not sure if my experience reflects a slight disappointment which new readers might dismiss as fanboy grousing about a superior novel OR a slight appreciation which new readers might dismiss as fanboy rationalizing about an inferior novel. I can only say that this novel was:

a) line by line, paragraph by paragraph, a warehouse of prose delight -- a middle-aged wealthy couple, the husband "a desiccated toddler, age floating unf

...moreComing into this novel as a Lethemite, a devotee, I'm not sure if my experience reflects a slight disappointment which new readers might dismiss as fanboy grousing about a superior novel OR a slight appreciation which new readers might dismiss as fanboy rationalizing about an inferior novel. I can only say that this novel was:

a) line by line, paragraph by paragraph, a warehouse of prose delight -- a middle-aged wealthy couple, the husband "a desiccated toddler, age floating unfixed; [the wife's:] fifty-some years . . . pinned to her like a police-artist's sketch, or an archaeologist's reconstruction . . . .";

b) generally engrossing, despite a general lack of Plot (opting, instead, for a lowkey thrum of paranoia and emotional upheaval, a minor-chord quest narrative of sorts, amidst a sea of details and structurally-cohesive yet digressive sidebar stories);

and, c) utterly ambitious. This last element deserves some expansion, without spoilers: Lethem is trying to write a Philip Dick novel wholly grounded in the quotidian, or a Saul Bellow novel with its feet dipped below the slipstream fantastic, or... fuck all that: seeking to ungerrymander the seams and alleys and neighborhoods which seem to subdivide the city of Literature, to see common cause in the quest for a sense of reality *and* of the fantastic, of a grounded identifiable grappling with the stuff of life and a desire for escapes and escapism. He is writing a novel where reality is a problem, where Truth is at bay, and yet he sidesteps the cul-de-sacs of postmodern alienation -- or maybe he's writing a novel where the recognizable problems of our reality (cranes falling, a war raging overseas, love lives confusing and confounding) are *and* are not tropes for our own personal traumas, yet sidestepping the cul-de-sacs of the new realists' narcissism and parochialism.

In some ways, this is a 9/11 novel, carefully counterposed to stuff like Clare Messud's Emperor's Children, where that geopolitical event becomes a lever which vaults the narcissistic upperclass protagonists into more truthful, honest lives. What hooey. Lethem never lets his narcissistic upperclass off the hook, resists redemption--the towers are glimpsed only through a vague Grey Fog bedeviling a borough of Manhattan, they haven't fallen, this is fiction, yet we hear and see and feel countless hints and echoes (that Fog, an artist whose metier is giant holes in the ground, a rampaging tiger or "tiger" able to destroy buildings randomly) -- by keeping the fiction central, by keeping the problem of "fiction" and "reality" central he keeps us attentive both to the very real ways fantasy invades and shapes our consciousness all the time and to the ways a fantasy of "realism" can fallaciously assuage our reliance upon fantasies of life. He really has in mind a complex hybrid literature, works deviously and diligently to remake the novel using a great stew of ingredients stolen from a history far richer and stranger than just "postmodern," "genre," "realist" ....

And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. I enjoyed the novel, but I find its project as interesting as--or more interesting than--its performance. It's long -- too long? And, push come to shove, I find myself constantly recognizing the various tastes in the dish (oh, there's a dash of De Lillo, then a whiff of Paula Fox, and isn't that some Pynchon?), instead of relishing the meal.

I was disappointed by his last novel. And I admit that this one doesn't bowl me over as some earlier works had. But it's an eminently impressive try-out, a novel novel, a new track he's taking. Imagine what comes next, where he might be going...

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Oct 14, 2009

R. marked it as to-read

My Answers to the Random House Reader's Guide Questions

1. When do you think the action of the novel occurs? Is there a reason the time was left vague? Is this the "real" New York City?

A:

2. At what point did you begin to suspect that Chase Insteadman was living a fiction? At what point in their story do you think Perkus Tooth understood that Chase had been deceived about his role?

