Pattern Recognition

Richard Romeo romeocheeseburger at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 18 18:31:46 CST 2003


> 
> 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.'' ... 
-----------
god, how tiresome this trope of the quest of the hip
hunters.  If the Savage Girl wasn't bad enough, we got
more of the same.

> 
> [...]> 
> 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.''
___________
the delillo curse or virus is working its way thru
today's publishing houses, oh my...echoes Valaparaiso
a
> 
> > 
> ... 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. 
--------------
alas, if i'm not mistaken Oedipa shies away from the
LSD and drug culture in 49 eh? nit picking, i know
> 
> 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.'' 
-----------
if white noise has become dated--this surely will be.
i wonde how anyone can say transcend--don't we need 20
yrs of perspective for that?


rich 
>
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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