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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...
My favourite German word is bummel, (I also am very fond of the word Schmetterling just becuase it is so very unevocative).At its very best this book is a bummel, defined to copy paste from jerome k jerome "A 'Bummel'," I explained, "I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes;...
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 p...
In which Lethem tackles paranoia and conspiracy theory, in other words, DeLillo and Pynchon territory.There’s a wonderful book struggling to get out of this rambling oblique farce of a novel. The full blooded obsessive vigilance of conspiracy theorists would make a great subject for a modern novel – the watchdogs who watch the watchdogs, an informed elite calling to account a sinister informed elite at the other end of the political spectrum. I watched a video yesterday where a guy examined fram...
“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?” ― Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City I really wanted to like Chronic City. I really wanted to enjoy Lethem's latest NY story. Sorry, no go. The problem is Letham falls straight into a void, a hole, existing between Michael Chabon and William Gibson. D...
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 exists at basic
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 those are
Lethem’s work is seemingly more palatable when the hyper-luminosity of vaunting ambition to write the sort of lofty and lengthy Great American Novel in the manner of a Bellow, a Roth, or a Franzen is unpresent. This bloated and stressfully long-winded plotless slab of hipster-wankery sacrifices the humour, pacing, and genre-bending marvellousness of the earlier novels in favour of a character study of two vacuous, deeply uninteresting persons, in a hermetically sealed Manhattanverse where everyt...
I was looking forward to reading this book, I really was. But as I got farther into it, hoping that something interesting would happen, I found myself wanting to do other things -- pretty much anything else, including dusting and emptying the dishwasher -- rather than read this book.Lethem gives us a motley crew of Upper East Side oddballs to start “Chronic City.” Chase Insteadman, child star of a TV sitcom, now lives comfortably on royalties but is dealing with renewed publicity as the fiance o...
Chronic City will most definitely NOT be a 5-star book for everybody (as evidenced by the mixed reviews here) so here's a simple test to help determine if it will tickle your fancy or not. Please choose the answers that best describe your feelings:1. I find Richard Linklater's semi-surreal, conversation-based films such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly (possibly Slacker as well) to be:A. Mostly amazing, makes me think deep thoughtsB. Pretty good, nothing specialC. BoringD. Don't know, never w...
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 are quite unlikeable. Chase is unsympathetic and Perkus was a stereotypical smart-yet-weird, stoner, faux-intellectual. The story wasn't entirely boring, but it was cliche in some aspects. I couldn't empathize with a lazy once-actor, nor with an evidently smart but absolute nutter like Perkus. He reminded me of those people who smoke weed and discuss consp...
A floating fresco of urban renewal, outsider cultural criticism, and the puppet-strings of power. Lethem's Manhattan is an island of literalized metaphor and dreamlike sets, one which he is nonetheless able to convey with a sort of conviction through an often thoroughly believable cast (all improbably Dickensian names and satiric caricatures aside). As usual, he's immensely readable, his plotting incongruous but ultimately convergent. Perhaps a little overly convergent, as after a while it start...
I was enthralled with this strange tour of the dope-inspired concerns of a contemporary group of Manhattanites. They form a circle of friends around a visionary former rock critic named Perkus Tooth. The portrait rendered of New York as a “pocket universe” for these characters seems like a pleasant cross between the disturbing delusions in novels by Philip K. Dick and the fun self-fulfilling quests in Vonnegut tales. From hybrid vigor, the offspring is satirical but not vicious, solipsistic but
Video reviewFor everybody who's ever felt like their city constitutes the entire universe. Its orderly structure makes its roaring madness navigable, accessible, even homely. Possibly Lethem's funniest, most addictive, best book - and the man has written some incredible stuff.
It was inevitable, perhaps. Chronic City is the book with which I acknowledge to myself that Jonathan Lethem has joined the ranks of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Joanna Scott, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and so many others -- which is to say, he has left the vaunted zone of Those Who (to Me, At Least) Can Do No Wrong, and he has entered the zone of Those Who I Still (Kinda) Really Like (Most of the Time). David Foster Wallace had made a similar move, around the time of Hideous...
The early parts of this I thought were great. And for a time I was thinking to myself that Chronic City had the potential to be even better than the brilliant Motherless Brooklyn. There were echoes of Lethem doing for Manhattan what Paul Auster did so well for Brooklyn. The introduction to characters here really drew me in, with the early friendship between Chase Insteadman and the oddball Perkus Tooth in particular being really interesting. They, along with friends Richard Abneg and his wealthy...
Moments of 5-star writing here but I found myself unable to have the kind of deep, caring engagement with the story arcs and characters that such a rating generally requires. That said, the book was fully entertaining all the way through. Jam-packed with humorous and thoughtful riffs and meta-riffs on pop culture, avant garde art, stoned philosophizing--all pulled through the looking glass of Lethem's penchant for Noirish Mystery and geekish cataloging. Clever but not too-clever. The most enjoya...
CRITIQUE:In Praise of Perkus ToothBy the end of the first page of this novel, I was fascinated by the character, Perkus Tooth (no relation to Spooky Tooth ;))(1.), not just his Pynchonesque name, but his personality.Within two chapters, I was convinced that Jonathan Lethem had created the character and his peers, so that he could hang out with them. It's not often that a character is such immediately appealing, good company.Perkus is a former rock critic, and has a headful of ideas about film, l...
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 an east-side...
During those infinite summers of junior high, I would spend two or three nights a week at friends and one night hosting others. Such led to largely nocturnal existence, collapsing towards dawn only to wake at noon and go swimming. Role Playing Games, junk food and the new portals of Atari and VCRs extended a rather free reign to explore. One evening we were at my friend David's house, eating frozen pizza and talking about Culture Club. or, maybe, Chuck Norris Suddenly around 1 a.m. David's very