A:

3. Can you accept that Oona Laszlo is respon...more

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Aug 02, 2011

Candace Burton added it

Is the comparison of this book to _A Prayer for Owen Meany_ as blackly humorous as I fear? Because I loved both books but for completely different reasons. In part, I think I was completely smitten with Lethem's novel from the outset because of the literary wasteland I'd just finished (_Special Topics in Calamity Physics_)--this felt like being given a ginger ale after three days of stomach flu: it's a simple thing, but it feels like the best ever. Lethem's prose is magnificently evocative, and ...more

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Nov 21, 2011

Totoptero Horwendil Amleth rated it

Desde hace un tiempo vivo con una estadounidense, compañera de estudio. Compartimos un departamento junto con una gata y tres guitarras. Establecimos un día para practicar mi menoscabada pronunciación inglesa; la idea es comunicarnos en ese idioma durante todo el día (sin concesiones). Sólo hasta que empezamos el ejercicio idiomático de manera continua noté mis fallas en el vocabulario, la gramática y la pronunciación. Pero no sólo eso, el idioma se ha convertido en un tema de conversación const...moreDesde hace un tiempo vivo con una estadounidense, compañera de estudio. Compartimos un departamento junto con una gata y tres guitarras. Establecimos un día para practicar mi menoscabada pronunciación inglesa; la idea es comunicarnos en ese idioma durante todo el día (sin concesiones). Sólo hasta que empezamos el ejercicio idiomático de manera continua noté mis fallas en el vocabulario, la gramática y la pronunciación. Pero no sólo eso, el idioma se ha convertido en un tema de conversación constante: diferenciaciones inexistentes entre el inglés y español (el clásico to-be), el desplazamiento de objeto directo a objeto indirecto (el clásico “i want you”), cómo realizar traducciones literarias y demás. Y el tema me persigue: una chica me pide que le ayude a encontrar el paradero de un bus que (coincidencia) es el que quiero tomar. Esperamos cuarenta minutos, tiempo en el que me cuenta que acaba de asistir a su última clase como: ¡traductora literaria! Y ha sido después de todos esos momentos en que me doy cuenta que paso actualmente por un bache de textos extranjeros: la especialización de mis estudios en literaturas de habla hispana me ha llevado a la lectura y relectura de libros escritos originalmente en español y me ha obligado a dejar a un lado las novedades mundiales de Mondadori, TusQuets o Anagrama. Y las cosas se veían seguir así durante un tiempo largo hasta que la lectora más voraz que he conocido en mi vida (un saludo María), calmó mis ansias de novedades anglófonas con “Chronic City” de Jonathan Lethem.
Conocía la escritura de Lethem por textos anteriores como “Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa” “La Fortaleza de la Soledad” o “Motherless Brooklyn”; además por ser uno de los salvaguardas de la obra de Philip K. Dick (del que hace poco seleccionó y editó una monumental “Exégesis”). Quizá una de las razones por las cuales me gustaba tanto la escritura de Lethem era por su énfasis en un abordaje que tocaba el humor paródico en sus proporciones exactas: caminaba por una cuerda floja de la que siempre salía indemne. Hasta en la muy cruel (y perversa) novela de ciencia ficción “Muchacha con paisaje” lo lograba; siempre quise saber cómo lograba escribir estos libros desopilantes a partir de historias mínimas, íntimas. Con “Chronic City” ha dejado a un lado ese espacio de lo íntimo explotado a su máxima expresión, para entrar en el grupo de escritores norteamericanos que quieren escribir la gran novela newyorkina [el corrector ortográfico dice que debo escribir neoyorkina, nueva palabra]: ese mismo sueño de ser DosPasos y escribir “Manhattan Transfer” (Franzen, Tom Wolfe, la lista se sigue) y en ese paso ha perdido más de lo que ha ganado. Lethem cuenta la historia de Nueva York desde un personaje marginal, que sale de lo convencional desde una condensada y confusa forma de ver el mundo. Como si fuera un fractal parecido al laberinto de Minos, el cerebro de Perkus Tooth [el antihéroe de Lethem] abre puertas durante