With all due respect to Camelot, Dickensian London, and Mort Weisinger's Metropolis, if I had to choose one fictional location in which I had to spend the rest of my life, I would choose Jonathan Lethem's New York City. There's plenty of room there for heroism (it's the kind of city where a detective with Tourette's syndrome can unravel an immense, shadowy conspiracy) and music (in The Fortress of Solitude, 1970s Brooklyn seemed to be the set of an enormous hiphop musical set to the lazy beat of shiny pink Spaldeen rubber balls slapping against the sides of brownstones). It's a city teeming with life, from the gilt, smoky splendor of a Christmas party at the mayor's mansion to "a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries, pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down Eighty-sixth street."

Chronic City, Lethem's latest novel, is his best book yet, in part because it features his best writing about New York. Unlike his previous books, City stays almost entirely on the island of Manhattan, not even venturing very much to the other boroughs, and its citizens could all come from a central-casting call for Manhattanites. There's the famous child actor, all grown up and kept afloat in socialite dinner-party circles on a cushion of half-assed celebrity worship and generous residual checks; the grizzled mayor's aide, his cynicism made corporeal in the form of a bristly, unkempt beard; and the delicate, semireclusive wall-eyed former music critic who simultaneously loves and fears the world.

The critic's name is Perkus Tooth (almost all of the characters in City have gloriously ridiculous names—the former child actor who narrates the book is named Chase Insteadman, and the mayor's aide falls in love with a socialite named Georgina Hawkmanaji, who quickly becomes nicknamed The Hawkman). He has fallen down the rabbit hole of criticism that transforms the world into a gnarled mass of language and heterodoxies—in short, somewhere along the line, he started believing his own bullshit. Like every pretentious critic, Tooth watches movies (including Steve Martin's 1982 detective spoof Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid) and listens to music expecting to find some sort of key that will unlock the text and reveal the answer to all the mysteries of life, but all he finds are more mysteries.

Lethem has packed City with those unanswerable mysteries of symbolism, in the form of plot threads seemingly pulled through the book from other texts, making his New York City a kind of paranoid science-fiction landscape in a world not quite our own. Lethem has said that he intended City as an homage to Philip K. Dick (Lethem is a tremendous fan of Dick's, recently championing and editing the Library of America editions of the science-fiction master's work). There is some sense of The Man in the High Castle–style alternate-reality playfulness in City. Manhattan is being terrorized by an enormous escaped tiger that can seemingly tear up subway tracks with its teeth. Insteadman's lover is an astronaut who is trapped in orbit by insidiously placed Chinese space mines. The United States is busy trying to ignore the fact that it's in a war with a malevolent, mysterious foreign power (the New York Times even publishes a "War-Free Edition" for people who don't want to worry about foreign affairs). Marlon Brando hovers in the weird purgatory that only celebrities can be consigned to—the kind of tragic existence where nobody, including Wikipedia, can really recall for sure if he is dead or alive. And Tooth and Insteadman become obsessed with a kind of vase called a chaldron, believing it to be an object too perfect to be anything but otherworldly.

City's disparate plot threads don't tie up neatly—like Tooth, the reader discovers that not every striking image in a work of fiction can be cleanly unlocked to reveal a greater truth. But City does attain something magical. Even as characters in the novel begin to wonder if they're in a simulacrum of New York City (which, of course—being characters in a novel—they are), Lethem begins tearing his beloved City to pieces, via the aforementioned giant tiger (who socialites speculate may be a lovesick pneumatic drill or an evil robot). In the latter part of the book, a character develops an awful case of the hiccups, and each hiccup is ingeniously represented as a hole in the line of dialogue: "She kept wanting me to try these stupid cures. I swallowed so much water I bloated like a tick." To the reader, it gives the appearance that even the words on the page are falling apart, like static encroaching on a far-off pirate radio station. By poking at these holes in his own simulacrum of New York City (in the way that you simply can't stop tonguing at the coppery socket left behind when you lose a tooth), Lethem explodes some ideas of what fiction can and should be. This isn't just a giddy young writer prodding at the bounds of genre in literary fiction; this is a talented author who is tugging on the loose ends of fiction—not just books, but the countless fictions that surround us and make our lives bearable every day.

Lethem is clearly continuing Dick's theme of a fabricated reality messily overwriting a "real" baseline reality, but City feels tethered to something solid in a way that even Dick's best work never was. Lethem's love of New York, his heartfelt appreciation of the city and its boundless possibilities, enables him to not get lost in the ether in the way that Dick (who, it must be said, was absolutely a child of Los Angeles) almost always did. Dick's work was always plagued by an underlying nihilism, which inspired in a reader the sense that he could simply shrug and destroy it all—protagonists, antagonists, and planet—at the end of every book. But Lethem refuses to get wrapped up, Tooth-and-Dick-like, in the fuzzy academics of his own concepts. Jonathan Lethem believes in New York City, and he believes in the fictional New York City, too, and he doesn't see a difference between the two. The original, he knows, simply couldn't exist without the simulacrum.