For a writer who has been so lovingly embraced by critics and readers for the past ten years, Lethem is certainly a slippery character. He emerged as a high-minded genre enthusiast, skilfully melding the paranoid freakout of Philip K. Dick–style science fiction with the cool steel of Chandleresque hard-boiled fiction. Depending on when you come to him, you may prefer the drugged-out Oakland full of talking animals in Gun, With Occasional Music, or you might like the mystery-as-bildungsroman, featuring a Tourette’s-afflicted private eye, Motherless Brooklyn (which nabbed him the National Book Critics Circle Award). Many first read him in 2003, when the semi-autobiographical novel The Fortress of Solitude hit The New York Times best-seller list.

In 2007, Lethem published You Don’t Love Me Yet, a sort of minor novel about an indie-rock band in Brooklyn that, while amusing, failed to distinguish itself from hundreds of other band novels. At the time, it was a disappointment: If there was one thing we could always pin on Lethem, it was ambition. Two years removed now, it’s easy to see You Don’t Love Me Yet as an EP between albums. The Fortress of Solitude was a major project – exploring race and gentrification in late-20th-century Brooklyn, as felt by kids growing up there. And now, Lethem has produced Chronic City, his Manhattan novel that could be seen, following Fortress, as a novel about being an adult.

Chronic City’s narrator (but one could argue, not its protagonist) is Chase Insteadman, a washed-up child actor happy to be out of the game, living off the residuals of his long-syndicated sitcom, Martyr & Pesty. Chase makes the celebrity rounds – moneyed dinner parties, paparazzi-swarmed galas. But it’s not his bygone career that piques curiosity. Instead, Chase’s fiancée, Janice Trumbull, has captured the E! generation’s hearts in her current state as a marooned astronaut, trapped on the crumbling International Space Station. She sends Chase drippy love letters that the New York Times publishes on the front page. Meanwhile, Chase is so psychologically adrift that he can barely remember what she looks like, never mind whether he still loves her. On a menial acting gig, he encounters Perkus Tooth, a lazy-eyed, chronic-smoking cultural critic who, for a while, earned attention by posting long-winded broadsides all over the city. Now, Tooth is an enthusiast’s enthusiast, and the driftless Chase is putty to his obsessions. Tooth provides Lethem ample space to lay down comically academic pop exegies. And while the rants roll on, Manhattan is besieged by a giant tiger, who lays waste to mini-marts before he can be caught, and a gray fog that never leaves the lower part of the island.

Part of the joy of reading Chronic City is watching Lethem build this alternate Manhattan in his gorgeously constructed sentences (and a nice side game to play consists of counting the myriad adjectives Lethem trots out to describe Perkus’s wayward eyeball). If Fortress was a book about the seriousness of childhood and adolescence, then Chronic City is about the absurdity of adulthood. Though Chase and Perkus have their own personal dramas, there’s never much of a sense of purpose to them. Like Janice on the space station, they’re adrift and simply emoting for lack of anything else to do.

Chronic City, then, is an almost complete synthesis of Lethem’s past work. It’s ambitious like Fortress, numinous like Gun and otherworldly like much of his short fiction. It even has a little bit of You Don’t Love Me’s ennui. With elements of all of his books contained herein, for once, Lethem might not be able to slip out of that embrace.

Jonathan Messinger