A review of Jonathan Lethem’s “Chronic City.” Tough to find on the VQR site, so here’s an excerpt:
Lethem’s real star is Manhattan itself, a place where one is “persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire . . . We only pretend to live on something so orderly as a grid.” Near the beginning of this messy, radiant novel, Abneg finds himself thinking, “To whom does New York City belong?” The answer, which arrives definitively in the book’s final chapters, is both no one and everyone—the kids, the criminals, the robbers, the heroes, and the malcontents. New York belongs to you.
October 20, 2009, 12:53pm Comments
