Chronic City / Jonathan Lethem

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem

published 2010, read in October 2012

category: general fiction

rating 3 / 10: so bad it's embarrassing

Let's be clear: the rating of 3 out of 10 is *my* rating. There may be readers who enjoy reading this sort of drivel. Or perhaps something interesting does happen if you can bear to read past page 85.

Not that I expected much. In Barcelona for a week, wanting a book to fill some idle moments. The nearest bookshop had a few metres of English-language books, a highly eclectic mix indeed.

I chose the one book which was written recently, vaguely SF and I had not read before. Perhaps I should have selected from the very small range of "classics".

In its general theme, this book reminds me of The Great Gatsby: a story of the rich and the beautiful, as seen by a jealous outsider. Where Fitzgerald hated the rich because he did not belong, Lethem longs to join them. Or so it would seem, from the styles of the books.

Lethem, though, takes his readers to new levels of self-indulgent boredom.

By page 85 -- which is as far as my good sense would allow me to go -- nothing has happened. The first-person storyteller has met a man with a sharp mind and poor dress sense. The two have smoked dope, eaten the same meal at the same restaurant several times, and dropped numerous references to characters and actors from TV and movies.

Are these characters and actors real? Are they invented? Are they "clever" inventions based on real people? Who knows?! Who cares.

The novel appears to be named for a favourite brand of marijuana. Perhaps it is the same brand that the author uses when writing. Because that's the way that the book reads...

Remember the stereotype Hollywood hippies? That friend of Dobie Gillis, for example... the hippies who ramble on, speaking a language of their own, making very little sense to the rest of the world. To their own drug-addled senses they are providing deep insights into the mysteries of the world. To the rest of us, they are mumbling nonsense.

Chronic City is mumbling nonsense.

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