toda la novela y crea conexiones (algunas coherentes, algunas absurdas) que llegan a tocar hasta al nadaísmo. La novela es expansiva más que intensiva: las largas conversaciones en las que los personajes fuman cantidades ingentes de marihuana, ensanchan la novela hasta desconyuntarla. Aunque el problema no es esa expansión desbordante, en realidad es la resaca de marihuana la que molesta: pasado un capítulo hiperreferencial y complejo que se espesa en medio de las nubes del “pot chronic”, se sigue otro que guarda una lejana relación con el anterior y que pareciera se parte de otra novela. Acostumbrado a novelas que se cierran sobre sí mismas, o que se abren para cerrarse, la novela de Lethem pareciera que tiene más hilos sueltos que tejido en urdiembre. Ahora, si me fuera posible separar algunos elementos de la novela en historias individuales, creo que estaría escribiendo algo totalmente diferente. La idea fabulosa de los calderos como tesoros inmateriales, la emocionante y patética vida en los hoteles de perros, el tigre que destruye aleatoriamente partes prescindibles de la ciudad, las cartas de la astronauta Janice Trumbull atrapada en la estación internacional, la niebla gris que obliga a mudarse y hace a Manhattan cada vez más pequeña, la versiones “No war” del New york Times, los falsos (¿reales?) Fiordos que se abren en plazas y bosques, la actuación natural y los guionistas sombra… todas estas historias aparecen como desarrollos fenomenales y espeluznantes en la novela de Lethem. No sé muy bien porqué la insistencia de esa especie de “novela total” con la que muchos escritores estadounidenses están obsesionados, cuando en este libro es posible encontrar excelentes historias cortas que podrían ser narradas de manera fenomenal. Pero las conexiones grandilocuentes no sólo cubren la idea de novela total: la hiperreferencialidad del texto sorprende. Acabo el libro con un sinsabor extraño, Lethem logró meter en un solo libro una especie de receta perfecta para hacer la novela de la década en New York: un personaje a lo Ignatius Reilly, una resolución típica de Philip Dick, una ambientación que nada tiene que envidiarle a Paul Auster, referencialidades de cultura popular a lo Chabon (aunque ya Lethem había demostrado su poder en “La Fortaleza de la Soledad”), misterios existenciales que rozan lo filosófico, lo metafísico y lo místico a lo Murakami, bromas inteligentes a lo Kurt Vonnegut… y con todo eso no es una novela que me logre encantar como lo hicieron conmigo todos los anteriores autores y libros. A pesar de sus 450 páginas, el espacio queda corto para tan abarcadora tarea que se propuso Lethem; por eso disfruto más sus novelas cortas como “Muchacha con Paisaje” o “Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa”. O quizá no entendí
nada de fondo, y me parece extraño que el New York Times la elija como la mejor novela del 2009 y le achaco tal decisión a que se cuidan las espaldas porque de repente Lethem se convirtió en el chico New Yoker por excelencia.
O quizá los elementos se pierden con una traducción (española, obviamente. Un par de “¡cojones!” desentonan, aunque se ve el esfuerzo de traducir en un castellano un poco más neutro que en los libros de Palahniuk, por ejemplo) que no logra pasar efectiva y realmente palabras-ideas-guiños como Chronic, Insteadman, Obstinate Dust. En el caso de esta última los traductores logran hacer ese guiño Lethemeniano (acabo de inventar esa palabra), al traducir el título del libro como “La bruma indistinta” en la cual mantienen la relación con “La broma infinita” de David Foster Wallace (Ralph Warden Meeker en la novela). Pero así como logré encontrar unas cuantas relaciones (muchas de ellas encontradas por cortesía de mi roomate) perdidas en la traducción, ¿cuántas habré perdido? seguro muchas. Mientras sigo con mis clases de inglés (que pretendo seguir hasta darme cuenta que para aprenderlo realmente tengo que viajar) seguiré con traducciones varias y perdiendo la mitad de las aperturas lingüísticas de mis autores angloparlantes favoritos. Al menos ahora con un pequeño grito puedo preguntar una que otra duda y aclarar las polivalencias del lenguaje. Cuando empiece un libro de Murakami, intentaré mudarme con una japonesa.(less)

