Chronic City

Customer Reviews

• Hipsters Without a Cause  Sep 26, 2009 (34 of 39 found this helpful)

  I'm a big fan of Lethem's writings. I like his sensibility and always feel he has something compelling to say about the human condition.
  
  Chronic City, like Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, is full of jokes, especially about the hipster crowd. A lot of the jokes have an in-the-know or insider quality. The characters' names, Chase Insteadman, Perkus Tooth, Oona Laszlo, to name a few, sound eerily similar to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. There is also Ralph Warden Meeker, the author of a 1,000-page novel Obstinate Dust. This seems like a tongue-in-cheek allusion to David Foster Wallace and his sprawling Infinite Jest. One of my favorite jokes is how film critic Perkus Tooth retypes New Yorker articles in a different font style because he believes their gravitas and persuasion is dependent, not on content, but on the iconography of the New Yorker itself. As a compendium of jokes written to be enjoyed by the literati cognoscenti the novel is hilarious.
  
  Sadly, though, Chronic City didn't work as a compelling and absorbing narrative. In fact, the plot left me incurably cold, emotionally distant, and ultimately frustrated.
  
  Stylistically, the novel is a success as Lethem's language and craft always prove eloquent and polished. But this self-consciously hipster novel suffers from a lacking plot engine, self-indulgent characters prone to long-winded discussions about their esoteric knowledge of the arts, and as such the novel suffers from being more of an intellectual exercise with little emotional power. Its theme of hipsters lacking direction doesn't have enough plot impetus or emotional involvement to be rendered with the kind of power I expect from Jonathan Lethem. Five stars for jokes; three stars for plot line.

• What goes around ... keeps coming back.  Oct 2, 2009 (32 of 39 found this helpful)

  In case you miss some events the first time, don't worry Lethem will return to them - and return to them - until you want to scream "Get on with the story! (If there is one.)". Thus went the first half of this book.
  
  Actually there were some attempts to mingle several stories, none of which will push this to the top of Lethem's bibliography. As much as I usually enjoy Lethem, this one was a disappointment.
  
  The whole book is about some amorphous Manhattan of perhaps some not-so-distant future. The characters are equally as formless as they wander without purpose from one juvenile, hedonistic romp with sex, pot and booze, to another. They are equally unwilling to provide meaning to each other's lives - and they are 'friends'.
  
  Of course, no book by Lethem is a total flub. There are always enough zingers and turns of phrase to keep even a lesser effort worth another turn of a page. The interactions of the characters are presented in a noirish style, and where the novel does advance, there were some moments of meaning.
  
  Fortunately, I'll probably have forgotten this one before Lethem releases his next one - and hopefully the next one will have something about it to remember. I suggest you to wait for that next one and give this one a pass.
  

• A fine book, but not for me.  Oct 1, 2009 (20 of 24 found this helpful)

  There's nothing wrong with this book, but it was a mistake for me. I got it because I am an admirer of Jonathan Lethem -- and I still am -- but while I loved "Gun, With Occasional Music" and "The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye," his literary novels are just too detached and meandering for me to enjoy. I love the way he writes, and there are some wonderful flourishes in this book -- I particularly liked Laird Noteless, the "sculptor" whose works are nothing more than enormous holes in the ground in awkward places, and the moment when the main character, Chase Insteadman, has one of those classic hypochondriacal synaesthetic attacks, when he is overwhelmed by sensation and alienation -- and it turns out he has the flu.
  
  But for the most part, the book felt wrong to me. I need more of a narrative and less self-aware humor. I have also known people like Perkus Tooth, and I don't like them, so sympathy for this guy was hard to drum up. For those who enjoy postmodernist literature, I think this book would probably be a wonderful experience, but I couldn't finish it. Which, of course, makes me feel like a semi-literate buffoon, but there are too many books out there to read, and enjoy reading, for me to spend more time slogging through something that I can't get a handle on.

• The real and the surreal clash in Lethem's Manhattan  Oct 14, 2009 (9 of 11 found this helpful)

  If Seinfeld was "the show about nothing," then Chronic City just may be the novel about nothing. It's beautifully written, but very little happens in the course of its 480 pages. To keep my comparison alive, you'd find your "Jerry" in protagonist Chase Insteadman--one of the many unusual names we'll discuss in a moment. The book's jacket copy describes him like this:
  
  "Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much-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."
  
  Within the novel's text, Chase describes himself: "My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I'm truly a vacuum filled by the folks I'm with, and vapidly neutral in their absence." In other words, a hard character to really care about.
  
