Chronic City??? final thoughts

[Michael Bailey]

Motherless Brooklyn was loads of fun, though...



all kinds of spoilers follow:








ok, the actor dude was being utilized by the mayor and so forth as a
news story husband to I guess draw interest to the space station?

a-and, he actually knew the astronaut lady when he was a sensitive
(but not gay) kid back home in Indiana

and, because he was supposedly so stoned out that he did not catch on
until the very end, we are meant, perhaps, to tie his inattention to
(or blame it on) his stoner habits and his punk-litterateur friend, as
being exemplars of the trends to which (to its detriment, perhaps) the
eyes of the cultured West were drawn, as they were simultaneously
drawn away from the spectacle of "man's progress into Space"

a-and the one guy is thinking about raiding the cyberworld to get the
chaldrons, thus putting all kinds of emotional energy into something
rather sterile, and everybody's fallen away from reality...

That is, as David Bowie said, this ain't rock'n'roll, this is
(de-)genocide...a decky-dance...

Motherless Brooklyn: Lethem's "Secret Integration"

Chronic City his V. -- or maybe his "Entropy" -- ie, you've got the
upper room (space, where the ladyfriend's at), and you've got the
downstairs where the party's at (the loony guy's crib, where you've
got the makings of a Whole Sick Crew, when you factor in the lawyer
guy, his ladyfriend, and the bum who turns out to be a computer
adept), and you've also got the Street where the Tiger is running
loose and chewing up stuff...I really wish the waitress would've
managed to escape, though...

and I miss the presence of a Stencilian POV...

Personally, I wouldn't rule out ol' Lethem following up with somethin'
better, but he's kinda rough on his dramatis personae -

I looked in Wikipedia because I was confusing him with Jonathan
Franzen - then remembered kinda perusing The Corrections, and thinking
he was rather tough on his characters too...



On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Well i forced myself to finish the Lethem Novel. I will never read another
> of his books. Truly , painfully dreadful.  Ineptly using fake suspense to
> ineptly sustain  fake introspection to reveal  the warm goo at the bottom of
>  a con job. It doesn't entertain, It doesn't  engage emotionally, it doesn't
> reveal or challenge intellectually;  it is a book jacket con job through and
> through, a clever Hollywood outline without a soul. Even though it is a
> library book I still feel as though my pocket was picked.
>
>
>
>