The Pickup Artist

Rating:
Summary: Good candidate for deletion
Review: Certainly, there are elements of Tom Robbins and Douglas Adams and Terry Gilliam in this book, but this is less like a story and more like a collection of interesting elements. The plot gets more and more nonchalantly weirder to the point of absurdity, so I was able to skim the last 50 pages without any worry that I'd miss anything important. I believe that the book could be improved by moving the interspersed "history lesson" to an appendix rather than forcing the reader to wade through it on the chance there's something interesting within.

Rating:
Summary: A Surreal journey into the furture of Art
Review: Hank Shapiro is a pick up artist. He spends his days confiscating literature, music, art, and movies that have been scheduled to be deleted. Some clients are surly, others just want the money they get for turning items in, but Shaprio is always professional. Its a people job and he's a people person.

The trouble starts one day when he picks for destruction up a Hank Williams record. He remembers that his father gave him the name Hank as he was a fan of this musician. He becomes obssessed with hearing the albumn and even goes as far as to visit a "Misdeamenor Cafe" where someone can hook him up with a black market record player.

Shapiro finds himself on the run with a pregnant librarian called Henry, a dead clone named Indian Bob, and his dog Homer who is female. They travel ever west in search of Hank's stolen record.

Full of interesting characters and also the history of this future world, the pick up artist is both entertaining and thought provoking. Its hard not to compare it to the classic "Fahrenheit 451," but the reasons for deletion are more complex. I highly reccomend this title.

Rating:
Summary: Neat Premise & Details, but Weakish Trip
Review: Sure to be compared to the Ray Bradbury classic, Fahrenheit 451, Bisson's satirical romp posits a future in which 20th century works of art (books, films, records, paintings, etc.) are being systematically deleted to make room for new artists. Hank Shapiro works for the Federal Bureau of Arts and Information as a "pick up artist," (kind of a repo man/IRS auditor) employed to make house calls to confiscate items that have been "deleted." The story follows what happens when he confiscates a Hank Williams record and has the urge to play it before destroying it (strictly against the rules). It seems his father, who abandoned him, named him after the singer, and Hank hopes to catch a glimpse of his father through the music, which he has never heard. This leads him to an illegal underground "Misdemeanor Cafe" where he tries to buy a record-player but ends up losing the record, and eventually on a surreal cross-country quest with a long-pregnant woman, his ailing dog, an amazingly resilient homing bug, and a dead clone Indian as companions.

Oddly enough, once the road trip starts, the book starts to rapidly loose steam. Bisson has a knack for great little details like various futuristic drugs, including Half-Life', which allows the dead to speak (Hilariously, they tend to say things like, "Oh no! I'm dead aren't I? Tell me I'm not dead!"). Or the giant landfill being burrowed through by miners on a drug called "Dig" who retrieve old ephemera that gets sold in "flee" markets that straddle state borders. Vehicles generally run on a massive electrical grid, and Indian casino chips function as a currency franca. But even with these nifty details, the trip'in which Hank is trying to recover the album, and the woman is trying to reunite with an old love'never really goes anywhere interesting.

Fortunately, every other chapter is a history of how the deletion system came into being, starting with terrorist acts against art and museums, and continuing with the support of the shadowy software giant "Mr. Bill" (Bill Gates, duh), and a celebrity trial. This history shows how the production of art has outpaced the world's ability to absorb it, placing new artists at a stifling competitive disadvantage. It's a kind of interesting satirical concept that Bisson riffs on rather well, but it can't completely conceal the tepidness of the road trip chapters.