Chronic City

Reading last week about the late Michael Seidenberg, I got to thinking about this book by his great friend Jonathan Lethem, who started selling books for him as a young Brooklyn teenager. Perkus Tooth, the novel's most memorable character, might be based more closely on another Lethem pal, the critic Paul Nelson, but the book is saturated with the spirit of Seidenberg's salon: taking place in bohemian pockets hidden away in the billionaires' city, clouded with pot smoke, and full of brilliant cultural chatter curdled by impotence into melancholy and paranoia. Lethem's big Brooklyn novels might have gotten all the attention, but this one is a connoisseur's pleasure, with the sneaky staying power of, to make a reference its characters would likely appreciate, Bowie's Low.