Although you’d think based on this post’s title and a spate of mass shootings in America this year (more than one per day, if I’m to believe what I see on the interwebs) that this’d be a political post, you’d turn out to be wrong. The title is the title of a novel by Jonathan Lethem, an author whose name I had heard for years but whose work I had never read until this year, when in July I picked up his Chronic City and enjoyed it a lot.

A few weeks ago, I found cheap copies of his gun, with occasional music and Motherless Brooklyn, and I read gun over the last few days.

It is ostensibly a sort of noir style detective novel, and the epigraph pays homage to Raymond Chandler, whom I’ve not read but who I gather wrote similar stuff. I don’t usually go for genre fiction because the appeal seems to me to be more in the familiarity of the framework and the trappings of the specific genre than in the creation of a distinct voice or other formal innovation that I’m likely to find interesting. I’m not passing judgment on genre fiction here, to be clear; there’s a lot to be said for finding a formula that you enjoy and sticking with it (I buy shirts and pants of the types I like basically in bulk because I find them comfortable). But the books I tend to enjoy most are the ones that do something a little different in terms of voice or structure or rule-breaking, and genre fiction by definition tends to follow established patterns and thus to avoid innovation of the sort that I find appealing. I feel like once I’ve read one or two noir stories, I understand the pattern, and reading a lot more of them in which the names and circumstances change slightly but the flavor is largely the same doesn’t interest me.

So when I first started in on gun, I wasn’t too excited by it. It felt like I was reading pretty standard noir fiction, and once I had the stereotypical noir narrator’s voice in my head, I felt like I’d maybe had my fill. But then there was mention of something called Forgettol, a particular sort of a generic snortable drug colloquially called “make.” This was sort of interesting. And then I came across this:

I rode up in the elevator with an evolved sow. She was wearing a bonnet and a flowered dress, but she still smelled like a barnyard. She smiled at me and I managed to smile back, then she got off on the fourth floor.

Well that’s an attention-getter! This was not to be standard noir fare after all. We encounter other evolved animals in the book, along with some “babyheads,” who are human children exposed to the same evolution technology used to turn animals into sort of human hybrids, with the result that they’re (the babyheads) mentally mature but stuck in the bodies of toddlers and seem understandably cranky and prone to drink. We learn that we’re in a dystopic future in which the state provides free make to keep people’s faculties sufficiently dulled and in which the police officers (called inquisitors) deduct karma points from your id card when you run afoul of them. We do of course also see the usual trappings of pulp detective fiction, complete with one-liners, hard drinking, the roughing up of various and sundry people, and pretty much everything you’d expect besides the lonely saxophone background music (if there’s an audio book, I’ll bet you get the saxophone too).

So the book turns out to be a neat mix of noir and something resembling dystopic sci-fi, with pretty fun results. I enjoyed the book a lot (also, it’s short, so the enjoyment to page count ratio was very high), and I enjoyed just as much how it helped me think a bit about what I find appealing (or not) about what I do like reading (and what I don’t).