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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 Conrad Metcalf is a well-executed Philip Marlowe cover song with just a little bit of record scratching thrown into the background for texture.

On the other hand, those same columnist quotes, blurbs, and reviewers all seem to liken Lethem to Philip K. Dick. Personally: not seeing it. It’s a bit of a stretch, some optimistic name-dropping to match up Lethem’s mystery/noir heritage with some similarly classic science fiction antecedent. The ubiquitous drug use? Sure, okay — that’s a bit Dickian. A Möbius fold of reality unraveling around the narrator in some palpable and thoroughly eldritch fashion? Not so much. More than PKD, the scenes in this novel played out in my imagination as fearfully symmetrical to Cronenberg’s take on Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch — substitute Jim Henson-esque “evolved” animals for Mugwumps but otherwise that’s it, right down to Peter Weller as Conrad Metcalf.

Or maybe Punk’s review has got it down:

It’s Blade Runner meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Where was I? Oh right…

A part of me desires to do a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the text, to get all scholarly about it and run the blockade of Chandler’s lineage here. I want to look for the hidden significance of the doctors as urologists, to get semiotic on names like “Catherine Teleprompter” and “Danny Phoneblum”. But instead I’ll just give a positive nod. It’s a fun, noirish scifi romp with all the right moves and delivers slightly better than expectations.

★★★★☆

A version of this review originally appeared on GoodReads.com.

In December, John gave me a homework assignment: “You want to include some sort of ‘mystery’ element in your stories?  You better get familiar with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.”  It seemed like a simple enough request.  Get down with the classic, defining bodies of pulp noir.  Sam Spade?  Philip Marlowe?  You better know these bastards inside and out.

I cruised through most of Hammett’s work back in January¹ and it took until now to get back to the assignment and jam through a couple of Chandler’s novels.

Having gotten through these now², I can see why John recommended them as “homework assignments”.  These are definitely classic pieces of American literature worthy of a second or even first tier position in the pantheon.  Looking back on these two collections now, I should have dove into Chandler’s work first.  John commented on some parallels between Chandler and William Gibson (one of my perennial favorites), citing the former as a major and obvious influence on the latter.  I enjoyed Hammett’s work but I also found it a bit gruff and fragmented — but fragmented in that random way and not fragmented in that serendipitous way.  On the other hand, I found Chandler to be elegantly staccato, gritty and yet dirt-on-the-knees proud.  I agree with John that Chandler’s influence on Gibson is apparent though I think they are going after far different goals as writers: Case is the illegitimate son of the illegitimate son of Philip Marlowe and though they’re living in the same neighborhood, headed in opposite directions on the same street.

Or maybe it makes more sense to compare Marlowe with Hammett’s Sam Spade?  Marlowe as the teeth-clenched pragmatist to Sam Spade’s hopeless romantic?  Or maybe that’s just Marlowe’s LA to Spade’s San Francisco?  In any case…

I have never been much in to mysteries as a genre before.  Noir has no surprises; when you expect a twist, it’s just the grateful realization of your expectation.  And while this has not really changed my mind so much on mysteries, it was certainly nice to branch out a bit.  And finish my homework.

1. Three of five; had to get it back to the library.[↩]
2. Again, 3 of 5 for Hammett, 2 of 3 for Chandler.[↩]