Amnesia Moon

Lethem gets a lot of credit from me for trying different scenarios in his novels. He doesn't do the same thing over and over again and I can admire that in a writer because it shows someone willing to take risks and stay away from their comfort zones. Watching someone attempt that, I can forgive the occasional misstep or misfire, because sometimes watching the author trying to put it all together right down before you on paper is enough. The process is fascinating to me, sometimes, even if it doesn't amount to anything. Is Lethem a science-fiction writer? Maybe, maybe not. He certainly uses the trappings of the genre to drape his stories in, without even really committing fully, taking the bits that he likes and casting the rest aside. Like Iain Banks, he shoots for a different target each time and takes a new approach. But unlike Banks, he doesn't sidetrack the more science-fictional work (like this one) into a pseudo-pseudonym like "Jonathan L Lethem", both this and the more "normal" stuff (ie Motherless Brooklyn) all fall under the same canopy. The setting makes the point and the point is what you're looking for, buried under the weirdness. In this case, the novel opens with an apparently post-nuclear war America recovering, taking us into a small town ruled by an overlord, one of the inhabitants is a man called Chaos. But just when you think the struggle is going to be one thing Lethem starts to turn it and basically say "Things are not meant to be this way" and has Chaos eject himself from the town, with furry girl Melinda in tow. What transpires then is a journey West, going constantly outward, trying to find what went wrong and if it really is wrong, how it can be fixed. And, if it can't be, what will happen next. Lethem uses the setting to make a comment on modern America and does the reader a service but not playing the surrealist landscape for laughs, for the most part he plays it straight and he plays it serious, this is the world they live in and it is no joke, even when the events seem to demand somebody laugh at them, at the pure absurdism of it all. By the time he gets to the third town and starts debating the nature of luck, you realize that the landscape may be more malleable than you previously thought it was and that Chaos (if that's who he is) isn't so much in it as a part of it. Throughout the novel Lethem seems to be shooting for a Philip Dick vibe, with the characters and the reader ultimately questioning the very nature of reality and its subjectivity and trying to determine how much we really know. What separates it is that Lethem's surrealism is more calculated, he's got a plan here and he's leading us, if not to a conclusion, to a point where we can make our own conclusions and debate how viable they are. In Dick's case, especially toward the end, I think he really believed it was happening, in some aspect of this world. Lethem is trying to make a point and Dick is showing us how he thought the world

Throughout his career, Lethem has demonstrated repeatedly his ability to turn genre rules upside down; in this book he does so repeatedly. Little is what it seems, and the denouement is satisfying and rich. A terrific introduction to his work. Utterly inventive and a soulful examination of the conflict between the inner and the outer landscapes.

Don't be swayed by the negative reviews, this is a great novel, thought provoking, imaginative, and well written. I think the reviewers coming from Motherless Brooklyn are resisting Lethem's efforts to pull them into a dream, where things aren't wrapped up into a tidy little package. This completes my reading of Lethem's works and I thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

It seems like most people out there are reading back from Motherless Brooklyn. IE: Going from a great lush semi-realistic tale to an earlier very lush dreamlike tale. Doesn't seem like people started from the beginning...I loved Amnesia Moon and have read it 3 times over the last few years (Gun I did like more, I reread it about once every year). There is an esence in Lethem's writing that does not escape you from book to book. It's hard to explain. A comfort level between writer style to reader. And his writing style is beyond top notch. These one stars perplex me... I felt the climax in this tale was better than Gun With Occasional Music. Any climax with a talking Banzai tree and grandfather clock that leaves you on the edge of your seat is a book to be reckoned with. If you are looking for a book to hit you over the head with all of the answers to all of it's secrets, then you might be better off looking for Dainelle Steele's or Stephen King's newest.

I don't know what to tell everyone that "didn't get it", I can see how this book might perplex the masses, I however loved every moment. Like real life, not everything ends in a neat little package. I do wish Letham would write a sequal to this book, but it does come full circle in exactly the way it needed to. The entire book is about a mans self discovery, letting the reader in on what he finds. In the end he has direction and identity, the story has explained itself but yes, it does leave the reader wanting more. Letham is one of those authors that greys the lines between sci-fi, fantasy and true liturature. He is a strong writer with a diversified array of tallent and an amazing ability to simply tell a damn good story.