Pattern Recognition

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 19, 2003
'Pattern Recognition': The Coolhunter
By LISA ZEIDNER

In the jagged cities of science fiction, there is a
God -- or at least a Wizard of Oz -- and his name is
Thomas Pynchon. ''Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of
mine,'' William Gibson has proclaimed. Gibson, who
must be tired of hearing himself identified as
''coiner of the term 'cyberspace,' '' has gone to
worlds not yet reached under Commander Pynchon's rule.


Critics of science fiction grouse that Gibson can't
get far while steering the same old postmodern
spacecraft, and dismiss his inventiveness as mere
bells and whistles. But some die-hard fans lament that
he's deserting the mother ship every time he tries
something off the flight path of his first novel,
''Neuromancer'' (1984). All of which puts Gibson in
the unenviable position of being able to displease
many of the people much of the time. 

If his elegant, entrancing seventh novel offers an
answer to his detractors, it could be roughly
translated as: so sue me. ''Pattern Recognition'' is
almost nose-thumbingly conventional in design. Despite
the requisite tech toys, it's set squarely in the
present. But then the dates of Gibson-action have been
creeping steadily backward. Predicting the future,
Gibson has always maintained, is mostly a matter of
managing not to blink as you witness the present.

The novel's heroine, Cayce Pollard, -- no relation to
the Case of ''Neuromancer,'' though Gibson does like a
sly self-reference -- is a freelance marketing
consultant.... As a ''coolhunter,'' she penetrates
''neighborhoods like Dogtown, which birthed
skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding
whatever the next thing might be.'' ... 

[...]

... As an ode to paranoia, ''Pattern Recognition''
resembles not that Pynchonian bible, ''Gravity's
Rainbow,'' but ''The Crying of Lot 49.'' In fact, it
can almost be read as a tribute or, as Hollywood would
say, a remake. After all, when Pynchon explored
entropy, counterculture and the postal monopoly in
1966, there was no Internet. 

But does our technology really produce a cataclysmic
shift, or is human nature immutable? That has always
been Gibson's über-issue. As Pynchon has taught us,
the right answer isn't necessarily either/or. It may
well be both/and. (Even the paranoid can be
followed.).... 

In Gibson's fiction, to see our souls, look at our
cities. Cayce calls London a ''mirror-world'' -- like
urban America but, with its oversize appliance plugs
and steering wheels on the wrong side, disconcertingly
off. Distant cities seem both strange and familiar,
especially under the influence of jet lag, here also
called ''soul-delay.'' Culture itself, Gibson
suggests, is a kind of jet lag, or, as Cayce's
therapist puts it, ''liminal'' -- a ''word for certain
states: thresholds, zones of transition.''

[...]

As usual, Gibson's prose is -- to use some of his
favorite adjectives -- corpuscular, crenelated. His
sentences slide from silk to steel, and take tonal joy
rides from the ironic to the earnest. But he never
gets lost in the language, as he sometimes has in the
past. Structurally, this may be his most confident
novel. The secondary characters and their subplots are
more fully developed, right down to their personal
e-mail styles. Without any metafictional
grandstanding, Gibson nails the texture of Internet
culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know
only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about
someone spying on your browser's list of sites
visited. 

[...]

... Yet the book also manages to be, in the fullest
traditional sense, a novel of consciousness -- less
science fiction than Henry James. After all, Oedipa
Maas, the truth seeker of ''Lot 49,'' is sort of a
pot-smoking Isabel Archer, inheritance and all. Cayce
is Isabel, with a search engine. 

Can a book with references to Starbucks, iBooks and
Hummers become a classic? Can anything transcend its
time now? Or is any novel about our tumultuous era
bound to be a blip on the radar screen -- the
equivalent of 20 seconds of stray footage on the Net?
''Pattern Recognition'' considers these issues with
appealing care and, given that this best-selling
author is his own kind of franchise, surprising
modesty. Gibson's novel succeeds in being both
up-to-the-nanosecond and also, in Cayce's highest
praise, ''curiously difficult to date.'' 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/books/review/19ZEIDNET.html

Audio: William Gibson Reads From "Pattern Recognition"

http://www.nytimes.com/audiopages/2003/01/19/books/audio-gibson.html?8bu

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