WBR: Spook Country
This week’s book is William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country. I requested it from the library mostly on the basis of the rave review in the Washington Post, which called it "a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist" and compared it to Don DeLillo’s books.
I read it in about a day and a half, which puts it way ahead of most of DeLillo’s recent books. (I’ve owned Underworld for several years and don’t think I’ve made it past page 50.) But other than being quite readable, I didn’t think that Spook Country had a lot going for it. (Well, it did offer the pleasure of hearing a Gibson character say "remember where we were all going to do virtual reality?")
I had two major complaints about it:
1) The book has three main characters, whose stories wind up intersecting as the book proceeds. But all three of them are fundamentally pawns, being moved around by other people. None of them ever considers doing something independently.
2) One of the major conceits of the books is about locational art, where virtual reality headsets are mashed-up with GPS receivers, so they send images that are specific to the exact spot where you stand. But none of the locational art described in the book sounded in the least bit interesting. I’ve experienced real directional art — Janet Cardiff’s audio piece, Words Drawn on Water — and it still lingers with me two years later. Nothing in the book had that sort of resonance.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Underworld is too long, but it’s good. Give yourself another 100 pages … once the “everywhere I look I see garbage” thing kicked in, I was hooked.
September 20th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I read Pattern Recognition not too long ago, which is the book that Spook Country follows to some extent, and it started me on a minor Gibson reading frenzy. I have been doubtful about Spook Country, but I went ahead and bought it. I will probably still read it, but I won’t expect a lot, which will probably let me enjoy it more. It’s a shame, though, because I think Gibson has written some really original stuff in his time (although I hate his agressively “I’m cooler than you are” tone).
September 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
I heard William Gibson read some of his book this evening. Paraphrasing him to counter your critique about the characters is not possible for me. I know this is a cyberpunk cultural observation which I believe Sidney Eve Matrix or Zillah Eisentein has written about.
I did want to comment that he admits not doing locational art that inspires in his book. That is paraphrasing. He may have also said that such art is still not done. Those of us in the audience pointed to cameras that record locations as a here now invention. It exists now and most probably before the book was written.
His point was the spatial nature of cyberspace is not over there where we don’t go much but now everywhere and where we now are almost never outside of.