Chronic City
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Mark Deakins
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By:
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Jonathan Lethem
About this listen
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus' countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.
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Editorial reviews
Jonathan Lethem's ambitious new book is a warped computer game, a Real Life alternate universe full of corridors and doorways that open up onto esoteric lore, secret histories, and quirky spins on reality a warren where the narrative burrows down in increasingly irregular diversions. Its central concern is our perception of truth, and how that perception is molded by our obsession with celebrity, contemporary art, the obscure byways of the internet, and the hollowness at the heart of human relationships. Marauding tigers, meanwhile, bring chaos to the streets of Manhattan.
The central character is that ultimate has-been, the former child actor. He lives off residuals from an old TV show, and continues to act, in one way or another, as the celebrated fiancé of Janice Trumbull, a dying astronaut lost in space. Chase is locked into his own lonely orbit, a character written into the city's narrative as a recurring name in a slightly skewed but recognizable social scene. That is, until Perkus Tooth, a critic and conspiracy-theorist, enters his life, with his riffs on popular culture and obsession with among many, many other things transparent fetish objects called chauldrons.
Tooth is one of Mark Deakins' many memorable characterizations in this recording he comes across as halfway between Bartleby the Scrivner and The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy. Deakins succeeds in painting each character with a light and unobtrusive touch, bringing life to characters that, on page, could easily appear as ciphers. Throughout Chronic City, reality is riddled through with simulation, and vice versa; Deakins' performance anchors the listener to some semblance of factuality, and makes us care enough to follow the narration through the shifting sands of authenticity. This is a universe where hacks and ghost writers create a "muppeteer's fiction", and it's thoroughly in keeping with Lethem's style that one of the more affecting parts of the book Janice's letters back to Chase turn out to be not quite what they seem. Nevertheless, Deakins delivers them without irony or ersatz sentimentality, and his integrity is of considerable benefit to the story.
Towards the end of Chronic City, Lethem's skill with language is finally matched with his control of the plot, and the two strands gel, bringing a sense of urgency to the quest for the real. Dafydd Phillips
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In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis' last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash; are forced to flee everything they've ever known.
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a hot mess
- By Alison on 04-09-19
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The Curiosity
- A Novel
- By: Stephen Kiernan
- Narrated by: Kate Udall, Erik Bergmann, George Guidall
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Kate Philo makes a breathtaking discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. Heedless of the potential consequences, Kate's boss orders that the frozen man be reanimated. As the man begins to regain his memories, the team learns that he was - is - a judge, Jeremiah Rice. Thrown together by fate, Kate and Jeremiah grow closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah's new life is slipping away. Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man she has come to love.
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Almost perfect
- By ellegreenland on 04-14-14
By: Stephen Kiernan
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Smoke and Whispers
- By: Mick Herron
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When a body is hauled from the River Tyne, Sarah Tucker heads to Newcastle for a closer look. She identifies the dead woman as Private Detective Zoë Boehm, but putting a name to the corpse only raises further questions. Did Zoë kill herself, or did one of her old cases come back to haunt her? Coincidence is an excuse that soon appears pretty unconvincing. Sarah can’t leave until she’s found the answers to her questions, however dangerous they might turn out to be.
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What a disappointment
- By jaf on 08-23-24
By: Mick Herron
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The Snow Garden
- By: Christopher Rice
- Narrated by: James Daniels
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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It is more than just the late November weather that has cast a chill over the campus of Atherton University. When the wife of respected professor Eric Eberman is killed in a tragic accident, his secret student lover, Randall Stone, fears the professor tried to avert career suicide by committing homicide. Or do the dead woman’s haunting last words point to an even more damning crime? Fearing the truth, Randall digs into his lover’s hidden history.
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Murder, Mystery and Mayhem at it's best!
- By Tammy M on 11-30-14
By: Christopher Rice
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Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
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Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
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Blackmail, My Love
- A Murder Mystery
- By: Katie Gilmartin
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Josie O'Conner travels to San Francisco in 1951 to locate her gay brother, a private dick investigating a blackmail ring targeting lesbians and gay men. Jimmy's friends claim that just before he disappeared he became a rat, informing the cops on the bar community. Josie adopts Jimmy's trousers and wingtips, battling to clear his name, halt the blackmailers, and exact justice for the many queer corpses.
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Fine Writing, Beautifully Read
- By CJ on 06-14-15
By: Katie Gilmartin
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The Damnation Game
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Marty Strauss, a gambling addict recently released from prison, is hired to be the personal bodyguard of Joseph Whitehead, one of the wealthiest men in the world. The job proves more complicated and dangerous than he thought, however, as Marty soon gets caught up in a series of supernatural events involving Whitehead, his daughter (who is a heroin addict), and a devilish man named Mamoulian, with whom Whitehead made a Faustian bargain many years earlier, during World War II.
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Damned If You Do
- By Wag The Fox on 04-05-14
By: Clive Barker
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French Exit
- A Novel
- By: Patrick deWitt
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit.
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deWitt deLivers Eccentric Quirky Characters
- By Liberty on 09-23-18
By: Patrick deWitt
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White Noise
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
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Designed to be analyzed by an English class
- By RI in Canada on 10-15-16
By: Don DeLillo
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The Conspiracy Club
- By: Jonathan Kellerman
- Narrated by: Rob Kahn
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, Dr. Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise and warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work as staff psychologist at City Central Hospital, only to be drawn deeper into a waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn Banks.
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Disappointin Departure
- By Tom on 12-03-03
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The Lost Ones
- A Novel
- By: Sheena Kamal
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for 15 years - since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren't looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope. A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets.
