Book, with constant boredom. Answers, with no questions. Questions, with no answers on the tips of tongues or inside cheeks (maybe ass cheeks). Music, with no tone. Gun, with no bullets. Who signed off on the license? Déjà vu that reminds of nothing. Is that the appeal of genres to remind of nothing and feel the welcoming coma with dreams that someone else plants there and you wake up before you can see anyone's faces? The eye from that book, the nose from this... "Make me look beautiful!" "But

When down and out private inquisitor Conrad Metcalf's last client turns up dead, Metcalf takes up the case to find out who killed him. Can he find the killer before he runs out of karma and winds up in the deep freeze?If Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick spent an evening together doing hard drugs, this would be the book that would result. Lethem weaves together the sci-fi and noir elements together so tightly that an evolved kangaroo doesn't seem out of place after his first appearance.The wor...

I absolutely loved this book. It is pulpy bananas. It's really good sci-fi and brain fryingly good noir. Its noir sci-fi. What! I didnt even know such a thing was a thing. Lethem is so funny in the darkest sense. This version of the future is terrifying because it's so believable. Questions can only be asked by people with a license. Drug use is not only legalized but hyper encouraged because people are capable of giving up their rights if they can avoid any negative feeling. I cant think of a b...

For the truly sick individuals that pay attention to my meanderings on Goodreads, you'll note that I frequently take notes as I'm reading. Except when I don't. And I didn't, much, while reading this. Why? Because 1) I was too engrossed in the story, 2) things happened so fast that I didn't have time to process them, and 3) I have no good way of actually conveying what I thought as I read. So, "why", you ask "are you even writing this review, Forrest?" - because: Duty. You see, back in 2017, I vo...

Excellent. His style is as cold as Hammett's, and the moral core as strong as Chandler's. And any book that says both "In Los Angeles it's illegal to know what you do for a living" and "Tell him next time he wants to talk to me, don't send a marsupial" should be in everyone's library.This character develops, is one thing somewhat new: he loses his early self-consciousness about his metaphors, and eventually solidifies enough to end a chapter with the brilliant line: "It was time to stop fucking

Raymond Chandler meets Philip K. Dick? I didn't expect to like this odd near future neo-noir quite so much. If you like Blade Runner, The Big Sleep, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit you'll have to give this trippy novel a try. I'm going to have to read more sci-fi noir and Jonathan Lethem in the future.

Zooming, fast-paced, hardboiled futuristic thriller with an edge that won’t say quits.Gun, with Occasional Music - a mix of Raymond Chandler Big Sleep and Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the first novel by Brooklyn born Jonathan Lethem published in 1994 when the author was age thirty. Oh, what some writers would give to have this man’s talent. The first-person narrator is a private eye by the name of Conrad Metcalf, a tough, handsome chap (what else?) who throw out wisecrack...

CRITIQUE:Epigraph"...The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."- Raymond ChandlerThe Best of Both WorldsIt's always interesting to observe a first-time author choose one or more literary worlds for their fiction, and then discover or invent a writing style that suits those worlds.Here, the worlds are derived from the private detective genre of Raymond Chandler, and the near future science fiction genre of Philip K Dick. Once these choices were made, it seems that "Gun, Wi...

The quotation from Newsweek's review of this novel that appears on the front cover is quite accurate: "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision".I was also reminded at times of Jack O' Connell's "Quinsigamond" series of futuristic crime thrillers: Word Made Flesh, Box Nine, Wireless (Quinsigamond #2), and The Skin Palace.This novel is set in near-future Oakland. The police investigators are known as "Inquisitors" and if you cross them, you'll have your karma card punched. Your ka...

My name is Conrad Metcalf, and I'm a private inquisitor. You knew that. You read it somewhere and it gave you hope. Let me tell you now that it'll cost you seven hundred dollars a day to keep that hope alive. What you'll get for that money won't be a new best friend. I'm as much of a pain in the ass to the people who pay me as I am to the guys I go up against. Most people walk out of my office knowing things about themselves they didn't want to know – unless they leave after my first little spe

"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."- Raymond ChandlerI like Jonathan Lethem, having really enjoyed his great novel Motherless Brooklyn, but his quirky, doddering, pseudo-sci-fi detective novel Gun, With Occasional Music didn't really work for me. It follows a detective named Conrad Metcalf as he tries to solve a murder that no one else seems to care about solving, and that everyone is also seemingly trying to cover up. The novel is set in a future where geneti...

Video reviewManages to offer some of the most unforgettable world-building I've ever read without pausing the action for more than a few words at a time. Offers an absurd dystopian future that's just absurd enough to be convincing. Fuses hardboiled with scifi as seamlessly as to be unfair. Rocks.

Sci-fi noir detective story. It's Blade Runner meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and exactly as goofy and dark as that sounds.Conrad Metcalf is our narrator, a Private Inquisitor in a world where direct questions are considered rude and question marks are flashy punctuation. The story's filled with products of evolution therapy: talking kittens and mobster kangaroos, plus the mysterious babyheads -- toddlers with advanced intelligence that hang out in babyhead bars and babble their babyhead talk. I...

somebody lent me this book because they know i love my noir, and the book pays off in that regard but the notion that this is science fiction or a successor to pkd is confusing to me -- the world lethem introduces us to has drugs coming out the wazoo, and there are evolved animals yes, but really? that all seems window dressing, a spin on what is primarily a detective story. lots of what i would consider the speculative elements don't actually seem to go anywhere -- why is text outlawed? what's

A first rate hard boiled detective story that throws in some intriguing elements of speculative fiction to create something special.Starting out, it could just be another hard boiled detective story about a down and out PI on a murder case involving some sketchy characters and a crime syndicate. Yet, Lethem slowly peels back the layers on a world that grows ever more bizarre. Some of this could be considered window dressing - genetically "evolved" sentient animals and "babyheads"; inanimate obje...

The characters in this story mix their own special blends of drugs to give them just what they need to get through life. This book is its own special blend of sub-genres – mostly detective noir with a heavy dash of cyberpunk and a sprinkling of dystopia. I think it was missing some addictol though, because I never had trouble putting it down. I liked it more toward the beginning, but it started getting tedious around the middle. Toward the end things picked back up, but there were things that an...

In Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction's worthy successor to Raymond Chandler. Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer -- they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler's pulp noir will ring through with startling clarity to readers of this novel. The cadence of the narrative, the hard-boiled dialogue, the archetypal characters... Lethem's Con...

The style and voice and plot are pure Raymond Chandler, set in a weird future of talking kangaroos and mind-altering drugs. It's a wild ride that's largely successful, though not as ambitious as other futuristic genre mash-ups (for example, China Mieville's The City and The City), in part because it hews pretty closely to a standard Chandler-esque plot and in part because the futuristic elements aren't quite as developed. Still, there are moments of sheer brilliance here.

The first fictional offering from Lethem is a wildly entertaining slice of surreal dystopic black comedy, featuring kangaroo nemeses, murdered sheep mistresses, and beleaguered ape PIs. Lethem manages to marshal his eccentric ideas through a skilful semi-parodic noir, keeping the oddness at a controlled timbre without succumbing to the cardinal sin of zaniness. An impressive debut, sealing Lethem’s cult status from the off.

“Sometimes it’s better not to think in questions, but I can’t seem to get out of the habit.” ― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music Science fiction slams into a hard-boiled, noir pulp (imagine 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' written by Chandler and directed by David Lynch'). Fun, quick and in parts even close to brilliant. Lethem is one of those writers I'd stamp with "Most Likely To Disappoint Me". He has a ton of potential, but far too often I see that potential sizzle away. Most of that ener...