Synopsis
Trying to avoid his day-to-day struggles and unable to remember his life before nuclear war, Chaos attempts to live as one of the mutated survivors, until he is told that the bombs never fell and sets off on a journey for the truth. Tour.
Reviews
Lethem's post-apocalyptic vision reflects American culture as if in a funhouse mirror in this strong follow-up to Gun, with Occasional Music. Televangelists have become actual robots, dog food is the cuisine of choice and the soap operas star government figures?all making for a confusing world for Everett, aka Chaos, who lives in a movie-projection room in Wyoming, drinking a liquor "that amounted to rubbing alcohol." Fleeing his projection booth with Melinda, who's "covered with fine, silky hair from head to foot," Chaos discovers that he is a "dreamer," one whose dreams can remake reality. As Chaos and Melinda travel through the U.S., they find that, while each town has been affected differently by the mysterious source of the apocalypse, none can fill in their incomplete memories or answer their questions. Alighting in Vacaville, where everything is determined by "luck tests," Chaos and Melinda settle into family life with a woman and her two children. But figures from his past, including some who appear only under the influence of intravenously administered drugs, draw Chaos into discovering that past?and into making more active use of his dream powers. The author draws each stop on Chaos's journey with care, including a supremely decadent San Francisco and a Los Angeles overrun with aliens, bringing to life all the horror and confusion inherent in his future world. At its heart, this novel remains a simple story?the search for identity, the search for family?but Lethem uses it successfully as a springboard for both a commentary on American culture and a convincing portrait of his main character. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lethem follows his critically acclaimed crime novel pastiche, Gun with Occasional Music (1994), with a strikingly different vision of a postapocalyptic U.S. Chaos is an introverted occupant of a run-down movie theater in Hatfork, Wyoming, who is surrounded by mutant locals and living on canned food until he suspects that the local tyrant, Kellogg, has lied about the bombs that have supposedly destroyed the rest of the country. After stealing Kellogg's car and taking to the highway with a fur-covered runaway girl, Chaos discovers that each new town he comes to is afflicted with its own form of insanity, manifested by mass symptoms ranging from an imaginary, blinding green mist to an obsession with luck. Returning to his native San Francisco, Chaos suddenly remembers his previous identity as a man named Moon and discovers the power his own dreams can have to cure the madness around him. In a remarkable display of versatility, Lethem tempers a liberal dose of quirky surrealism with interesting, believable characterizations and a compelling, imaginative story line. Carl Hays
A young man named Chaos sets out on a journey across a shattered America to search for the truth that lies behind his fragmented dreams. From Hatfork, Wyoming, a desert town populated by genetic mutants, to the Strip, where perpetual fast food establishments exist in a cultural vacuum, Chaos begins to piece together a history of the breakdown of reality. The author of Gun, with Occasional Music (LJ 2/15/94) embues his second novel with a breathtaking vision of a world in flux. Lethem's prose is as flexible and memorable as the evocative story he tells. Most libraries will want this foray into speculative fiction for their sf collections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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