Gun, with Occasional Music By Jonathan Lethem

Gun, with Occasional Music

By Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 19th, 1964. His mother was Judith Frank Lethem, a Jewish activist, who traced her family roots to Germany, Poland, and Russia. His father was Richard Brown Lethem, a Scotts-English Protestant, and avant-garde painter. Jonathan was the eldest of three children, His brother Blake became the graffiti artist Keo and is still active today training apprentices in the craft. His sister Mara Lethem became a noted translator of books from Spanish to English and a writer in her own right. All three of them grew up in a commune in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn and experienced a very Bohemian upbringing. When he was young his parents divorced and Judith passed away from a brain tumor when he was thirteen. Originally intending to pursue visual art styles like his father, Mr. Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont but realized that he would rather write and dropped up. After an epic bout of hitchhiking, he ended up in California and worked for used book stores for about twelve years before publishing his first short story in 1989 and novels starting in the 1990s. Gun, with Occasional Music, is his first novel published in 1994 by Harcourt, an American publishing company that was founded in 1905 and bought by Houghton Mifflin and re-branded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2007. The novel itself was well received and nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel. Let's talk about this book, shall we?

Everything dies and there are a lot of ways to die, some deaths are relatively easy and one could even say a good way to go (In this truth lies half the beginning of the Millennial Death Drive {that sound you heard dear readers was me rolling my eyes}). Others are at least quick and done with a minimum of mess. The society we see in Gun is not dying well, fast or with a minimum of mess (And this is the other half.{Oh please, compared to what people in the 1930s or 1850s had to deal with? Get a damn grip}). It is dying slow, hard, and ugly; and the people caught up in its death throes have no idea what's going on (My God. The author is prescient.{Our society is not dying, it’s having a nasty bout of generational battling}). Set in an alternate 2008 Oakland, Gun takes place in a world where almost everyone is taking drugs to deal with their lives, asking any kind of questions is at best borderline illegal, and humans have increasingly isolated themselves not just from each other but from themselves. Inquisitors have replaced the police and are the only ones really allowed to ask questions in this society. I'd like everyone to sit for a moment and think about what it means when only the authorities are allowed to ask questions. While Mr. Lethem doesn't explore that to deeply, he doesn't shy away from the implications either, showing us newscasts that have abandoned giving any narrative of the news instead using pictures and musical themes to communicate very basic propaganda and the Inquisitors abusing their authority with almost childlike disregard for any consequences (To the world is reduced to Fox News but worse… and the Inquisitors are basically… well the logical conclusion of police now. Gotcha!). After all, how are their abuses even going to be uncovered in the first place if no one else can ask questions? Those who do ignore the law and keep asking questions and acting in ways to disturb the “peace” are dealt with through the karma system, a system of government-issued points kept track of through a computer system and accessed through plastic cards. Acceptable behavior can get you more karma issued. Unacceptable behaviors get karma docked. Hit zero karma and the Inquisitors can come and take you away for any reason and put you in the deep freeze, a cryogenic prison. The only checks on this system seem to be the rapidly disappearing private inquisitors and few semi-honest men and women in the system trying to keep everything from going further off the rails. As you can guess these are rather ineffective checks. Further reinforcing the feeling of a society dying from internal rot is the utter lack of children except for animals mutated into anthropomorphic forms and intelligence, and the babyheads - mutated children,who have completely replaced natural children, and are supposedly more intelligent than their parents, The book provides little to no evidence of that intelligence, just that these children mentally develop faster into self-sufficiency and are borderline sociopaths in their behavior towards the adults (Where oh where did this shit go off the rails? I mean, the living Furries I get because anthropomorphic weasels and raccoons are adorable, but… why Evil Boss Baby? {I’m not sure, on the one hand some characters talk about it as if there was no choice in it happening. Others call it a giant mistake society made}). The remaining unmutated humans deal with this by taking government subsided and approved drugs that have such names as Acceptol, Forgettol and so on, which keeps them docile and in an easily distracted haze.

In the middle of all this works Conrad Metcalf, a private inquisitor. He was once a member of the government force but now plies the trade of asking questions for private citizens. Conrad is an interesting choice of main character. In some ways he's traditional, being a P.I in bad odor with the authorities caught between his idealism and cynicism as he works on the very edge of the law to try and ensure some scrap of actual truth is maintained in the process. He's a person on the margin of society but there because of his own beliefs and choices, not because he was born with the wrong gender or skin color or in the case of this setting species. He's sarcastic with a smart mouth that gets him into trouble and he depends on his wits and observational skills to get himself back out of trouble. In other ways, he's very non-traditional playing with the context of the setting itself. For example, Conrad is literally emasculated, having undergone a procedure where he traded nerve endings with an old girlfriend in what was supposed to be a temporary procedure, which became permanent when she promptly disappeared (Wait. WHY!?). This means while Conrad's equipment (if you'll pardon the euphemism) functions perfectly fine, he gets no real sensation from the function. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work but it colors his relationship with the women characters in the story as he varies from low-level hostile (which is pretty much how he deals with the male characters), to resentful towards desirable woman, to flat out anger and violence when a woman tries to use sex as a bargaining tool. His relationships with men honestly aren't any better with violence being a predominant theme of his interactions with human beings either implied through him coming in and asking invasive questions (which requires a license in this setting) or by him and the other characters trading hits throughout the decaying Oakland streets and parking lots. This gives us a picture of a man who is incredibly isolated and can't reach past his own anger and distaste for the world around him to end that isolation. It also seems to be the norm for his society as everyone else seems very isolated as well. This is vividly illustrated by the man who started this story, Dr. Maynard Stanhunt a former client of Conrad.

