Chronic City? Does it stay boring?
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Tue Aug 24 13:59:48 CDT 2010
well I read on last night and the story itself seems to be kicking
in, which makes the characters more palatable. I don't know if I
could do better, maybe if I had started writing fiction 15 years
ago , he's not exactly on unreachable terrain as a writer. Thanks for
the feedback though I think I will finish it.
On Aug 24, 2010, at 4:17 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
> 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.
>>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list