Customer Reviews

Amnesia Moon

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Sometimes I find myself reading the old Philip K. Dick books and thinking: Where did Dick get these ideas? Were they transmitted to him from an alien satellite brain (or Vast Active Living Intelligent System)? Who's picking up those transmissions now?

Here's the answer. Except for the 1990s references, this book could easily have been written by Dick himself. (There is a brief reference to Dick's DR. BLOODMONEY at a San Francisco cocktail party). This book bespeaks an enormous freedom of imagination: "something" has happened, nobody knows what (shades of Delany's DHALGREN), but afterwards some are "dreamers" able to construct oneiric "Fictitious Subjective Realities," and others are trapped in these FSRs. The narrator Chaos (or Everett) and his sidekick, the furry little girl Melinda, travel through a variety of these dreams, from the postapocalyptic wasteland of Hatfork, Wyoming, to the zombified media-slave suburbia of Vacaville, to the fog-shrouded Oedipal struggles of San Francisco. to the wars with the alien hives in LA.

This book is truly an explosion of creative promise, drawing out those threads first revealed in Lethem's short stories in CRANK! and elsewhere. I'm eager to pick up more old Lethem SF, before he caved to the exigencies of verbosity for mainstream acceptance.

When I want a well-written book with a little imagination that I can knock off in a few hours, I pick up a book by Lethem. Amnesia Moon is my third, after Gun with Occasional Music and As She Climbed Across the Table. Compared to those two, I found Amnesia Moon superior in writing style and imagination. Lethem strings together his flights of imaginative fancy better than he did in Gun and has more of them than he did in Table. Also, despite the episodic nature of this story of an amnesiac who travels between alternate realities in a dreamlike odyessy, Lethem achieves a strong narrative flow to keep his audience reading.

However, though he gives tantalizing hints as to the nature of the disaster that has turned the world into a patchwork of alternate societies with different pasts and rules, Lethem never commits to an answer. The solutions to the central mysteries our hero attempts to solve in his journey -- who he is, what happened, what his role in it was -- are promised, but Lethem reneges at the last moment. Where the answers are not important to the story, this does not bother me. (See K.W. Jeter's novel Farewell Horizontal for a strange setting that is never explained, and in which the lack of explanation is no detriment to the book.) But here, I got the sense Lethem would just plain rather be obscure -- or worse, that he could not think of a satisfying explanation and hoped that his failure to give us one would be written off as artistry.

The journey to this unsatisfying ending is the best stuff of Lethem's I've read. I was completely absorbed by the story, enjoyed the characters, and loved his style. This would have been a four star book if he'd been able to follow through to the end.

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 actually was and in that sense Lethem lacks some of that author's cascading intensity, the driving need to push through just one more veil to show you how things really are. Chaos goes to California and discovers things, which lead to more things. He gets some control over the things he learns and finds out that he may be powerless, or maybe all-powerful. The novel doesn't end neatly, in fact it really doesn't end at all, and one gets the sense that Lethem really had no idea how to wrap it up in a way that would be satisfying to everyone and instead just left it there dangling and let us write out own endings, or at least decide at which point to snip it off. In the end that makes the book a little less than it could be but the journey itself is interesting enough. And maybe the next one will be sharper, a little more incisive. But for the moment we have this and even if it doesn't succeed grandly like you hope it would, it's an attempt and if we don't give some credit for attempting, we'll never produce anything at all.

This is the fourth Lethem novel I've read and by far the strangest of his work. In a setting very reminiscent of Phil K. Dick, Lethem writes the story of world where reality is defined by the dreams of a few. Everett(Chaos) travels through the nightmarish domains that these dreamers have created for themselves, all the while influencing them with his latent but generally uncontrolled ability to affect reality as well. One of the major themes of the novel is Everett's fear that imposing his own reality will eventually take him down the same path as the other dreamers to a point where everyone around him is subjugated to meet his whims.
While the writing is excellent, there are several points where the story drags. The clear resolutions found in Lethem's other works are not present here. This is a confusing tale that gets progressively more confusing through the conclusion. Its worthwhile if you are willing to put in the effort but not as fulfilling as it should be.

