Suhani Gupta

Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel “Gun, with Occasional Music” thrusts readers into the perplexing world of near-future Oakland.

In the Oakland of the near future, humanoid animals roam the streets, the radio plays menacing music in place of bad news and anesthetizing drugs like “Forgettol” have humanity in a chokehold. Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel “Gun, with Occasional Music” thrusts readers into this perplexing world from the first page, a place irrevocably damaged by the excesses of technological innovation.

At its core, “Gun, with Occasional Music” is a murder mystery. It centers around private investigator Conrad Metcalf, who is hired by a man claiming to have been framed of murder. Metcalf works against “the Office,” the official police department plagued by corruption. This conflict frames the novel with the common trope of a good cop taking on a dishonorable police force, yet the novel is anything but ordinary.

The central plot only serves the purpose of providing a backdrop to the more interesting mystery of this novel: the world it takes place in. While Metcalf attempts to solve his murder case, I had my own puzzle to piece together. Lethem incorporates the novel’s world-building in bits and pieces, time and time again lulling me into a false sense of understanding before suddenly introducing a completely bizarre new technological tidbit that disoriented me once more.

This unconventional approach of tying a murder mystery with speculative fiction made the novel much less formulaic than the typical detective story. It allowed important themes to shine through, particularly through the focus on the advancements of the future.

Lethem’s future takes technology to its extremes. In this version of Oakland, people have become averse to difficulty. Mechanical devices like guns have their own soundtracks that play when they fire, meant to soften the blow of significant events. Moreover, new and improved drugs with names like “Forgettol,” “Acceptol” and “Blanketol” are ubiquitous, with even the protagonist of this novel snorting his own blend of “make” to lull his pain. Asking questions is considered rude, as everyone wishes to remain in their own bubble of unfeeling, unthinking existence.

While these developments seem drastic, they mirror today’s technologies that aim to desensitize humanity. With short-form entertainment at the tip of our fingers, we have access to absolute comfort, just like the “make” pervading Lethem’s Oakland. The novel’s new machines seem wildly fantastical, but they symbolize anything that allows people to check out of reality and reflect a world that has lost its moral and intellectual backbone.

Perhaps the novel’s strangest element is its “evolved” animals and babies. In an attempt for further development, the government has invented a technology that stops allowing children to be children and animals to be animals — instead, they take on distorted, adult-like forms.

The outlandish idea of babies and animals walking and talking like adults provided some much needed comic relief from the dark content of the novel. Yet the idea from which these innovations were born — that society needs to reach maximum productivity at all costs — is one still pertinent. In the Silicon Valley especially, tech companies propel a standard of constant and exponential output. This level of efficiency has to crash down eventually, and the novel’s world captures what that may look like in the future.

“Gun, with Occasional Music” is a departure from realism into the realm of the abnormal, but at the same time remains utterly relevant. Seeing billionaire CEOs push new, mind-numbing technology today reminds me just how dangerously absurd life has become. A future where people avoid difficult questions at all cost, where addiction controls the masses and where variations from the norm are stifled is a world that we hurtle towards at an astonishing rate. This novel proved ahead of its time, predicting developments that we have now accepted as reality.

Rating: 4.5/5