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Jun 30, 2011

Jordan Ferguson rated it

I discovered Jonathan Lethem purely by accident. I hung out in bookstores long before I was paid to do so, though in 2005 my reading habits were decidedly more four-colour and periodical in nature, as I continued amassing the 2,000+ issue comic collection I’ve mentioned in these pages before. So it was no surprise Lethem’s 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude called out to me [titled after Superman's Arctic hideaway]. I tore through the thing in about a week, and even though I found the linguis...moreI discovered Jonathan Lethem purely by accident. I hung out in bookstores long before I was paid to do so, though in 2005 my reading habits were decidedly more four-colour and periodical in nature, as I continued amassing the 2,000+ issue comic collection I’ve mentioned in these pages before. So it was no surprise Lethem’s 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude called out to me [titled after Superman's Arctic hideaway]. I tore through the thing in about a week, and even though I found the linguistic choices a little difficult, and ultimately found Dylan a bit of a whiny prat [I get it, no one's realer than you, Brooklyn we go hard, blahbluhblah] the book’s combination of comic book lore, racial crossover and nascent hip-hop culture won me over. I still recommend that book to people in the store today.

Since then, I’ve been through most of Lethem’s work, with the exception of a few early, explixitly scifi novels. Motherless Brooklyn is still my favourite novel, The Happy Man my favourite short story, and that essay in The Disappointment Artist about seeing Star Wars however many times my favourite nonfiction piece, possibly ever by anyone.

So I was thrilled when a package showed up at work for me with an advance copy of Lethem’s new novel Chronic City. His previous novel You Don’t Love Me Yet didn’t really set me on fire [it's too hard to write about music, and I never understood why Lethem felt he had to write the novel...like Murakami's After Dark, it was more like a catch-all for ideas he didn't know what else to do with] so I was excited to take another crack at him.

Yeeaaaahhhh….

Shifting his locale of choice from Brooklyn to Manhattan-that-is-not-our-Manhattan, Chronic City follows Chase Insteadman, a former child actor who now plays the role of despondent fiance to Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped on the International Space Station, which has been permanently separated from Earth by a line of Chinese orbital mines. He wanders the city doing the odd bout of voiceover work for the Criterion Collection and waiting for the letters Janice sends from the station, which are then published in the New York Times [war free edition, of course].

It’s at the Criterion offices that Chase meets Perkus Tooth, a former critic and street artist who writes unsolicited liner notes, smokes a lot of pot and stays mostly sequestered in his filthy 84th Street apartment, leaving only to grab cheeseburgers at the diner a block away. Devoid of anything else to do with his time except collect residuals from his sitcom days and wait for his next missive from Janice, Chase starts hanging out at Perkus’s apartment, smoking an equal amount of pot and trying to play dutiful student as Perkus constructs elaborate theories on the significance of everything from Brandon, Mailer and the Muppets [or Gnuppets, as they're called in this world]. Rounding out the motley crew are Perkus former college classmate Richard Abneg, a former lefty activist and current fixer for the city’s billionaire mayor, and Oona Laszlow, who once glued up Tooth’s street art and now ghostwrites memoirs for WNBA players and Nobel winning physicists.

Like I said, the book takes place in a world that is like but is not ours: a gray fog surrounds Manhattan for so long its residents begin to doubt the world beyond it, fjords are placed in the middle of the city and a giant, two-storey tall tiger may or may not be wandering the urban landscape, disrupting subway service and demolishing buildings. Lethem uses the parallel world to sling shots at everything from the Twin Towers memorial project to Second Life to David Foster Wallce [a giant book called Obstinate Dust gets chucked into the aforementioned fjord for being too frustratingly difficult to read]. All the while, Perkus is constructing his theories on what it all really means, and imparting them on whoever will listen.

The problem is, Perkus is a douchebag. Chase [or Lethem] wants the reader to care about him so badly, but it just never fires off. Lethem’s succeeded in creating a vibrant character in the sense that you can’t wait to be rid of him and his pontificating and assurance that he knows more than everyone around him. If you went to a liberal arts college, you know Perkus Tooth, he was the turd in your English or Philosophy or PoliSci class who had to comment on fucking everything, then went out to the campus square and held court over the other stoner burnouts, preaching that the education they were paying for was teaching them nothing. By the time Perkus’s ultimate destiny is decided in the book’s closing moments, it’s a relief to be rid of him. Spoiler alert.

Lethem seems to have a bit of a boner for the Perkus type. He immediately reminded of Carl, the complainer from You Don’t Love Me Yet, who’s supposed to be so earthshatteringly brilliant it makes total sense that young Lucinda would fall in love with him. Only it never does. Perkus has the same issue. The book feels like Lethem is trying to make big statements about our present and future, and how bad it’s sucking compared to what has come before, but he relies on Perkus to get these points across, while being narrated by Chase [aside from one jarring third-as-first-person interlude when Perkus goes to an acupuncturist]. While I like what Lethem’s trying to say, ultimately I felt like the book failed in execution, and even the ‘twist’ at the book’s conclusion felt anticlimactic, which may have been the point.

