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A review by meghan111
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
3.0
New York City, but slightly different: ominous fog and a snowy winter that won't end, a tiger roaming the streets and causing destruction, a conceptual artist who digs huge pits in locations around the city. The New York Times publishes a war-free edition. To fill this edition, there is a need for non-war news. Chase Insteadman, former child star/current lightweight celebrity and socialite, and his fiancee, Janice Trumbull, make up a part of these headlines. Janice is an astronaut currently stuck in the international space station, whose love letters to Chase appear in the paper. Chase, meanwhile, becomes entranced with Perkus Tooth, an enigmatic pop-culture guru who seems to have an interest in finding an answer to the question of the meaning of everything and its relation to Marlon Brando and Gnuppets (a slightly different version of Muppets.) Perkus Tooth wants to know the truth, and Chase comes to realize the illusions he is living in and with.
This book meanders a lot, contains horribly accurate descriptions of migraine, and evolves into an exploration of stoner logic about the nature of reality - what if everything in our reality is just a simulation, one of thousands or millions of similar experiments? How would we ever know? That sounds cliched, but Lethem is such a great writer that he makes it sound new, as if the characters are really experiencing these revelations in their slightly-off version of New York City.
This book meanders a lot, contains horribly accurate descriptions of migraine, and evolves into an exploration of stoner logic about the nature of reality - what if everything in our reality is just a simulation, one of thousands or millions of similar experiments? How would we ever know? That sounds cliched, but Lethem is such a great writer that he makes it sound new, as if the characters are really experiencing these revelations in their slightly-off version of New York City.