Chronic City - Softcover

Lethem, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571235662 ISBN 13: 9780571235667

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2009

Synopsis

Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, living off his earnings as a child star. Chase owes his current social status 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, and trapped in a vague routine punctuated only by Upper Eastside dinner parties and engagements.

Into Chase's life 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' 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. Together Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth - that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought.

Beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, Lethem's new novel is as always, utterly unique.

About this title

Review:

"Astonishing....Knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.....Turbocharged....Intricate and seamless....A dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it's also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass."--"New York Times Book Review" ""Chronic City" is a feverish portrait of the anxiety and isolation of modern Manhattan, full of dark humor and dazzling writing....proves both funny and frightening."--"Entertainment Weekly " "Exuberant literary revving.....Lethem's vision of New York can approach the Swiftian. It is impressively observant in its detail and scourging in its mocking satire. There are any number of wicked portraits....His comments on New York life are often achingly exact....So pungent and imaginative"--"The Boston Globe" "Ingenious and unsettling...Lethem pulls everything together in a stunning critique of our perceptions of reality and our preco

Book Description:

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem - the critically-acclaimed author of You Don't Love Me Yet and Fortress of Solitude - is a searing portrayal of Manhattan-ites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0571235662
• ISBN 13: 9780571235667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480