Still, Lethem keeps me as a reader because of the soundness of his ideas, despite the misfires in his execution.(less)

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May 04, 2011

Burn rated it

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Chase Insteadman ist schon dem Namen nach ein Lückenfüller. Als ehemaliger Kinderstar geht er ganz auf in seiner neuen Rolle als Liebling der New Yorker High Society. Der Schauspieler im Ruhestand lebt von Tantiemen, gehört zur Tischdekoration von Wohltätigkeitsveranstaltungen und führt eine medienwirksame Fernbeziehung, die diesen Namen wirklich verdient. Er ist nämlich verlobt mit einer Astronautin, die, verloren im Weltall, auf einer Raumstation festsitzt, die von chinesischen Minen umzingelt...more

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Apr 23, 2011

Alan rated it

Recommends it for: Manhattanites, Manhattan-drinkers and all you poor exiles from the City

Recommended to Alan by: Previous work and a complicated setting

Feverish and insular, Chronic City creates a whole world out of a few city blocks, on an island which is itself a mere 33 square miles in area (just about the same size, I found out recently, as the wilderness of Oregon's own Sauvie Island). It's a world where the far side of a city park can be an exotic and difficult tourist destination:

"The West Side was a mysterious distance from the East, the howling park between us and home." (p.61)

Lethem does a fine job of portraying people just...more

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Mar 30, 2011

Elaine rated it

Shelves: american-contemporary-writers

I'm generally a huge fan of Mr. Lethem's prose, but this book eludes me. There's a great play with the thematic twinning of fake versus real, whether Manhattan itself can be a sort of illusionist dreamscape with its flotilla of rich upper-crust East Siders, its quirky on-the-fringe inhabitants, its hobos and entrepreneurs and underground trade denizens. I was more than once reminded of Matrix, especially when the discussion centered around simulated reality, but in the end, I'm just puzzled. ...moreI'm generally a huge fan of Mr. Lethem's prose, but this book eludes me. There's a great play with the thematic twinning of fake versus real, whether Manhattan itself can be a sort of illusionist dreamscape with its flotilla of rich upper-crust East Siders, its quirky on-the-fringe inhabitants, its hobos and entrepreneurs and underground trade denizens. I was more than once reminded of Matrix, especially when the discussion centered around simulated reality, but in the end, I'm just puzzled. That Matrix thing has already been done. My admiration of Lethem, and having read his previous books, leads me to think he wouldn't even jump into this foray unless he had something new to add to this hoopla.

The tale ostensibly centers around one former child-star -- Chase Insteadman (who mistakenly gets called Chase Unperson) and his striking up a friendship with Perkus Tooth, a former rock star critic (broadside creator and self-appointed cultural watchdog for those of us who may not be familiar with Frank O'Hara, Joe Brainerd etc.). The duo is joined by an old childhood friend of Perkus, Richard Abneg and his high society consort, Georgina Hawkmanaji. They often congregate in Perkus Tooth's apartment on Eighty Fourth St. and smoke pot, watch old black and whites until the wee hours, discuss esoteric issues such as whether the tiger that had escaped and now prowled Manhattan wreaking havoc indiscriminately on New York public services is real or a Mayoral cover-up for something more sinister, whether Marlon Brando is really alive or dead, whether life itself as we know it is Yet Another World (think Second Life). They become obsessed with a hunt for something called a chaldron -- a kind of intriguing vase -- that began trading on Ebay for thousands of dollars. In their chase of the chaldron, they in fact discover more layers of virtual reality than they bargained for. Floating into this mix is the fact that Chase Insteadman is supposed to be engaged to a lady astronaut lost in space -- Janice Trumbull, whose love letters to Chase Insteadman, become a sort of public treasure to be consumed by the general Manhattan audience. At Perkus Tooth's apartment, Chase also meets finally one Oona Laszlo - a ghostwriter-- whose current project led her to view huge dug-up craters called art produced by Laird Noteless. Chase Insteadman then engages in a torrid affair with said Oona Laszlo to reach a denouement that is satisfying to no one, not Chase, not Oona, certainly not the reader.

Okay? What's the upshot? I've read a 547 page book and I keep thinking the whole book is an algorithm. But for what? Even the names -- Perkus Tooth, somebody Toothbrush, Laird Noteless (come on...), Chase Insteadman (instead of who?) -- feel like some kind of tongue-in-cheek Fibonacci sequence. I found Perkus Tooth too eccentric and strange, and despite attempts to make him lovable, he just wasn't, because half the time, I couldn't understand what he was on about. Chase Insteadman felt limp to me, purposeless, and spends all his time pushing away guilt he's supposed to feel about cheating on his lost-in-space astronaut fiance (who....get this....actually develops cancer of the foot in space and has to undergo a traumatic amputation), and the rest of the time led by his dick. To Tooth's fullness, Chase Insteadman offers one-dimensional caricature, but even this would have been okay, if there was just one personality trait about this whole bunch that made me care. Richard Abneg (short for abnegation?) and Georgina Hawkmanaji are too peripheral to matter. The chaldron? I couldn't climb on board that obsession no matter how I tried, probably because the characters were obsessed when stoned out of their minds. It's a bit like watching other people having a merry old time drinking or orgying, and you're sitting on the bench, just watching...how fun is that, really?

