Chronic City

At the centre of the book is the protégé-mentor friendship between Chase Insteadman, former child-star and darling of the Manhattan dinner scene due to his marriage to Janice- an astronaut trapped on a space station sending him very public love letters and Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed pop critic, hack and sell-out. Their stoned, cheeseburger-guzzling relationship is framed by Tooth’s apparent education of the seemingly vacuous Insteadman, setting up a bizarre trawl through alt.Manhattan’s more surreal sides on an epic and paranoid journey to discover ‘the Truth.’ Meanwhile Insteadman’s affair with ghostwriter Oona threatens to debunk all the goodwill the public place on him due to his unique marital situation.

The book is funny, dreamy, surreal and lovelorn in its view of the Big Apple, especially the scenes involving the upper echelons of high society, their brutish interest in Insteadman’s marriage and their own quirks and irks, affairs and dysfunctions. It’s written with confidence and a complete disregard for the conventions of normal storytelling, making it one of the year’s more interesting books.