I read this book in one sitting, feeling like I had snorted a mixtue of Regrettol and Addictol, two of the many govenment-sponsored drugs made available for free to citizens of this future world. The narrator's personal blend of drugs was 'skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments.' The blend he delivered to me, however, was light on the Acceptol. This bittersweet story would be too depressing to recommend to anyone were it not for the humor, which had me laughing out loud. Metcalf and the kangaroo are worth reading again and again, but with little jokes like Testafer 'Here's a tip, Grover. You're supposed to go first-' 'Shut up.' Well, I'd tried to warn him' I was reading dectective fiction as good as Chandler, to whom the book is inscribed.
This is some of the best fiction I've ever read and I recommend it highly. I read this book in one sitting, feeling like I had snorted a mixtue of Regrettol and Addictol, two of the many govenment-sponsored drugs made available for free to citizens of this future world. The narrator's personal blend of drugs was 'skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments.' The blend he delivered to me, however, was light on the Acceptol. This bittersweet story would be too depressing to recommend to anyone were it not for the humor, which had me laughing out loud. Metcalf and the kangaroo are worth reading again and again, but with little jokes like Testafer 'Here's a tip, Grover.
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You're supposed to go first-' 'Shut up.' Well, I'd tried to warn him' I was reading dectective fiction as good as Chandler, to whom the book is inscribed. This is some of the best fiction I've ever read and I recommend it highly. OK, I didn't 'get' this novel. I'm a fan of detective novels but haven't read much hardboiled stuff. Maybe that's the key. I'm also not a great fan of SF, and there's a lot of SF stuff in this book.
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I picked this one up because the idea of the talking animals intrigued me - I read just about every 'talking animal' book I could get my hands on as a kid, and I wanted to see how it was done in an adult's novel. I was disappointed. To me, the book seemed kind of cobbled together - lots of different competing ideas that got lost in the shuffle. One reviewer commented that he found the novel 'scary'. I didn't find it scary, just annoying. I'm generally pretty good at suspending disbelief when I read a novel; in this case, I just couldn't do it.
The 'talking animal' and 'evolved baby' bits just were too unreal and didn't seem to fit. Another thing: I'm realy.not. a fan of explicit sexual comments and stuff. There's a fair amount in this book. Also, the idea of heavy drug use (even if it's 'engineered' drugs) was sort of off-putting. I suppose that Lethem wanted to conjure up a dystopian future world; I almost got the sense from reading the novel that this dystopia contained things he.wished.
existed (being able to trade sex feelings with a person of the opposite sex, taking copious quantities of cocaine-like drugs, etc.) This is one book that's headed for the used-book store. Conrad Metcalf is having a rough time lately. The instrumental news on the radio hints of bad things coming. It's getting tougher to figure out what his clients want, because they all snort so much government-supplied Forgettall that they don't know who he is, let alone what they do for a living. Only Private Inquisitors like Conrad are allowed to ask any questions at all, in fact. Conrad's got it tough: he needs to see his old girlfriend about a personal matter, half his customers are evolved animals, one of his suspects is a brain-evolved, drunken, sarcastic, three-year-old babyhead, and the gangsters in the back room of the Fickle Muse have sicked a kangaroo hit man named Joey on him. What kind of catastrophe could have produced an insane world like this?
Why are the children being turned into babyheads, and why evolve animals to take their places? Why is everyone upside-down on free dope all the time, why is the news just sad or happy music, and why do people have appliances as parts of their names? Why does the government freeze you if your karma drops too low? And how the heck can you shoot someone with a gun that goes 'Dum, da dum dum' when you draw it? Ah, ah, ah: no questions allowed.
Just sit back and watch this thing unwind. There's a real hard-boiled private eye in this book, but he's a gorilla. That didn't even surprise me after the sheep was murdered.
Even though justice is a lost cause and human rights an interesting problem, Metcalf fights on for his client's freedom, risking his own karma in the process. Lethem himself obviously has karma to burn. This was a stunning debut and a sure sign of things to come from this gifted and wildly imaginative writer. 'Gun, With Occasional Music' takes the hard-boiled noir detective genre and twists it around like the torso of a man watching a good-looking woman pass him on the street. Conrad Metcalfe is a two-bit scuzz-bag P.I. Ripped from the pages of Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, spaced out on nose candy and 25 karmas away from an upstate vacation on a cryogenic slab.
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His nemesis, Joey Castle, is an evolved kangaroo born into a marsupial mob and working his way up from being Danny Phoneblum's flunky to being Mr. Taking the case of a chump doctor set up to take the fall for the murder of his partner, Metcalfe uses guile, snappy repartee and dumb luck to blow the case wide open. If you start reading this book, be prepared to look stupid because you will have an ear-to-ear grin on your face until you put it down. This book will be for Generation X what Tom Robbins' 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' was for the Baby Boomers - a cult classic enjoyed by those in the know. Jonathan Lethem deserves much more of a following than he has. Reading this book will certainly get the ball rolling.
After reading Letham's less-than-coherent 'Amnesia Moon,' I almost made the mistake of not reading him again, but a couple of reviews posted here convinced me otherwise. This book was magnificent: brilliant ideas and brilliant writing. I'm just surprised that I hadn't heard more about this author, because this work is far superior to most modern fiction I've read. Not being much of a genre fan myself, it was nice to see a hard-boiled detective story in a sci-fi (though entirely conceivable sci-fi) setting. Rich, developed characters (be they detectives, doctors, evolved apes or tiny mental giants) and a thick plot with no holes in the story to worry about. Be forwarned, its a real page-turner, and not something you want to pick up unless you've got a day or two free.
Gun, with Occasional Music, is more than just a quirky, idiosyncratic novel. It's the beginning of an era.
The Age of Lethem. Jonathan Lethem is quickly becoming the man to watch in the arena of Literature. A sort of The Big Sleep on 5-MeO-DMT, the novel itself is a phantasmagorical travel through a terrifyingly and hilariously possible future. Conrad Metcalf, a private dick with some serious genital problems, is sucked into the topsy-turvy world of a prominent urologist and becomes entangled in some of the strangest scuffles ever put down on paper. The plot thread that yields the most yuks for your buck is one involving a wayward kangaroo bullyboy named Joey Castle. The novel takes a terrifying turn near the end.
I won't spoil it, but it left me unable to sleep for the rest of the night, when I finally finished it at 3:00 AM. Read this if you don't place a high value on sleep. This is Lethem's debut novel and it's a pretty impressive beginning. He's obviously well-versed in the nuts and bolts of both hard-boiled mysteries and futuristic noir because he pulls off a mean blend of the two here. The patter between characters is good and he's got a particular knack of ending chapters with a stick-in-your-craw line that manages to both gently tease and pay homage to Hammett and Chandler and the rest at the same time. It is a first novel, though, and seems a bit underpopulated.
Thin isn't quite the right word, because his characters have teeth, but this isn't a teeming world. It's superior to most everything else on the market, however, so we'll just leave it at that and say it's a great start to what's been an excellent and varied career so far. Now if they'd just stop hiding the book in the sci-fi section, I'd be even happier.