Though it does get slow and frustrating at times, I found it very interesting and original. It has all the elements of a dream - identity displacement, location displacement, time displacement and fantastic unrealistic elements in abundance. The answers to many questions are left to be hypothesized about but this just adds to it's dream-like qualities.

Brillant but not for everyone.

This book will convince you that insomnia isn't all that bad a thing.

Which is worse: a megalomaniac or someone pulling the strings who doesn't even know he's doing it? Lethem will have you scratching your head continuously as you try to figure out the meaning of this (pick a genre so long as "strange" is part of the description) book.

It seems the consensus of reviewers is that there is a weak ending. Add my vote to that tally. This is a weird book which is fine; but coupling it with a non-existent finish does a disservice to the reader.

In 1971, Ursula Le Guin wrote the short novel, _Lathe of Heaven_ in which George Orr's "effective dreaming" tranforms reality in just the arational way you'd expect from the subconscious. Le Guin's novel ends with "the break," an event that changes reality in contradictory and chaotic ways. In both content and form, Lethem's novel feels like a sequel to that novel. Chaos, Everett, Moon--whatever name you go by--lives in a world permanently and madly altered by effective dreaming. The difference is that the talent was unique in _Lathe of Heaven_. In _Amnesia Moon_ dreaming transforms reality locally, producing overlapping and confusing realities. In this case, the aftermath proves less interesting than an inciting incident deep in the background of the Lethem's novel. Though ably written, _Amnesia Moon_ is ultimately less satisfying than Le Guin's work, a less exciting and less interesting continuation. By itself, the novel is compelling enough, but juxtaposed with Le Guin, it seems mere fluff.

I picked this up because I'd really enjoyed Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn, and parts of The Wall of the Eye, The Wall of the Sky. Unfortunately, this sci-fi surrealist road-trip never leads anywhere interesting. Chaos, the amnesiac hero, is on a quest to discover the truth of what what happened the world (we are given hints of alien attack, nuclear/biological holocaust, etc.) and his own identity. However, memory, time and truth seem to be totally subjective in this landscape and are somehow dictated and controlled by his dreams. The overwhelming subjectivity results in a surprisingly dull roadtrip, as he struggles to find himself in a world which makes no sense. As with some of Lethem's other work (especially his short stories), there are a some interesting ideas, flashes of genius writing, and the sense that Lethem doesn't know how to finish what he's started. Unless you're really into dreamlike surrealism, skip this one, 'cause Lethem's capable of much better.

Amnesia Moon was the first Lethem book I ever read, and I couldn't put it down. I have since read several of his other books, and of those I've read, only <i>Gun, With Occasional Music</i> comes close. However, be warned, only read this book with the understanding that you have to figure it out, because he never tells you flat out. Even compared to other Lethem books, this one is ambiguous. I read the entire thing looking for closure and an explanation and of course I didn't get that. I've been waiting to get my copy back from a friend so that I can reread it in the right mindset, to get a better understanding of the book.

Anyway, I don't mean to make it sound bad, it's absoultely wonderful, just understand that it's not for everyone. If you only like books that travel from point A to point B in a straight line, skip this one. But if you're prepared to be taken on a fantastic journey, traveling every way but straight, and to be released from any definition of reality, pick a copy up today!

How sad I am. _Amnesia Moon_ thrilled me for the first half and more. I was eager to turn the pages and find out more about the bizarre journey of Chaos/Everett. The realms and characters intrigued me. But alas, the story all but collapses in San Francisco. The insertion of highly futuristic technology feels abrupt and unwarranted. Worse, the tale falters into an awkward, mixed-up set of characters and dreams and dead ends. I couldn't wait for it to end, and could care less (unlike so many reviewers) that the ending is "incomplete."

My sense is that Lethem didn't know what to do with his novel. He'd written something quite good, until he got to San Francisco. And then he suddenly goes Pynchon-esque on us. Lethem neither prepares us for this abysmal confusion, nor did he execute the transition adequately. He stammers and reaches fitfully, until he simply closes the book. This book should not have been published in its current state. Will I read Lethem again after this introduction? Perhaps: there was enough in the first 100 pages to make me think the guy can tell a good story... and Amazon readers tell us to focus our Lethem energies elsewhere.