Faber & Faber

Chronic City: Jonathan Lethem

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Synopsis:

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much loved sitcom. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: trapped on the International Space Station by a layer of low-orbit mines, Chase's teenage sweetheart and fiancee Janice Trumbull sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper Eastside dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose 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.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's novel is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.

Options:

• Audio snippet: Jonathan Lethem reads from Chronic City [1 of 3]
• Audio snippet: Jonathan Lethem reads from Chronic City [2 of 3]
• Audio snippet: Jonathan Lethem reads from Chronic City [3 of 3]

Tags:

Categorised as:

Fiction

Sub-categories:

General Fiction

Places:

Manhattan; New York

Genres & Themes:

Celebrity; Conspiracy; Drugs; Psychedelia; Space; Virtual Reality

Events:

Jonathan Lethem at the London Review Bookshop, Jan 07