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Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe

0 comments By Jonathan Lethem

For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »

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1. 
   $19.56 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   Chronic City

   Jonathan Lethem

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Eric Anderson, December 1, 2006

Ignore the critics who trotted out their templated "pomo novels are baggy monsters with no heart" review to meet their deadlines for reviewing this novel. This is Pynchon at the height of his descriptive powers, which is all the more remarkable for this stage of his career.

Against the Day lacks the hallucinatory quality that makes Gravity's Rainbow such a headrush of a reading experience, but it adds real depth and breadth to GR's exploration of systems of power and Pynchon's unique way of connecting themes of antithesis and subversion to the science of physics -- he is right at home in the Age of Invention and Robber Barons.

There's an entire universe of dark magic contained here; the novel's 1100 pages becomes a footnote to the real story that includes the present day.

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