This title will be released on October 13, 2009.
about this book
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's 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.
