Volume 57, Number 3 · February 25, 2010
Stars Without Sky
By Charles Baxter
Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, 469 pp., $27.95
The title of Jonathan Lethem's new novel suggests a cityscape that is both unwell and bedeviled by repetition. The story is located largely on New York's Upper East Side, specifically 84th Street and Second Avenue, with extensions bounded by the East Nineties to the north and Grand Central Station to the south. A more insular novel would be difficult to imagine. One of the book's narrators 'flinches from any wider world,' and another character feels as if he is far afield on Twenty-third Street and Sixth. Even the West Side is 'a mysterious distance from the East,' and as for the rest of the world, forget it. The characters' neighborhood feels like a hideout, a 'quarantine,' a fortress, to use a Lethemian word, beyond which it is dangerous, even fatal, to move.
Review, 3607 words
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