Book Review: Jonathan Lethem, "Chronic City"

Soooooo.... the first completed book of 2010. Pretty exciting. I am sure I have spoken before of how my tired eyes, body and brain cannot seem to log more then 10-20 minutes a night of reading in bed. It seems so.... weak. But that is me. Let me bore you again with a rant about jonathan Lethem. I think he is in the top two or three writers plunking on a keyboard anywhere in America. He has perfect tone... pitch perfect for modern culture and society. His characters are immersed in pop culture without the total self irony that depresses in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. His characters are always well drawn and clearly, for lack of a better term, loved.

Chronic is set in NYC and our narrator is a grown up childhood star named (improbably as all of Lethem's characters) Chase Insteadman. he is engaged to be married to an astronaut trapped on the space station which has been cut off by Chinese space mines. This has assisted him, along with his residuals, in leading a life of glamour and sympathy in high society. He meets his angst in the form of a guy named Perkus Tooth, a failed rock critic, broad sider and social outcast and they get high on designer marijuana as Perkus spins tales speculating on whether they are just puppets in a play, like the Matrix. Perkus has a childhood friend who is now chief fixer for the mayor. The city is being terrorized by a giant tiger, or an errant tunnel digging machine and the weather varies from inexplicably deep snows to making the town smell of chocolate for days on end. Chase meet's another one of Perkus' friends name Oona and a love interest ensues.

The tangents of the book are what enthrall. Tigers and odd weather, homeless men and designers of alternate computer realities and chaldrons, virtual chaldrons, and getting high and bidding on things on E-Bay when your high. It just goes on and and on... but in a good way. relationships seem to bend almost to breaking but then seem to make a full circle. he explores friendships, relationships, art and pretense, without p[retention. I love this guy.

Needless to say it all gets complicated. It also gets a little sad but it is a tour de force of literature. This is a guy who is still writing at the top of his game and for the last hundred pages of confusion and tragedy, as his abandoned fiance' battles cancer on the space shuttle and has to have her foot amputated (yes it gets a little dark) the book is hard to put down. Surprisingly... things do not go well for Perkus and Chase confronts his own shallow life,,, in a good way... maybe... anyway. This is art.

Here is a better review from the N.Y. Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Cowles-t.html

9 Slingers on the 10 Scale.