Rating: 
Summary: The brilliant novel that started a brilliant career
Review: One of my favoirte books of all time. I love Lethem's gooey mix of scifi and gumshoe fiction. Part satire, part surrealism, with a rapt attention to language, a highly personal style and an utterly unbridled imagination. A dream of a book and a total page-turner. If you can imagine a sultry blonde dame killing her sleeping husband by smothering him with a Magritte painting of dogs playing poker, you'll love it.
Rating: 
Summary: Mystery, with occasional fantasy and science fiction
Review: Starting from the beginning, Gun, with Occasional Music is ostensibly a detective story in the traditional of Raymond Chandler. That short description is not quite apt, though--it's like saying Beck or Oasis is pop music in the tradition of the Beatles. There are some striking similarities in structure or theme, but the frills are quite different. Lethem's Los Angeles is filled with the products of evolution therapy-- animals that walk on two legs and mostly fill the menial roles (akin to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind) and babyheads, children that have been treated to have adult mental abilities while their bodies still are those of their age. Drugs are legal, available from corner "makers", who can mix your preferred blend like today's tobacconist, from substances called Avoidol, Relaxol, Acceptol, Believol, and, especially, Addictol. People carry around "karma" cards, that contain a collection of points, earned by doing good deeds, and subtracted from when caught in a crime including being rude. Instead of CNN, there's the music news, where one tries to understand if something bad has occurred based on the amount of bassoons or bass in the orchestra. Newspapers are collections of uncaptioned pictures. And people, unless police or licensed private investigators, find it the ultimate in rudeness to ask or be asked a question. Conrad Metcalf may sound like Sam Spade, but the world in which he tries to exist is not conducive to his anti-establishment position.The murder that Conrad attempts to solve is fairly straightforward, although Lethem does throw in a few really nice twists that fit with his world and the characters. For all its outre ideas, Lethem keeps the world consistent, as if he had thought while writing it, "What would a hard-boiled detective do if found in this situation?" The result is clean, crisp, often incredibly funny, and yet the ending is as tough as these novels come, with an additional bonus of an ending moral. Separately, Lethem's ideas are nothing new in science fiction. Together, and in a noir style, they make a fresh and witty adventure. I'm sorry that I took so long to turn to Lethem, and you can be assured that the other books will not linger long on my to-be-read shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Best Novel by Letham
Review: This is simply one of the best novels I've ever read, and most definitely his work of legacy. The plot and story is likable to the post-apocolyptic existentialism of Vonnegut, Huxley, Orwell, and even Chuck Palahnuik, however the combination of sarcasm and detail is unique to Letham alone. The metaphors aren't obscure and there isn't a trace of the condescending intellectualism that is considered apt social criticism as is commonly found in most of this genre, but it is still brilliantly clever.
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