Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City, is a step back from his 2003 work The Fortress of Solitude, according to Michiko Kakutani in a scorched-earth review of the book in The New York Times. Chronic City, she says, "is coy where Solitude was earnest, juvenile and mannered where Solitude was deeply felt." And that's certainly not the limit of the insults hurled at the book, in which a former rock critic and his bohemian friends smoke weed and offer not-quite-profound High Thoughts, and a former child star unconvincingly mourns an astronaut stuck in space. In this "tedious and overstuffed novel," Kakutani says, the details are merely uninteresting "whimsical embroiderings," the main character is "an irritating bore" who is "forever prattling on," the characters as a whole are an "annoying and tiresome lot," and worst of all, in the end "the reader simply doesn't care" about them.
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