I first met Perkus Tooth in an office.

Chase Insteadman, actor, lives in Manhattan. He used to be recognized for his stint as a child star on the hit show Martyr & Pesty. Nowadays, he's better known as the estranged, landlocked fiancee of Janice Trumbell, astronaut, the American woman trapped on a Russian space station marooned in a field of Chinese mines.

One day, while doing some voice-over recording work for the Criterion Collection, Chase meets Perkus Tooth, and is immediately seduced into a world of greasy hamburgers and fine grade marijuana that comes in sleek lucite cases labeled with names like ICE, TIGER, and CHRONIC.

Through the lens of Perkus Tooth, Chase Insteadman starts to see the world a bit differently. He starts to make connections, between gnuppets and Marlon Brando, the billionaire mayor and the ongoing "escaped tiger" crisis, which may or may not be a secret underground tunneling machine that is wreaking havoc on the bowels of New York City, Laird Noteless' cavernous vaginal art installations, flight patterns of birds, pixelated parallel universes on a computer screen, the ever-elusive eBay treasure known as the Chaldron, an apartment complex for dogs, foot cancer in space, and a ghost writer named Oona, with whom Chase is desperately in love.

Chronic City slides easily into my top 2 list of the 2009-2010 season. It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, only set in this weird delightful version of 2004 instead of 1969, and in the pixelated realm of Manhattan instead of the smoggy haze of Los Angeles. Maybe Jonathan Lethem read Inherent Vice and thought, I can probably do that, as both books feature colorful casts of characters wading through these (semi)dream landscapes of paranoia, friendship, coincidence, delicious food, pop culture references, mystery, sex, and potent THC.

But at the same time, Chronic City was entirely its own beast. New York City has a different set of secrets than the city of Los Angeles, and Lethem obviously has an incredible time sifting through the possibilities of what they could be. This book is a beautiful exercise of the mind: an author giving himself the freedom to create a universe in which anything goes, where anything can be true, where everything can be doubted, and where tigers really can stand as tall as traffic lights and roam around in the snow of summertime.