Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much loved sitcom. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: trapped on the International Space Station by a layer of low-orbit mines, Chase's teenage sweetheart and fiancee Janice Trumbull sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper Eastside dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's novel is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.