Novel: Gun, with Occasional Music

Premise and Setting
Jonathan Lethem transposes hardboiled detective fiction into a near-future city where the social order has been radically altered by biotechnology, social engineering, and an accommodation with animal intelligence. Streets hum with neon, bureaucracy and corporate influence, but the world is also populated by talking, legally enfranchised animals and by childlike "juveniles" whose behavior is policed and pharmacologically modulated. That collision of noir atmosphere and speculative oddity creates a city that feels both eerily familiar and grotesquely new.
The protagonist, private eye Conrad Metcalf, operates with the weary, rueful voice of a classic gumshoe but must negotiate technologies and social practices that would have been inconceivable in Chandler's Los Angeles. Memory drugs, engineered amnesia, and state-sanctioned "rehabilitation" programs have remade how truth is remembered and manipulated, so every clue is contingent on what people can be made to forget or forced to forget.

Main Characters and Plot
Conrad Metcalf is hired to take on what appears to be a routine missing-person case, but the investigation quickly spirals into something far darker and more systemic. The trail moves from seedy bars and legalistic corporate offices to the hidden intersections of politics and pharmaceutical power. Along the way Metcalf contends with ex-lovers, unnatural alliances, and a cast of human and nonhuman figures whose motives are blurred by altered memory and social engineering.
As pieces come together, the case exposes a conspiracy that uses memory-altering drugs and media manipulation to steer elections, erase inconvenient truths, and produce public consent. Metcalf's own past and the reliability of his recollections are put at risk, and the detective discovers that solving the mystery requires placing oneself in the path of institutional forces prepared to rewrite minds. The story builds to a morally ambiguous climax in which the detective's choices reveal as much about the new social order as any single revelation about the conspiracy.

Themes and Tone
The novel is a sustained meditation on agency, accountability, and the contingencies of identity under technological and political pressure. Memory is a central motif: who gets to remember, what can be made to vanish, and how memory-manipulating tools reshape responsibility and culpability. Lethem probes the idea that legal and linguistic systems, like memory itself, can be engineered to obscure power rather than reveal it.
Tone oscillates between wry pastiche and bleak satire. The narration captures the cadence and bravado of noir while using those conventions to critique late-twentieth-century social trends, consumerism, corporate dominance, and the infantilization of political subjects. The presence of anthropomorphic animals and engineered juveniles heightens the absurdity while also functioning as a dark mirror for human institutions.

Style and Legacy
Language blends hardboiled pared-down dialogue with playful, referential asides; the novel openly toys with genre while maintaining narrative momentum. Lethem's choice to graft classic noir onto speculative inventions allows both genres to expose each other's assumptions and limits, producing a story that is entertaining, intellectually provocative, and emotionally unsettled.
Over time the book has been read as a notable example of genre hybridity, a work that helped establish Lethem's reputation for mixing pop culture, literary allusion, and social critique. Its uneasy ending and satirical bite continue to invite discussion about memory, responsibility, and the ethical contours of technological change.