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Gun, with Occasional Music  By  cover art

Gun, with Occasional Music

By: Jonathan Lethem
Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
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Editorial reviews

Legend has it that, while they were working on the script for The Big Sleep, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett had to phone Raymond Chandler to clarify who killed a particular character; Chandler eventually admitted that even he couldn't work that one out, and let the scriptwriters decide for themselves. In even the most celebrated hard-boiled noir, then, clarity of plot is secondary to atmosphere, tone, and those particularly allusive metaphors the more overblown, the better. Jonathan Lethem's Gun with Occasional Music (actually the author's first published novel, though newly released here on audio) is no exception in fact, it takes these noir traditions to their illogical extreme by locating the plot in a surreal near-future where current societal trends are reflected in a funhouse mirror. Animals are "evolved" and take on human characteristics while remaining second-class members of society, babies are given growth hormones to "develop" quickly, radio news is broadcast in the form of abstract music, people's karma levels are monitored by a points-system, and, in a brilliant stroke, the only people allowed to ask direct questions are investigators (called "inquisitors"), so the gumshoe's verbal dexterity and panache takes on a heightened significance that heralds Lethem's career as a literary wunderkind.

Narrator Nick Sullivan serves this dialogue well, and has great fun with the accumulation of wisecracks. Lines like "The Bay View was a vacation spot for people vacating from their husbands and wives" are delivered with perfect timing, fitting for the kind of deadpan one-liners that are stock in trade of gumshoe narratives. If he perhaps emphasises the comic and cartoon at the expense of the story's darker undertones, then it is compensated by his well-drawn cast of characters, including a lugubrious villain and a tough-guy kangaroo hoodlum.

Although not as substantial as Lethem's two masterpieces, Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Gun with Occasional Music clearly sets forth the author's predilection for genre-bending, being somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick perhaps with a touch of Who Framed Roger Rabbit thrown in. Dafydd Phillips

Publisher's summary

Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems - not the least of which are the rabbit in his waiting room and the trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is an ominous place where evolved animals function as members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage.

In this brave new world, Metcalf has been shadowing the wife of an affluent doctor, perhaps falling a little in love with her at the same time. But when the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in the crossfire in a futuristic world that is both funny - and not so funny.

©1994 Jonathan Lethem (P)2009 BBC Audio

Critic reviews

"This colorful first novel is a fast and lively read, full of humorous visions and outlandish predicaments." ( Publishers Weekly)
"[A] sparkling pastiche of Chandleresque detective fiction displaced to an almost comical postmodern landscape." ( Booklist)
"Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision...an audaciously assured first novel." ( Newsweek)

What listeners say about Gun, with Occasional Music

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

SF SLAMS into a hard-boiled, noir pulp!

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.

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14 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Noir detective novel meets alternative future...

This book was in my library for a very long time... I think I thought it was a different kind of book than it actually was. It is billed as a noir-detective type novel, but I would have to say that it is equally an alternative future/sci-fi type novel.

It does have the Chandler-esque tone to it: making it on the dark side, and the action is short and succinct. It is not particularly violent or graphic, but has an over-arching depression about it. (i.e. you won't find a feel-good sensation at the end).

There is significant drug use - in fact, this is the component that sets the novel out as alternative future-ish... drug use has been legalized, and, even more disturbingly, made customizable for users. In fact, it changes society completely at the end - and it adds a layer of bleakness to the story, while still remaining believable. If you look at it quickly, you might think the drug use was just this detectives' booze (after all, don't all noir detectives have addictions?), but I think it was actually the component that carved out this world: the very world became the way it is in the novel because of this drug 'reality'. And the ending of the novel wouldn't have worked without it.

I have read elsewhere that the novel was a commentary on the state of individual detachment from/in the world, and I suppose that could be an accurate description. Except that I didn't read it for social insights or moral issues; I read it for simple enjoyment. Fortunately it delivered. Sure, you can read all sorts of stuff into it, but you don't have to, and I think the book stands well as a futuristic noir.

The narration is good. There is violence, but it is not graphic. There is no sex. I will be looking for more books by this author.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

quirky SF detective story

this is very much a Chandler "Big Sleep" type story but channeled through Pynchon and PK Dick. very good, and though the narrator could have been a bit more world weary noirish, or a bit more comic like Michael Kramer's narration for Westlake, (you really need to get Kramer's Dortmunder recordings on Audible) he does a good job. interested in Lethem's Chronocity now.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Gun, with Occasional Music

Any additional comments?

