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 the tripod Pit Bull). While the narrative may have been carefully crafted to emphasize the characters' ironic detachment from anything "real," it worked too well. Rather than the deep, nuanced portrait of Lionel Essrog in Motherless Brooklyn, everyone here is a shallow caricature of a different flavor of jaded New Yorker, kind of a postmodern, asexual hipster version of Sex and the City.

Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh. But I really didn't care about these people. There is a genius twist at the end that paints a beautiful picture of unrequited love, but by then it was too late for me. If the novel had been half the length, it might have been more effective. As it is, I'll look forward to Lethem's next novel... every work is always markedly different from the one that comes before. In this case, that's a good thing.