Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Gibson Gets Real
Dropped into a new local bookstore Fri evening, wanting something to read, rather than reread, over the weekend. Ended up picking Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition. First off...I liked this book - a lot; thinking it over I think it's my favorite of all Gibson's books - possibly because there's an underlying element of "sweetness" in the book's mood that keeps the pervasive vision of social anomie and paranoia at delicate bay.
The protagonist, Cayce Pollard is a "cool hunter" - an (expensive) trendspotter for hire. She's also an internet "footage" buff - footage being seemingly random snips of a movie (complete or work in progress ?) that's being released by an anonymous auteur (sp) to the obsessive interest of a growing clique of footage heads all over the world. She's also the daughter of an (ex) CIA honcho who seemingly disappeared in 9/11 & has a mother who tries to communicate w/ the dead (her Cayce's named after the Va. "clairvoyant"). Pattern Recognition operates explicitly in several arenas at once: 1. Cayce trying out new "brand" ids - seeing if they'll work or not; 2. attempting to find a pattern in the "footage" - where does it come from, what does it mean, who's responsible; 3. what's going on w/ the global economic system; 4. what happened to her dad. Being a responsible author, Gibson naturally ties all these threads together in a novel fraught w/ betrayal, dubious relationship, virtual friendships which solidify in the "real" world and hope.
anyway..i liked it.
bob
"the poundin' of the drums, our pride & disgrace" barry mcguire/ pf sloane(?)
Rating: - I want a Rickson jacket like Cayce's
Cayce Pollard doesn't just hunt cool: she *is* cool. Attired in anonymous Cayce Pollard Units (CPUs) in shades of black and gray, she jets around the world, meeting intriguing characters and acquiring snippets of information designed to lead her to the creators of mysterious Internet-disseminated video footage.Gibson skillfully conveys action, with Cayce narrowly escaping danger and extricating herself from dire situations a la James Bond. There are break-ins, spy-vs-spy encounters, double-crosses and triple-crosses. The good guys prove to be the bad guys, and then sometimes become good guys again. Or maybe vice versa. To fully appreciate the magic of this book, the reader needs to suspend disbelief: the plot may hang together but it doesn't quite make sense; the characters, etched with the driest India ink, seem one-dimensional. (You would probably rather not peek into their psyches anyway.) The video clips that serve as the motivation for the frenetic action hardly seem worth the effort (the premise reminds me of the Internet marketing frenzy that energized the Blair Witch phenomenon of 1999). And how, I wanted to know, could Gibson have given his protagonist a passion for Pilates, the uber-fitness fad of the decade and something that a trendophobe like Cayce would eschew? No matter. The less time you spend staring at the roller coaster gears, the more you'll enjoy the ride. Quirky Cayce, a minimalist leading a maximal existence, will help you hold on tight as you scramble breathlessly through the pages, mentally juggling all the plot points and characters and wondering if Gibson will be able to pull the threads together by the end. He does, with a denouement that I initially found unsatisfying. Or maybe I just couldn't bear the thought that the book had come to an end. Gibson's deft touch keeps the reader from dwelling on whatever flaws exist. This is the perfect book for a winter read: long enough to last a few evenings by the fireplace and substantial enough to stick to your ribs.
Rating: - Sloppy Sloppy Editing! What's up?
I'm a huge Gibson fan, bought Pattern Recognition Saturday and finished it Sunday. It's very provocative, especially for anyone interested in technology, the internet, advertising, and how they (could) intersect.I liked it very, very much, though not as much as Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Neuromancer, which are on a higher plane. My big beef here isn't with Gibson (though I suppose since he is the author maybe he shoulders some of the blame), but with the atrocious editing by the publisher, Putnam. All of five paragraphs into the first page, there's the first error: "...the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect (sic) at once stranger and less interesting?" Not a great start. Okay, I thought, maybe it's part of a new style Gibson's trying, or thematically perhaps the book is about semiotics and linguistics (and in a sense, which book isn't?). But then on the VERY NEXT PAGE, there's a punctuation issue : "The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America." Why is there a comma after "chairs"? It doesn't need it. In fact, the book reflects a rather exuberant use of commas, which I don't recall as a Gibson trademark. Then on page 6. ""People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine." Why the comma after "smoke"? Again, perhaps I'm nitpicking, but in my mind it's pure sloppiness, especially when the book's heroine is a meticulous observer/chronicler of pop culture in all its fissures and permutations; the heroine is a perfectionist, so these grammar/editing mistakes annoy even more. Speaking of which, Varick Street is spelled, wrongly, "Varrick" on page 186. And here's a horrible string of sentences that any sixth grade teacher worth her salt would make an author rewrite: P. 194: "Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn't right. However odd things seem, mustn't it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one's own, and no one else's? Hers has never been without its share of oddness, but something in its recent texture seems to belong to someone else." That's verbatim, folks. P. 204. Cyprus, the island, is initially spelled "Cypress," then spelled correctly three times directly below. At this point, I felt like calling Putnam to demand the head of the "proofreader"! P. 205 A rare occasion where "had had" appears TWICE IN THE SAME SENTENCE: "Katherine had had doubts about Cayce concluding, it was true, but they had come to an agreement, and had had a good closure." I begin to feel physically ill. Who was sabotaging my beloved Gibson? I loved the book, hated the sloppy editing. I hope the author and his publishers correct the next edition.
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