Lethem's New Novel-Oct 2009

[rich]

some of these character names are downright Pynchonian

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's
social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved
sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet 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, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine
punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city 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's 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. Along
with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a
hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the
billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to
several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an
island where everything can be bought: Truth.

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