Chronic City? Does it stay boring?

[Michael Bailey]

CC was a little too sad a book for me, but nonetheless it has its merits:
good scenery, for one thing -
some jiggery-pokery with identities that isn't bad (alice's got me
thinking of every self-made johnny as gatsby now, so this kid from the
stix that becomes a punk hero for putting out his broadsides now is a
sort of gatsby

   it's like, Chronic City he is saying there is some real western
canon that you can't just get into by writing broadsides and posting
them on telephone poles, and for his hubris in

     trying, well, you shall see what his horrible fate is...he's
wracking his brain trying to make this great thesis...

     Just like ole Fitzgerald was saying there is some kind of
eminence, great personhood, that you can't achieve by bootlegging
(personally I wouldn't frickin rule it out of hand completely...)

      that is to say, is there anyone eminent whose means of achieving
it were more acceptable?)
                 (then there's the other identity spiel with the
narrator/actor guy which is halfway interesting, it's like he's
actually pretty bright but he is leaning for validation upon the nutty
dude,
                  and the nutty dude isn't up to the task, and
although the narrator guy has a plenitude of looks talent money from
which he could pay the nutty dude from whom he's receiving validation,
                    he never gets around to it, and the one time he
tries is disastrous and so forth, which sets up an interesting dynamic
but it just isn't fair to the nutty guy!  It's like, here's this
wonderful loony character
                     and he's subservient in the book to the point of
view of this .... ah well, getting into spoiler territory...)

then you have the riff on consumerism...the chaldrons...which, umm,
take the place of "children" in these people's notional economies?

the pot use isn't completely convincing, as you noted, Joseph...that
is, none of the sensuality around potsmoking comes thru at all: it's
all about the name of the particular brand of weed and how much it
cost...
(which is too close to some of the reasons why I don't smoke anymore
and haven't for a long time for me to really complain about it...)

and the fate he reserves for the nutty dude is just altogether too
nasty for me to wholeheartedly endorse the book.  at least as a
pleasurable experience.

But I'd say the same of Kafka, so what do I know?  The fates he sends
his characters on certainly aren't very nice...

The nutty dude in CC is the only likeable character for me - certainly
not the narrator...not the girlfriend in space or the one on the
ground, not the mayor, not the dog...
ok, maybe the waitress in the burger joint - I liked her...

yeh, not a bad book...I could sit here and pick it apart, I thought,
but then I realized that I can't prove I could do better... and that
there were a lot of good things about the book, the birds in the
opening and I think I remember the closing images as well...




On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> I'm halfway through Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City.  Is there any drama in
> this book? Does this get any better. I do like Oona because I know someone
> remarkably like her, but everyone seems kind of stuck and Lethem's plan for
> unsticking them has not shown up yet.. I also  read Fortress of Solitude, I
> liked the old R& B singer and his son . but everything else was pretty so
> so.  So far I think Lethem is overrated. He covers interesting terrain but
> so far the only plot I can find is on the book jacket.
> Another problem   The pot smoking central to Chronic  does not  produce thc
> like thoughts. The narrator saying they were really stoned is a shitty
> excuse for delving into and replicating the experience in a literary form.
> These are reflective and introspective people  and smoking weed should show
> itself more discernibly in their thought patterns.
>