Better than Poodle Springs

Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem was a somewhat frustrating book. I saw it described somewhere as Raymond Chandler characters in the world of Philip K. Dick. I'm not nearly so familiar with Dick's work as I am with Chandler's, but that seems about right to me.

It's an interesting conceit, but Lethem fails for subtle reasons. He captures pretty well the hard-boiled attitude and language (though the four-letter words aren't necessary and Chandler finds elegant was to do without them that add, rather than detract, from his writing) and melds it well with the dystopian sci-fi futurism. He also does a pretty good job of imitating a convoluted Chandler plot that twists and turns all over and still makes reasonable sense at the end.

There are a couple key things that he doesn't get right though. Firstly, there's a bit too much sexual weirdness. Chandler's protagonist wasn't a prude or even terribly chaste, but the books didn't delve too deeply into sexual matters and certainly not with an eye to prurience as Lethem seems to. Secondly, relatedly, and more importantly, Lethem misses the key to what made Marlowe a good detective. It wasn't that he was was interested in truth and justice, though he was, he was a man who did what was right when push came to shove.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but Lethem has his detective do something at the end that is a bit too much of the vigilante. Marlowe would never have made the same choice, I don't think. And there are hints of that throughout, things said, things done, attitudes taken; small things that weren't the same.

Granted, Lethem doesn't have to make his detective the same as Chandler's, but in doing an imitative work, the portion that he didn't imitate was the key portion. He could have dropped any of the more superficial elements, or even most of them, and still had an homage that was truer to the original. An entertaining read, but not one I'll read over and over the way I do with Chandler.

But it's still far better than that abomination Poodle Springs, the one finished by the hack.