What happens if you take the classic noir detective story and put it into an American future characterized by perverse pleasure? You get this novel.

First the positive. If you like a traditional tough-guy detective story told in the first person, this has got that. It’s even set in the Bay Area and incorporates all of the necessary elements, damsels in distress, a seductress, tough guys jawing at one another, a morally flawed main character, etc. In fact, early on in the book I thought that I would rate it fairly high simply because Jonathan Lethem had done such a tremendous job of matching the trope. I was particularly taken with his deft touch on the snappy tough-guy repartee, if this were a movie there would be many quotable lines.

That said, I found it a little lacking at points. Frankly there were a few points where the book just lost my attention. These points seemed to be primarily where he left the main detective plot line and immersed the reader in world building. More importantly, I could never quite figure out how the world Lethem created served the story. For instance, you can expect the main character in this type of novel to hit the bottle or have an addiction, but everyone had an addiction and I’m still wondering how, other than occasionally making some people harder to question, that served the story. Another example of this was a series of genetically mutated animals. They were an interesting set of characters to play with and read about, but I can’t say that I felt like they added depth to the plot in anyway, which I see as a strong negative in a murder mystery. There was also a backdrop of Karma Points, which when it was first introduced I thought was an interesting concept, but it just never seemed to go anywhere intriguing.

As I think this through, it seems to me that the writer must have wanted to write a noir detective story, which is cool. Then he decided to place the story in a really funky world and the problem is that the world doesn’t end up facilitating the story, it came off to me as simply arbitrary.

Don’t get me wrong because of the strong first-person narration and appropriate incorporation of the genre’s tropes, it is an entertaining read. It just falls a little flat in the end. My official rating for this is 3.5 stars, but since most sites won’t let you do half a star I’ll click the three star button because I simply do not feel strongly enough about it to make it four stars.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

all about style

As with all Lethem's books, it's not the story that entertains, it's the writing. His books are all an interesting turn of phrase.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Entertaining

I wrote this review because I thought the other review was a little harsh. Entertaining book in the Sc-Fi genre. Didn't think the reader did as bad a job as in the previous review.

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    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Utterly bonkers and not in a good way

Full disclosure: I couldn't stand even the first quarter of this book - I was dumped into an absurd, grim world with a bunch of characters I couldn't care less about and a murder mystery that meant nothing to me. I tried to hang in there, but the book was too much of a chore. I think a big problem was the huge gap between their world and ours - very little of it seemed like a world that could grow naturally, so there was nothing to believe in and no investment. Also, the main character has nothing to gain and everything to lose by taking the case, and he just didn't strike me as the kind of boy scout you need to be to do that; also, he was so laconic about everything that there was zero sense of stakes. It's too bad, because the world had several interesting ideas that, if presented alone against an otherwise normal backdrop, could have made for an intriguing story. The big mistake, IMO was the murder - the victim and the fall-guy are nobody to us, so the mystery means nothing. Again, it's too bad, because I read a plot summary, and the solution is kinda interesting and ironic; if I'd only had to sit through a short story to get there, it might have been a lot of fun.

Also, a personal peeve: "swapped nerve endings" is just jabbering nonsense. That's not how anything works. If they'd just physically swapped genitals, it'd have made more sense, though it still would have added zilch to the story. That kind of woolie thinking gets right up my nose.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

It’s quirky

But it’s a keeper. Not just a spoof, or that horror, the sci fi comedy. More like an exploration of the Marlowe mythos. It has humor but doesn’t beat you over the head with it. It’s read well, too.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Such a clever idea but that's all

There's no denying the quality of Lethem's writing. His mimicry of the hard-boiled, Raymond Chandler type, simile-swinging detective is spot on. The novel's concept is clever and engaging--at first. After the first surprise of discovering the old-fashioned PI juxtaposed with a dystopian society, I found the story gets old, the characters are trite and undeveloped, and I got bored.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

A film noir set in "1984"

I really enjoyed this book, although it's definitely not for everyone. It's a detective story (very Bogart) set in a world with much like Orwell's "1984". I loved it. The narrator is great!

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