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Would make a great movie!
- By Shay on 08-27-17
By: Sheena Kamal
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Outside Looking In
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
- A Novel
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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For 60 years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the federal district of Sitka, a temporary safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the district is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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Didn't finish...
- By Ann E O'Connor on 10-16-17
By: Michael Chabon
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A smorgasbord of language
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Ugh
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SF SLAMS into a hard-boiled, noir pulp!
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Wonderful novel, horrendous audio book
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Ugh
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What listeners say about Chronic City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Midwesterner
- 02-04-16
Very Original
This was a very refreshing bit of something completely new and different. I bit surreal, even. Motherless Brooklyn is one of my all time favorites. Lethem is brilliant with making topics in philosophy easy for the likes of you and me to ponder on by using quirky, brilliant, damaged or even ubernormal characters in his work. Really clever and fun.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Scott
- 04-18-12
A Futuristic Look at Hipsters in Manhattan
What did you love best about Chronic City?
Excellent dialogue, great characters, and the interesting but obscure (probably to most?) pop-cultural references.
Who was your favorite character and why?
I didn't have one. I thought the characters were great overall but no particular stand-outs for me.
Which character – as performed by Mark Deakins – was your favorite?
I don't have a favorite here. I thought the characterization was strong overall.
If you could take any character from Chronic City out to dinner, who would it be and why?
I'd probably go with none. These are more the types of characters I would rather enjoy reading about than hanging out with.
Any additional comments?
'Chronic City'' is somewhat of a mysterious parallel vision of Manhattan's Upper East Side. The story is full of humor and is populated with a cast of young, off-beat, and exceptionally named characters. There's little in the way of narrative but it's a highly entertaining listen as the story is loaded with obscure film and pop culture references, a good deal of dry humor, a touch of science fiction, and strong dialogue. This is literary fiction, so it's not going to be for everyone, but for those seeking this type of mix it should be a fun listen.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Andrew Underwood
- 01-11-13
A New Favorite
I read Lethem's article "The Ecstasy of Influence" for Harper's, and was very excited by the exploration of thought surrounding contemporary artistic appropriation, updating Howard Bloom. That article lead me here to "Chronic City." I wasn't disappointed. In fact, this has become one of my favorite audiobooks. The grand ideas woven into a fun narrative peppered with myriad obscure cultural references makes this is the kind of book that I find hugely satisfying.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jackie
- 11-15-11
the boomer generation Bellow
This is an excellent performance rich with texture and nuance. I consider Lethem up there in the genre of one Saul Bellow. Boomer Bellow. Nice find.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Lacy
- 08-08-18
Vivid and intelligently original
Lethem, with Chronin City, writes a vivid character driven story that is refreshingly original, intelligently witty and observant, tight and edgy dialogue, and with a strange theme that our lives are all about distractions, signified by the novel’s interweaving of a purported tiger lurking around New York City unseen, the news following the lives of astronauts stranded on the space station because of Chinese space mines, and the personal story of the former child actor, protagonist, Chase’s girlfriend Janice Trumbull being one of those astronauts. This is as much about an ensemble of character round Perkins Tooth, a former rock critic. who is obsessed by Marlon Brando, and chaldron (pottery) photo then hologram, that propels the plot and brings the story to its strange, almost conspiracy theory denouement. This is an engaging story with interesting characters that are appealing due to their eccentricities, foibles, backgrounds, obsessions.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Bobby
- 01-21-11
Don't listen to the naysayers!
What's with the negative reviews? I loved this book, and I loved the performance. I felt at home in Lathem's imaginary world. Of course, I felt Chronic City, with its quirky adventures and bizzarro NYC, is more in sync with folks like Eileen Myles and Ted Berrigan and Patti Smith Perhaps than Jonathan Franzen's sad despairing FREEDOM riders. Oh well. For me I'm glad I didn't listen to the naysayers. I would have missed quite a ride. Or whatever it was.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Golanka
- 07-26-17
What is truth?
This book deals with the question of truth. It is told from a very specific perspective--an ex-child-actor-star living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan--but deals with a universal topic (assuming the universe cares about truth).
This is not a book for those looking for plot. It is about experiences, and is itself an interesting experience. Jonathan Letham has a great style that kept me interested in his words regardless of what they described.
Mark Deakins is a great narrator. He was able to create and maintain specific voices for each character, and obviously prepared well...he always had the right tone when reading dialogue, as opposed to some who, reaching the end of the dialogue, realize that the tone should have been sarcastic, tired, bored, etc. only after reaching the end of the line.
This is a book that makes you (or at least me) think about it even weeks after finishing it. I'd probably rate it 4.5 if I could add half a star.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Susan C. S.
- 10-31-09
When in doubt, don't.
This book got good and bad reviews. Believe the bad ones.
I rarely give up on an audiobook once I've paid for it, but with this one I'd rather listen to nothing. Pure unrelieved inanity. Sorry to say this, because I loved The Fortress of Solitude.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Richard
- 05-06-11
Is it possible to give a negative rating
I listen to 3-4 audio books a month and I have been listening to them for 10+ years, this is among the worst if not the WORST. Its a total waste of time. So, boring and almost self-indulgent that I would rather do just about anything else!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Lisa
- 05-27-10
Blech
This is the first audiobook review I've been compelled to make...after a promising opening paragraph, this book went downhill. It's so New York-centric that it's almost incomprehensible. Too bad. It had promising pieces. Sadly they were buried under a long, unnecessary non-plot. With heavy editing, there might even be a story here.
Not worth my precious credits.
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