Chronic City is Jonathan Lethem’s searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies. Into the cloistered life of Chase Insteadman, handsome but inoffensive fixture on the social scene, comes Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw them into another Manhattan, as they 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.
Lethem, the author of seven novels, including Fortress of Solitude, was in conversation with the novelist Tom McCarthy.
