Jonathan Lethem

Gun, with Occasional Music remained on my shelves decades after my first reading. I did not recall specifics, but the premise remained enticing, probably in much the same way I initially was persuaded to buy it. Lethem's plot and dialogue follow the gumshoe trope of distracting the reader: they carried me along effortlessly, the banter and interactions among characters amusing, the clues and case developments holding my attention.

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

The setting, meantime, works on a parallel track: a future dystopia, unclear how far in the future, unstated but presumably our own United States. Like the Chandler epigraph, Lethem does well not to say too much about it, nor about his world except in dribs and drabs. This layer of textual commentary rides shotgun while the shamus goes about his rounds, sketching out the generic reality the detective lives in, and later, the one it evolves into. The sci-fi alternative reality starts out amusingly different from our own, takes a turn, and ends up feeling uncomfortably familiar.

It's a quick read, the barest suggestion of an alien landscape, and all in all, worth keeping in my library for another couple decades.… (more)

What was it like to grow up on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the 70's? This work of autofiction by Jonathan Lethem is an appealing and nostalgic look backward to that time and place. If the novel has any structure to speak of, it tends to follow a group of kids from their pre-teen years when racial differences were not apparent into their pre-teen times, characterized by "the dance" and the emergence of racial and sexual awareness. The book finishes with a nostalgic look backward by the characters as adults with special emphasis on the gentrification craze and what was lost by so-called progress.

Lethem's writing is a little like jazz. The narrative tends to jump around a lot but is never far from humor and irony. One is unsure who the narrator is or what to make of the short vignettes other than as ways to provide the reader with a general feel for things. He succeeds at capturing the humanity of his characters, even the hoodlums, but one would have to look elsewhere for the kind of coherent plot evident in other coming-of-age novels set in rough neighborhoods (e.g., Douglas Stuart's Glasgow).… (more)