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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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Felicity, July 9, 2009 (view all comments by Felicity)
I found this a quick read, once I'd had a few pages to soak into the dialect. I enjoyed the frame, which placed the narrative firmly in a storytelling tradition, and gave enough clues about Janie's eventful life that the reader could quickly realize it was the life, not the events themselves, that mattered.

The dialogue throughout the book is spritely, marked by inventive habits of wordplay, and the narrative itself is often beautiful, evocative, and skeweringly apt. I love the recurring images that pervade it, like bright threads glinting throughout the fabric.

It's short, and much of its character work is expertly begun early and tied off neatly at the end, although there are some episodes that I still found enigmatic. It raises knotty issues of colorism, beauty, self-esteem and self-definition, and succeeds as a bildungsroman all these years and bildungsromans later.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780060916503

Subtitle:

(a novel )

Author:

Hurston, Zora Neale

Publisher:

Perennial Library

Location:

New York :

Subject:

Self-realization

Subject:

Psychological fiction

Subject:

Epic literature

Subject:

Allegories

Subject:

Self-realization -- Fiction.

Subject:

African-American women

Copyright:

1990

Edition Description:

1st Perennial Library ed.

Series Volume:

125.

Publication Date:

1990

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

xiv, 207 p.