I do come away with a sense that this is a very clever writer. In a way, the entire novel is a kind of play with reality and fiction. What a reader expects to get out of fiction. We know it's not real, but we want so badly to be fed a story that feels so real it overtakes our own life for the space of however many hours it takes to transport the fantasy. This novel refuses to do just that. Deliberately. Steadfastly. In its slippery quality, a stranger than strange story, one that reminisces Twilight Zone, it continuously gives you a story that makes you go, "Seriously?"
(less)

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Mar 23, 2011

Mariel rated it

Recommends it for: goddess of drought

Recommended to Mariel by: relevant ballads

Shelves: asleepanddreaming

"I lose some sales and my boss won't be happy
But I can't stop listening to the sound
Of two soft voices mended in perfection
From the reels of this record that I found
Everyday there's a boy in the mirror
Asking me what are you doing here
Finding all my previous motives
Growing increasingly unclear" - Kings of Convenience 'Homesick'

That's my "ellipisistic knowledge".

"Ellipsis is like a window opening, Ch...more

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Nov 29, 2010

Derek Wolfgram rated it

Jonathan Lethem is an extraordinarily inventive, evocative writer with an incredible gift for creating memorable, engaging characters. Chronic City is his third novel that serves as a paean to New York City. While the first two, Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, are my two favorite Lethem novels, Chronic CIty misses the mark for me.

Of course, Lethem on a bad day is still a fine writer. But this story and its characters simply did not make me care about them (except for Ava ...more

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Nov 22, 2010

Karen rated it

I didn't get this book. I usually love Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn is one of my favorite books - but I found little to like about Chronic City. The language is often awesome, hence the two stars, but the story and cultural references bored me. (I also didn't get most of them, although I patted myself on the back for realizing "Obstinate Dust" by "Ralph Warren Meeker" was a reference to "Infinite Jest".) I tend to dislike novels that are packed with references to ...more

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Nov 16, 2010

Stefani rated it

Shelves: classic-ny, funny

I tend to be obsessed with New York City—although having lived in the soul-crushing reality that is the city, a reality that bears little resemblance to the literary and cinematic portrayals of which I am fond, has tempered my enthusiasm and relegated it to appreciate from afar—which of course is why I reached for this novel among the literary line-up at the Honolulu airport store.

Having lived in said city, yes, I can relate to the existence of characters like Perkus and Chase, who see...more

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Jul 06, 2010

Tina rated it

I had to force myself to finish this one. I love Lethem's style and concepts, but this story lacked any real plot in my eyes - the characters just bungle around while being pretty unlikeable. Chase was a loser, pretty much, and Perkus was one step from being the stereotypical smart-yet-weird, stoner, faux-intellectual. It wasn't that the story was boring; it was just useless and borderline cliche in some aspects. I couldn't empathize with a lazy once-actor, nor with an evidently smart but absolu...more

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Jun 17, 2010

Brayden rated it

Not nearly as good as Motherless Brooklyn but still an engaging novel with the obscure cultural references that admirers of Lethem expect. The book follows a former child actor, now in his early forties and living off royalties in Manhattan, as he meets a series of new friends that awaken in him an intrigue for conspiracy theory, an interest in tangential cultural critique, and a desire for smoking pot. The book's most interesting character, Perkus Tooth, is an outsider, hermit-like cultural sno...more

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Jun 17, 2010

Matt rated it

I think everyone has heard the statement that when all you've got is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.... I think the same idea holds here, that Lethem is a novelist, so when he has something to write, he tries to do it in a novel even when a novel might not be the right form.

There's a lot of interesting material here, including a pretty interesting (though not necessarily new) idea about the simulated nature of our reality-- it owes a lot to Baudrillard, I think, though...more

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Jun 02, 2010

Parker rated it

Probably Lethem's most complex work to date, Chronic City is a bizarre and entertaining examination of a handful of characters living in an unusual alternate Upper East Side. Former beloved child actor Chase Insteadman is famed throughout the city for being in the longest distance relationship possible, with an astronaut stranded in a wrecked space station beyond a field of Chinese space mines. The city lives in fear of a tiger said to be loose on Second Avenue. Along the way, we encounter a str...more

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May 16, 2010

Casey rated it

For a few days I thought of not reviewing this book. I was so angry with it I just felt it would be a review full of venom. But as the days have passed and I’ve moved on to another book and the duties of daily living, my anger has dispersed.