  Chase is surrounded by a group of equally oddly-named friends. Foremost among them is Perkus Tooth, the "Kramer" of the bunch. Perkus is long past quirky and deep into weird territory. He's a largely sequestered social critic who spends his days and nights getting high and sharing semi-coherent rants with a selected few. Perkus's life-long friend, Richard Abneg, a city bureaucrat, can be our "George." And their long-time associate, and Chase's secret lover, Oona Laszlo, rounds out our quartet as "Elaine."
  
  My comparison with this long-dead television show is a little ridiculous, but at the same time, it's not crazy at all. These are caricature New Yorkers, doing their thing. Chase is the least objectionable of the bunch, but none of them are all that likeable. By far, the most sympathetic character is Janice Trumball, trapped in space and pining for her man. Her letters home were my favorite part of the novel, but they were few and far between.
  
  So, I mentioned the names. To those already listed add Strabo Blandiana, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanjani, Anne Sprillthmar, and many others. The crazy names certainly weren't randomly selected, and it's no casual mistake when Chase is erroneously addressed as "Chase Unperson," and Perkus is later referred to as "Mr. Pincus Truth." Lethem winks at his readers with this passage:
  
  "His name is Stanley Toothbrush."
  "See, now you're definitely making fun of me, because that's idiotic."
  "Stanley would be awfully hurt if he heard you. You have no idea how often people laugh in his face."
  "Toothbrush... that's just a little hard to swallow."
  "No more so than stuff you swallow every day."
  
  The New York setting is as much, if not more, of a character than any of the others. (And the title references not only Manhattan, but a grade of marijuana. Did I mention the characters spend interminable portions of the novel getting high and having only vaguely comprehensible conversations?) Lethem's Manhattan is immediately recognizable; I've eaten at the burger joint the characters frequent. At the same time, it's a sort of bizarro Manhattan where the city and the citizens have to deal with tigers run amok, a pervasive scent of chocolate, and can choose to read the "War-Free Edition" of the Times. Muppets are Gnuppets, and are referenced constantly. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
  
  I don't think anyone but Jonathan Lethem will ever understand what it all means, but by the end I understood what he was getting at. I just didn't care. As terrific as some of the writing is, the novel as a whole is rather tedious, and ultimately unsuccessful. I can't honestly recommend reading it unless, perhaps, you're a pothead with an extraordinary vocabulary.

• Interesting if not always engaging  Nov 11, 2009 (3 of 3 found this helpful)

  I was aware of Jonathan Lethem only through one of his previous novels 'Motherless Brooklyn' which I remember being an entertaining read. 'Chronic City' is certainly a lot more abstract, some may say it's mature, but I found it a little wanting to be honest.
  
  For the first 200 pages or so, we meet a collection of characters living in some kind of parallel Manhattan to the one we know and love, what with its strange chocolate smell in the air, giant tiger on the loose, and incessant fog. It's an interesting place, and Lethem throws in many cultural references, some of which I understood, other which passed over my head. Our chief characters however, appear rather selfish and unlikeable -- perhaps that was the point, as they laze around and don't really do anything but celebrate themselves. The only saving grace are the beautifully emotional letters from Janice Turnbull, our lead character Chase Insteadman's estranged fiancee, who finds herself trapped in space. These letters bring a soft touch to proceedings which helped me warm to the novel somewhat.
  
  Just when things seem to be going awry, Lethem produces a major event about halfway through the novel, and all of a sudden, the emotional frailties of most of the main protagonists are finally revealed, and the novel turns from being fairly humdrum to being quite readable. From there on in, we begin to learn more about this strange quasi-real Manhattan, and Perkus Tooth's descent into despair and helplessness is brilliantly written if perhaps not always too well explained.
  
  But this seems to be the key thing with 'Chronic City': Not everything is explained. The fine lines between reality and virtual reality are blurred throughout. What's real and what's an illusion is a constant theme, despite some explanation using the familiar Linden Lab 'Second Life' virtual reality software here entitled "Yet Another World" to help illustrate that we may, indeed, all be just merely part of a simulation and not in control of our own destinies as we like to believe.
  
  I was rarely bored while reading 'Chronic City', but neither was I as engaged as I would've liked. There's no denying that Lethem is a great writer, full of interesting ideas, but the novel seems to work more on a level as a piece of experimentation, rather then a tightly-plotted and exciting story. However, perhaps, that was the point.
  
  I find it hard to recommend this book, hence the three star review, but it is still, strangely enough, well worth reading. How's that for a parallel universe?