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Summary: Baby...Head!....
Review: Great first novel...Lots of ideas...Fun and enjoyable, reminds me sort of Alfred Bester and the Demolished Man...
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Summary: One mistake, which I'll ignore...
Review: ...Male kangaroos don't have pouches. And if that's the only thing that can be found wrong in this blend of futurism and noir, then it's pretty darn perfect! The chapters zip by with blinding speed; every chapter leads into the next. One twist in particular is hinted at very early on and left to simmer in the reader's head for almost half the book until its incredible payoff. Every character is by turns hilarious, frightening, and real; the futuristic inventions are never too far beyond the pale, or indeed beyond the end of this decade. Read this book, read it again, and then tell someone else to read it.
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Summary: An imaginative, wacky debut novel
Review: Jonathan Letham's first novel certainly gets top marks for imagination. The world he has created is one in which enhanced animals and babies act like adults and mood altering drugs are supplied free by the government. Additionally, asking questions of another person is illegal unles you are a public or private "inquisitor." Letham's hero, private inquisitor Conrad Metcalfe, narrates the story like a futuristic Phillip Marlowe. The plot is suitably bizzarre and many of the descriptions are unforgettable. My only quibble is that the part with the animals and babies comes off primarily as window dressing. It would not have altered the story much to have these characters portrayed as human adults. Nevertheless, this is a challenging and entertaining novel for those who like mind bending stories ala Phillip K. Dick.
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Summary: Chandler + Dick = Great Fun
Review: Excellent melange of hardboiled Raymond Chandler et al. with Philip K. Dick futurist vision. The mystery follows an archetypical hardboiled Oakland PI as he doggedly pursues the truth in a seedy, labyrinthine case. In this dystopic vision of the future, only the police and PI's are allowed to ask questions and everyone carries a "karma" card which the police can add or deduct from as they see fit. Zero karma and you get sentenced--to cold storage for a number of years. Genetic engineering has led to talking animals (who are definitely not first-class citizens) and bizarre gangsterish babies who have their own clubs! An awesome blend of genres which results in something all its own. If you like this, try William Gibson's Virtual Light.
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Summary: Jonathan Lethem--Heir to Philip K. Dick's Style
Review: Jonathan Lethem is the only modern author who comes close to the style of Philp K. Dick. Lethem has the remarkable ability to write about the most unusual worlds, yet make them believable, just as Dick did. Gun, With Occasional Music will astound you with its inventiveness.
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Summary: SF/Private Eye book with intriguing themes
Review: Jonathan Lethem has made something of a splash with his novels, including his latest Motherless Brooklyn. His short fiction has shown outstanding range, and a quirky imagination. Going back to his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, we already see demonstrated both these qualities. The novel concerns Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heels Private Inquisitor in mid-21sty century Oakland. He is drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor with gangster ties, and becomes involved with shady cops, gangland figures, and beautiful women with questionable pasts. Thus, at the surface, this is a straight-forward pastiche of the standard hard-boiled detective novel, transposed into the next century. At this level, the novel works fine: the mystery is sufficiently absorbing and has enough twists to carry the plot, and Lethem has the first-person narrative down very well, with the "typical" hard-boiled attitude. However, this is more than a standard SF take on Chandler. The SF elements themselves, though not terribly plausible, are interesting and thought-provoking, and well-integrated with the structure and themes of the novel. These include universal drug use for (fairly precise) control of emotional states, wildly extrapolated privacy laws, babyheads (children with vastly accelerated mental growth but normal physical growth), and intelligent, self-aware animals (the result of "evolution therapy"). Some of these tropes are use to generate jokes, but for the most part they support and reinforce the central story and the themes in which Lethem is interested. Ultimately, this is a serious, funny-sad novel, and at the heart of it are big questions about memory and the nature of personality. (These questions, and other elements of the novel such as the drug use, are very reminiscent of the work of Philip K. Dick.) Lethem handles the mixture of moods excellently, and the resolution to his story is perfect and satisfying. This is a very exciting first novel from one of the most promising new SF writers of the past few years.
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Summary: Good stuff, especially for a debut
Review: 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.
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Summary: Stupid stuff
Review: I started reading Jonathan Lethem with _As She Climbed Across the Table_ which I thought was funny, sharp, tho small . I've sense read ALL Jonathan Lethem books in hopes to finding an equal or better book. I found nothing but acid trip/opiate dream garbage/drivel. All overly detailed and quite boring, lacking in story. Stupid stuff. The only book of Jonathan Lethems I'd recommend is _As She Climbed Across the Table.
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Summary: Don't Ask Why
Review: Tough P.I. 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.
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Summary: a not-too-interesting book
Review: I thought it would be better, but lacks character depth and plot development. Too predictable, not believable.
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