Read Online Chronic City 9783608501070 Books

Product details Hardcover Publisher Klett-Cotta Verlag Language German ISBN-10 360850107X

Chronic City 9783608501070 Books Reviews

• The book is (in part) a Philip K. Dick paranoid conspiracy theory novel, and other reviewers have pointed out that they're so used to this kind of thing that they guessed the plot in advance, were bored by the device, and so on.
  
  But Lethem adds a point that Dick and movies like THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR leave out "conspiracies" cannot help but reduce themselves to interactions of human beings those who conspire against you may be your friends and lovers, REALLY, even as their conspiracy continues.
  
  This is new and interesting--but dry, best illustrated in the rather cold, self-mocking way which Lethem uses, and which negative reviewers here have commented on. Lethem has pointed out in his personal essays how he was drawn to a colder, more cerebral and more comic book-like art than his father produced.
  
  Many reviewers have noted that the book's narrator, Chase Insteadman, is an uninteresting character. But so are we all. It would take novelistic trickery to make us interesting, and most novelists would not be interested enough in us to bother. Neither is Lethem, but he's interested in our situation. What should uninteresting people do? Dream of being at the center of a conspiracy? But would being a victim, or even being a conspirator, make them any more interesting?
  
  To the five-star reviewers, yes. To the one-star reviewers, no. To Lethem ... who knows? But these are some of the points he covers.
• Chronic City is funny, witty, and has some interesting points to make about modern society. I hate calling anything "post-911" and as such I hope that this book, or books like it, herald a new "post" era, the "post-Facebook" era. This is definitely a book written by someone well acquainted with the various devices used in the Information Age, even if the characters themselves make use of them so rarely.
  
  SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT The conceit of this book - and it's not particularly obvious that this is the conceit until the very, very end - is that the protagonist Chase Insteadman doesn't *exactly* live in Manhattan. He lives in a kind of Second Life version of Manhattan, but one created by people with an *awful* lot of time on their hands, so much so that there is another, Inception-style Second Life that exists in their virtual world, one that a lot of "sims" or whatever spend large amounts of their own free time building. There's no real mention of the world outside; it appears that these characters are all artificially created objects who have no way of knowing about the outside world (actually, Richard Abneg could be a "human", thinking about it), but trust me on this by the last sentence of the book it's kind of obvious what is going on.
  
  Once you figure this out, a great many things about the book which were annoying before begin to make a lot more sense. The Thomas Pynchon-style names, for one. Chase "Insteadman", really? A woman named Georgina Hawkmanaji? "Perkus Tooth" and "Oona Laszlo" seem normal by comparison. See also the weird misspellings of pieces of the popular canon like Muppets (I kept wondering to myself, "what is Lethem going to say about Jim Henson's creations that would get him in trouble with the franchise and led him to rename them 'Gnuppets'?") or "Obstinate Dust" replacing "Infinite Jest" (which was my favorite part of this book because MAN do I hate Infinite Jest). See also the weird, weird things going on in there like the giant burrowing tiger that periodically trashes buildings. All of this stuff makes a massive load more sense once you figure out that the characters live in a simulacrum of New York City.
  
  Anyway, this almost makes me want to go back and read everything again with that in mind. It's a bit, I guess, like "Memento" or "The Sixth Sense" in the way that everything you experience before this revelation is colored by the revelation itself. Around 40% of the way through the book it felt like little more than a hipster stoner comedy; you get 80% of the way in before it finally starts to really drop the aforementioned bomb on you. Heck, I might revisit it in a couple months. It's satire, for sure, and hipstery satire on top of that, but I'm not convinced that it's just, I don't know, "Airplane" for the PBR-drinking crowd that some of the negative reviewers might lead you to think it is.
  
  That being said, I can't in good conscience give this 5 stars because in the end I think it's a bit too precious for its own good. I get that Lethem was trying to hide the simulacrum aspect of things, and to some extent he did a good job of it simply by allowing the characters to interact with the world the way characters not entirely in on the "joke" so to speak would interact. That being said, this conceit in particular just makes it seem a bit full of itself for its own good. It's not intentionally... obstinate the way DFW could get but neither is it a great example of clear, forcible writing.
  
  It is well worth reading though. This was my intro to Lethem so I can't speak to how well it compares to his Brooklyn book. I think that, generally, if you enter this book understanding that even though New York is the putative home, it's really a much weirder, SimCity version of New York, you probably won't be too confused and/or frustrated.
• Chase Insteadman is a former child TV star coasting on the royalties from his earlier television fame. His girlfriend is an astronaut unable to return to Earth, stranded on a space station. His friends are paranoid stoners, eccentric ghost writers, and political movers and shakers. And all of this comes together in a story about...well, nothing, really. Chronic City is full of Lethem's usual strong writing and great character work, but the story meanders from wandering conversation to wandering conversation without much momentum or point for much of the book. About 2/3 of the way through the book, the reader gets a glimpse that there may be something more going on, and much of the book's apparently pointless nature comes into a sort of focus. All of that wouldn't be so bad if Chronic City weren't so overlong, taking far too long to get to its point and hence never really justifying the length of it all. It's a disappointing work from Lethem, not because of its ideas or its language, but simply because of its aimless, drifting nature that overcomes the point buried somewhere deep in its pages.