Signed
Gun, With Occasional Music
Inscribed first edition, 1994
Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) is Jonathan Lethem's debut novel, set in a near-future Oakland that has absorbed the aesthetics and moral logic of classic hardboiled fiction and bent them around a Philip K. Dick-inflected reality. Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor. Asking questions has become socially taboo, so investigators work by instinct and implication rather than interrogation. The city runs on government-issued designer drugs called "make," each calibrated to produce a specific emotional state, and the population has been partly replaced by evolved animals, "evolveds," who occupy the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. When Metcalf is drawn into a murder case involving a kangaroo bodyguard and a mob-connected lowlife, the investigation leads him into the usual noir machinery of double-crosses and dangerous women, and a society that has traded self-examination for chemical comfort.
Inscribed copy. Signed and inscribed by Lethem on the title page: "For Mika / Don't take any signing nickels! / Best, / Jonathan Lethem."
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Locus Award winner (1995). Nebula Award nominee (1994). ISBN: 0151364583. #10252.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Inscribed copy. Signed and inscribed by Lethem on the title page: "For Mika / Don't take any signing nickels! / Best, / Jonathan Lethem."
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Locus Award winner (1995). Nebula Award nominee (1994). ISBN: 0151364583. #10252.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The noir architecture of Gun, With Occasional Music is not mere pastiche. Lethem takes the genre's conventions, the cynical loner narrator, the corrupt system, the femme fatale, the crooked cops, and molds it into something more pointed. In Metcalf's Oakland, the act of questioning has been literally outlawed because questions imply that things might be other than they are, and the society has become conditioned not to look too closely at things. The make drugs ensure that nobody is too uncomfortable for too long. The evolveds function as a permanent underclass whose otherness nobody has to justify, since their servitude is simply the way things are. The police are thugs who enforce social norms rather than laws. It is, in short, a society that has solved its problems by refusing to acknowledge them.
Lethem has acknowledged Dick's influence extensively, and the trademarks are clearly there from the reality-eroding anxiety to the ordinary man navigating an absurd system, with the sense that the world is held together by fictions that everyone is complicit in maintaining. But the Chandler debt is equally important, and Lethem has pointed readers toward Thomas Berger's Who Is Teddy Villanova? as another key influence, a noir parody with a similarly compressed, wisecracking prose style that predates Gun by nearly two decades. Metcalf is a genuine noir protagonist, not a science fictional hero, and the novel works as detective fiction on its own terms before it works as anything else. The genre combination was relatively fresh in 1994 and helped establish the territory that Lethem's subsequent fiction would continue to explore.
Gun, With Occasional Music was Lethem's first book and remains one of his most purely enjoyable, tight and funny and genuinely dark in equal measure.
Lethem has acknowledged Dick's influence extensively, and the trademarks are clearly there from the reality-eroding anxiety to the ordinary man navigating an absurd system, with the sense that the world is held together by fictions that everyone is complicit in maintaining. But the Chandler debt is equally important, and Lethem has pointed readers toward Thomas Berger's Who Is Teddy Villanova? as another key influence, a noir parody with a similarly compressed, wisecracking prose style that predates Gun by nearly two decades. Metcalf is a genuine noir protagonist, not a science fictional hero, and the novel works as detective fiction on its own terms before it works as anything else. The genre combination was relatively fresh in 1994 and helped establish the territory that Lethem's subsequent fiction would continue to explore.
Gun, With Occasional Music was Lethem's first book and remains one of his most purely enjoyable, tight and funny and genuinely dark in equal measure.
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