false 16718 0156028972 9780156028974 1597 178 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1222918678m/16718.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16718.Gun_with_Occasional_Music 6404 Jonathan Lethem 22060 2898 4 3 false Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2003 Sat Sep 01 13:17:57 -0700 2007 Sat Sep 01 13:21:47 -0700 2007
Conrad Metcalf is our narrator, a Private Inquisitor in a world where direct questions are considered rude and question marks are flashy punctuation. The story's filled with products of evolution therapy: talking kittens and mobster kangaroos, plus the mysterious babyheads -- toddlers with advanced intelligence that hang out in babyhead bars and babble their babyhead talk. I can come up with my own reasons for most of these things, just take gene therapy, bioengineering, and cloning and project it forward twenty years, but it would have been nice if the story could have given me a hint to their origins in this fictional universe.

Above all, the novel is a mystery, though a failed one. It suffers from the ultimate drawing room "You may be wondering why I've gathered you all here today" infodump, where we all sit down and hear what really happened. It's a mark of how poorly the mystery is constructed that these answers don't appear in the natural course of the narrative and instead require an infodump for resolution. The mystery plot is weak, but the universe Lethem created makes up for the lackluster detective story.

The book is funny but disturbing, playful but violent. The fly-leaf actually got it right for once. It says, "It's funny. It's not so funny." Exactly.]]>