Chronic City is an exploration in a wordy world of meaningless. Jonathan Lethem has written books I really like. That’s why reading this book for me was so difficult to take. Lethem force feeds us the lives of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth. Yes ...moreFor a few days I thought of not reviewing this book. I was so angry with it I just felt it would be a review full of venom. But as the days have passed and I’ve moved on to another book and the duties of daily living, my anger has dispersed.

Chronic City is an exploration in a wordy world of meaningless. Jonathan Lethem has written books I really like. That’s why reading this book for me was so difficult to take. Lethem force feeds us the lives of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth. Yes those are real names only Lethem can summon. Chase was a child actor who now lives off the fame of his earlier years doing- well nothing. He meets Perkus a dope smoking, conspiracy loving ex-rock and roll critic through a common acquaintance. It’s this friendship that drives the story. But it’s a friendship based on nothingness.

I’ve had a recent e-mail conversation with someone else who has also unfortunately spent time with this novel. We both feel like we missed something. Like what the hell was the point of Chases girlfriend being trapped on a space station, a two story high tiger running amok in the New York subway system or the most infuriating sections of this book, the pages and pages of a search for a chaldron. The chaldron and the pages about it made me so hopelessly angry that I wanted my dog to eat this book right out of my hands and just tear it to bits.

I’m not even going to touch on the ending of this book. Some of you will find this book years later in it’s soft cover form and think to yourself “it can’t be that bad”. You’ll buy it and start to read it and go ” it’s going to get better, it just has to”. You will finish it and say ” did that just happen, can this book be that pointless”.

I’m sorry Mr. Lethem I don’t carve up that many books when reviewing, but you wasted my time, you made me angry as reader and you failed to engage me the reader into your Chronic City. Please come down off your high horse and write a book with feeling. Feeling Mr Lethem you have the talent stop screwing around. (less)

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Apr 12, 2010

Eugene rated it

for all CHRONIC CITY's ambition and for all its frantic counterculture name-dropping and for all its borrowed and original wackiness (a giant tiger, love letters from a marooned astronaut fiance, psychedelic ceramics) lethem's latest is at heart a comedy of manners, gently lampooning a fundamentally effete manhattan. it's also more page six than swiftian, the sting and focus of its satire sadly dulled and clouded as if in a solipsistic, self-entertaining mary jane fog.

which is both ...more

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Mar 14, 2010

Alex V. rated it

It took so long for me to read Chronic City it started to feel like I was roommates with the sophisticated drifters populating it. The characters and plots are absurd: a poetic music critic is befriended by a former child star who is engaged to an astronaut stranded on a doomed space station, just for starters.

The Manhattan they inhabit is a similarly doomed word to the space station, bathed in fog, pocked with man-made art chasms and ravaged by a giant tiger; and yet this book works as effortl...more

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Mar 11, 2010

Jeremy rated it

I love this Lethem guy.

He probably smokes too much weed to be much fun in person, but who knows?

The characters in this novel (and his others, oh yes) are almost constantly stoned, and it matters because weed becomes a huge factor in making Chronic City's events believable. I had a disturbing sense, once I became immersed in the book, of how impossible it is to know anything--and I mean this on the human, daily scale--about the world we live in. Manhattan is a perfect ci...more

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Feb 13, 2010

Dana rated it

I haven't enjoyed a book so much in ages. It is laugh out loud funny and the contemporary cultural references to bands, places, and pop icons make you feel smart. Then Lethem throws us a curve by inventing events, like a chocolate smell that engulfs Manhattan, that are just close enough to what really happened to be reminiscent and send you to google for confirmation. That seems to be the point: his characters talk about Baudrillard and virtual worlds theory even as his novel enacts the phil...more

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Feb 09, 2010

Nick Lomonossoff rated it

Apologies in advance to all fans of Jonathan Lethem, but I found 'Chronic City' an incredibly silly, overblown and tedious book. The author never seems to be able to decide whether he wants to create a kind of Pynchonesque delirium, in which eclectic literary artifact matters more than character and plot, or a simple comedy of manners set in Manhattan - and the result is an uneven mess. He never really answers the question (if he ever even considered asking himself) why the general reader shoul...more

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Jan 10, 2010

Timothy rated it

Shelves: fiction

I'm not truly convinced I liked this book - which might be what I liked best about it. In some ways, it hearkens back to Lethen's Gun with Occasional Music, the book in which I feel in love with his writing: It has the same genre-straddling reach, the same prompting of thought while distracting with absurdity, the same gloriously written sentences.