Dr. Stanhunt's murder is the event that kickstarts the story but the more I read the book the less sure I am that Dr. Stanhunt was a person. Dr. Stanhunt was estranged from his wife, had a very distant relationship with his medical partner and was so hopped up on Forgettol that his afternoon self had no idea what his morning self was doing. This is literal by the way, Conrad confirms this by telling us that when he called Dr. Stanhunt at the wrong time, the man had no idea who he was or that Conrad had been hired by him. If you're so divorced from your own life that you have no idea what you're doing from 7 am to 11 am and during those hours you don't know a damn thing about your life after 5 pm... Are you a real person at this point or just a set of discordant identities knocking about in the same body? (Two different people maybe?) Can you say you actually have a life or do you just fill up space like some sort of meat Popsicle? We never meet Dr. Stanhunt directly so we can’t really say if he had a life or not. It’s telling, however, that despite him being murdered, there doesn't even appear to be a funeral for the guy. None of the supporting characters ranging from the Inquisitors given the official case, to the doctors' ex-wife, the woman who lives in a nice house and seems to know the ex-wife and doctor well, and the angry kangaroo enforcer who wants Conrad to just go away and stop digging around none of them provide any answers into Dr. Stanhunt’s personhood or lack of it either. Nor do they seem to be mourning him. Conrad himself is more interested in figuring out who killed the Doctor to clear both himself and his new client than he is in answering any questions about personhood. To be fair, given that he is being paid to save his client from being imprisoned for murder so that's likely the priority. As Conrad works to unravel secrets that the doctor was keeping from everyone, including himself, he finds himself at the center of a spiral of crime, betrayals, and increasingly snarled relationships gone bad. In some ways, it mirrors a standard hard boiled detective story but in a lot of ways, it uses the science fiction elements of the story to explore just how easy it is to victimize and crush people when they're isolated and alone. It also gives us a glimpse of how the easiest way to isolate people is to convince them that they have no choice but to be isolated and that there's no way to fight that.

This is a very bleak novel in a lot of ways. I don't really like Conrad, even though he's the most likable character in the novel but I do find himself understanding him and approving of the lengths he goes to for a person he doesn't even like. I do feel Mr. Lethem kinda missed a few opportunities in this story due to his insistence of following the hardboiled format but what he does do, he does well. Do I like the novel? I can't say that I do. On the flip side, I read it twice and both times I read it in a single sitting so I can't claim that I hate the novel either (Maybe one of those things where it is objectively very good and pulls you in but… my god the author needs antidepressants? {That’s definitely a way to describe it!}). It's very well written, intensely in the first person from the view of Conrad and while the plot is a bit of a burning train wreck it's one you can't look away from. Part of the problem is the pacing, Mr. Lethem takes a lot of time to set everything up and illustrate the bleakness of his setting and ends up kinda rushing through the endgame. Additionally, a lot of the supporting characters are left kind of shallow and unrealized. Part of that is the weakness of going all-in on a single first-person narrative, you can only get so far into the other characters that way (Especially if the protagonist hates them and himself.). I would call it an uncomfortable novel but not one that makes you angry through ham-handedness or various other flaws but in how it makes you think. One repeating complaint I see in modern society is how people have fewer and fewer meaningful relationships. I see and hear people talk about how they don't have close friends and struggle to make any friends. I consider myself lucky in that I do have several people I would consider close friends that I can sit down with and talk about emotional issues or just shoot the shit about movies, games, or what have you (Hello! Otherwise why on earth would he put up with me...). I will say that if you're feeling friendless, the first step is to get out there and start meeting people. Join an activity, take up a group hobby, find my other readers and set up a book club discussing books I review. Do something to get into repeated social contact with people outside of your workplace, otherwise, you might end up doing the Forgettol and losing yourself. I'm giving Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem a B. It's a book that's gonna stay with me and gave me a lot to think about despite the flaws in its plot and pacing.

With this review done, loyal readers we head into February, where we discuss the works of Philip K Dick.  Our esteemed Patrons have voted that our focus for the next month be the short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, which most of you would know better under the title Total Recall.  So we'll be covering the story, both movies and even the television show!  Speaking our Patrons you can join their ranks for as little as a 1$ a month and get a vote on what books get reviewed as well as discussions on theme months or any other suggestions you'd like to make.  Just join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads.  Hope to see you there and as always, keep reading!