Lethem moves back to New York for Chronic City, his newest novel. It’s a wild ride through real and imaginary landscapes, where a virtual reality game prize becomes a object or worship in the real world and where a dying fiancee in space both ties the main character down and sets him free. And it’s a tour through the magic of New York in a search for reality.

Chase Insteadman is a former child actor who is engaged to an astronaut who is trapped in the International Space Station by a off-screen accident. Chase’s spends his time living off his residuals and doing voice overs for Criterion DVDs. His acting career is pretty much dead, as a script never arrived for the a movie he thought he was hired for.

When Chase runs into Perkus Tooth, a pop critic whose claim to fame was pasting artistic broadsheets around New York in the 1970s, he finds himself drawn into to an interesting (to say the least) group of people who all help Perkus search for Truth and Beauty while a Tiger (a renegade electronic driller) randomly destroys parts of the city.  As Pinkus draws Chase into his fold, other people start joining their group. Richard is an aide to the city mayor, who falls in love with a society woman and has twisted arms to keep Perkus in his apartment. Oona is ghost writer, the best in the business, and former assistant to Pinkus, who is working on a book about a famous artist and becoming Chase’s love interest. There is also Biller, a bum who might be a virtual millionaire and Watt, the supplier of marijuana to the group.

The book takes us on a wild search for a chaldron, a virtual treasure that might be the key to reality in the real world, and makes us a witness to the apparently random destruction of the Tiger. It leads us on a tour through the artistic and political side of New York while dropping names of real people, easily guessed pseudonyms of others and incarnations of ideas. As Pinkus finds his world destroyed by the Tiger, Chase’s fiancee, Janice, is slowly dying in the space station. Chase finds himself not remembering Janice unless others remind him as he starts falling in love with Oona. But Oona is deeply involved in her latest project which might be the key to Chase’s reality.

This is a wonderful book which slowly grabs us, bringing us into Chase’s world and then slowly pulls the rug out. It would make a wonderful companion to Synecdoche New York in the way they both deal with artistic visions and reality. It’s yet another masterpiece by Jonathan Lethem, one of the greatest novelists you’ve never heard of.