I bounced off, at least a bit, through the first third, drawn in more by the strength of the writing itself, rather than anything happenin...more

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Jan 10, 2010

christa rated it

Jonathan Letham's Manhattan is a variation of the real one that a former child-actor still pulling in a chunk of change might have access to: a hot-pants dinner party with the mayor in a mansion where the carpeting on the stairs is so thick that a guest can climb soundlessly to the top and check out the mayor's knacks; a place where an eccentric man whose wardrobe consists of pajama-ware and whose wallet bursts at the seams might pay bucko bucks to share a meal in a rented-out restaurant with a ...moreJonathan Letham's Manhattan is a variation of the real one that a former child-actor still pulling in a chunk of change might have access to: a hot-pants dinner party with the mayor in a mansion where the carpeting on the stairs is so thick that a guest can climb soundlessly to the top and check out the mayor's knacks; a place where an eccentric man whose wardrobe consists of pajama-ware and whose wallet bursts at the seams might pay bucko bucks to share a meal in a rented-out restaurant with a D-list actor who has re-achieved A-list celebrity.

A pre-established gray fog blankets the downtown area; an artist creates gaping maws in the ground that an occasional businessman might consider a good place to do a suicidal belly flop; a tiger is loose in the city, tearing up bodegas and inspiring a cultish Web watch. Briefly, the city is enveloped in something that is defined as a chocolate smell by some residents, a buzzing by others; a vacant high rise becomes a home for homeless dog.

"Chronic City" is a statement on authenticity and altered truths, a cultural satire, and in its best moments a portrait of BFFs chillaxing at the pad, smoking weed and talking smart, getting crunk on coffee, mowing down burgers and being socially awkward with the ladies.

Chase Insteadman is a former child actor living on the residuals of the sitcom he starred in years ago. His fiance Janice Trumbull is an astronaut who is stuck in space between a rock and a layer of Chinese land, er, space mines. She has foot cancer, and sends him epic love letters that are published in the New York Times -- which conveniently has the option of a war-free edition.

The story opens the day that our hero meets Perkus Tooth, a whacked out former artist turned rock critic with a wonky eye. Perkus Tooth serves as a cultural tutor for Chase, feeding him music, movies, dope, and his wild drooling theories about Marlon Brando or the font used in The New Yorker. These two are the foundation for a sort of Seinfeldian circle of friends: In walks a ghostwriter named Oona Lazslo, who rocks Chase Insteadman's world -- if not just his bed; Richard Abneg, who is a low-level fixer for the mayor, and his bird-like mate Georgina Hawkmannaji (AKA "Hawkman").

This crowd orbits a small part of the Upper East Side and becomes entrenched in a mystery surrounding beautiful artifacts called chaldrons, rare vase-like pieces for which the group is constantly out-bid on eBay.

"Chronic City" is a doozy with some really crazy writing that left my jaw unhinged. It has thick, wordy sentences that are so visual. It also has rabid rants that require holding onto a railing to navigate. Mostly it is a really fantastic stroll through a world that is familiar, and just left of familiar.

Mostly, I love this description of Oona Lazslo:

"She wore black ... making her like a marker scribble, a silhouette in spastic motion in that cramped kitchen. ... Black hair, too, in bangs and a neat bob. Had Perkus spilled a pot of coffee on his tiles and the coffee sprung to life as a woman an instant before I had opened the door, it would have explained her perfectly." (less)

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Jan 05, 2010

Matt rated it

Hank Moody (David Duchovny) from Californication said that he could no longer tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous, a feeling I had throughtout Lethem's latest novel Chronic City. Is he serious or just messing with us? Are his eloborate sentences masterful creations of the english language, or eye-rolling sarcastic rants?
This is the weakest of all the books of his that I've read so far, but I still kinda liked it. It reminded me of A Confederacy of Dunces, just swi...more

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About Jonathan Lethem

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of seven novels. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harpers, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among others.

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Quotes from Chronic City

“Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a 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. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain.” — 3 people liked it

“...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?” — 2 people liked it

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