Gun, with Occasional Music

Jonathan Lethem

Oct 2014 · Faber & Faber

About this ebook

The first novel by Jonathan Lethem (author of the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn) is a science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation.
Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room, and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea). He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love with her a little at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

Ratings and reviews

The world building was intriguing but never realised in enough detail to satisfy my curiosity: the nature of the world was taken as granted and read, and so as reader I was never invited to understand it as deeply as the characters evidently did. I found the deduction impossible to follow, not because it was too intricate but because it was too uneventful. Even when he did his big reveal of "whodunnit" at the end I was confused about who was who, who'd done what and why they'd done it. None of the tertiary characters stuck in mind firmly enough for me to connect their actions with meaningful motivations. The time skip at the end seemed as blandly reacted to as the rest of the occurances, stripping it of any consequence to the protagonist. The strength of the book is in the imagery achieved with clever turns of phrase, like "the carpet peeled up" in describing how he fell after being punched. That and the sci fi concepts made it a read I could finish to the end.

Hilarious early faded a bit, but still a good read.

About the author

Jonathan Lethem