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9 matchs for lethem:
Flashback: published several years ago in preReview, the website that reviews movies before they come out. According to recent Lethem interviews, this project is still in the works:
Motherless Brooklyn
A "loose adaptation" of the Jonathan Lethem novel, written and directed by Ed Norton and set in the '50s rather than the present day. (No, not the Ed Norton that works in the sewers and is Ralph Kramden's best friend.) Norton also stars, as Lionel Essrog, a detective with Tourette's who tries to find his boss's killer. You think I'm kidding about Norton adapting this, but, no, I got all this info off of his personal website. Fans of the novel--stop crying, right now. Blow your nose and look on the bright side. What were some of the cooler things in the book? (1) The comedy of having a big pottymouth lug from Brooklyn entering a post-counterculture Upper East Side Zendo that may or may not be a criminal front, sitting crosslegged on a mat with the Roshi's exquisite disciples, and trying not to swear. (2) The incongruity of a '90s story with many characters and scenes apparently stuck in a weird '40s timewarp. (3) The quasi-generational tension between two brothers, one a Sopranos-style crook and the other a hippie Zen master crook (spoiler, sorry). (4) Smart, funny references to recent pop culture (Mad magazine's Don Martin, Prince) mediated through the main character's ongoing, inner-monologuic obsession with his own very of-the-moment disease. Well, by having it set in the '50s, all that stuff goes away, and/or makes no sense! Isn't that great? Don't you love it that rich Hollywood actors have the ability to destroy interesting books with their vanity projects? I sure do. prereviewer - Tom Moody, 03/09/04
Irritants of the Day.
1. Jonathan Lethem's descriptions of art in Fortress of Solitude. Don't know if the Abraham Ebdus character is based on Lethem's father, or if Lethem's father is an artist, but the book feels like an elaborate revenge by a son who essentially hates art against a father wholly dedicated to it. Lethem knows just enough about his subjects to be dangerous. He can imitate the style of an Artforum review, describe an avant garde film screening, or string together a narrative of what is happening in an abstract painting or film well enough to make these things sound completely pointless and ridiculous. The book is filled with fake reviews, of art, music, etc--no one can respond to these because they are pure fiction, straw men for the writer's contempt. Lethem has a vicious wit--one wishes it could be turned on people and things that deserve it (Republican politicians, Judith Miller, etc)
2. Minus Space. If Lethem's imagined world of form-only art existed it might be found on this space. A website devoted to "reductive art"? Surely "reduction" is just one technique or strategy an artist might use to get at some significant content--not an end in itself. One might as well create a blog called Blue and only blog blue things. Yet in fact a longstanding cult persists around this "reduction," which has little to do with minimal art practices as described by Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt (or even Peter Halley) but instead provides a safe haven for late Greenberg disciples proudly entrenched in painting's own greatest area of competence--itself--while the world changes all around them. Not everything on Minus Space is that simplistic, they've added a fair amount of "painting as architectural critique" since the site's inception, but one yearns to pluck the better things one sees there out of the limited context. Many pieces are succulent but the photos are too small; half the time you're not sure what you're looking at and the pleasures you could get from staring at monochrome and shaped canvases are stanched.
Afterthought: Minus Space has changed in the last year or so. It added a blog [wrong--see here] but no longer hosts a deep archive of its past online exhibits. Instead it features links to artists' websites (some of which are Flash--yech.) A link I made to a show they put up online last year (Daniel Gottin) is now dead. Also, the site says it is no longer taking submissions. Perhaps "reductive art" as an organizing principle is petering out. Or Petering to the extent Halley is a mentor for any of these artists.
Update: This quote from Salon's Laura Miller, writing about Don DeLillo, also applies to Lethem: "The weaknesses of Falling Man are DeLillo's long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time -- and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered." It's so stupid. But it does work. Lethem's Fortress was lauded as the Great American Novel because we need such novels and young writers to write them. Whether or not the form is outmoded or the best vehicle there is a myth machine, an industry, behind it. The art world equivalent is painting, which you have to do, no matter how bad or irrelevant, to be a playa.
Is it possible Jonathan Lethem is a better critic than fiction writer? Motherless Brooklyn aside, his essays on popular culture, especially comics and science fiction, seem more urgent and hilarious to me than his books. I'm thinking specifically of his essays in Bookforum on the secret shame of being a Marvel Comics fan and the sometimes anticlimactic ecstasies of discovering old Philip K. Dick paperbacks in used bookstores ("Vulcan's fucking Hammer! I'd found it! Of course, then I had to go and read the damn thing."). Even in Motherless, some of the highest spots were the little vignettes on pop culture, e.g. Prince ("The way he worried forty five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition [Tourette's]") and Mad Magazine's Don Martin ("Mad often held the concluding panel of a Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out of the window into the path of a steamroller."). The following recent thoughts on Marvel Comics in the London Review of Books are also good, despite being framed by rather ordinary juvenile reminiscing:
In Marvel's greatest comics, [writer Stan] Lee and [artist Jack] Kirby were full collaborators who, like Lennon and McCartney, really were more than the sum of their parts, and who derived their greatness from the push and pull of incompatible visions. Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone - deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation - while Lee resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives, hormonal alienation, teenage dating problems, pregnancy, and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the City of New York. Kirby threw at the Four an endless series of ponderous fallen gods or whole tribes and races of alienated antiheroes with problems no mortal could credibly contemplate. Lee made certain the Four were always answerable to the female priorities of Sue Storm - the Invisible Girl, Reed Richards's wife and famously 'the weakest member of the Fantastic Four'. She wanted a home for their boy Franklin, she wanted Reed to stay out of the Negative Zone, and she was willing to quit the Four and quit the marriage to stand up for what she believed.After reading this careful, historically accurate exegesis I'm still mystified why Lethem flubbed some of the references in Fortress of Solitude (see earlier post). Let's save for another time why reading about our (I mean, my) pop-cultural past strikes a deeper chord than revisiting the day to day agony and boredom of 7th and 8th grade. (hat tip to Travelers Diagram for spotting Maud Newton's spotting of the essay)I seriously doubt whether any 1970s Marvel-loving boy ever had a sexual fantasy about Sue Storm. We had Valkyrie, Red Sonja, the Cat, Ms Marvel, Jean Grey, Mantis and innumerable others available for that. We (I mean, I) especially liked the Cat. Sue Storm was truly invisible. She was a parent, a mom calling you home from where you played in the street, telling you it was time to brush your teeth. Not that she wasn't a hottie, but Kirby exalted her beauty in family-album style headshots, and glimpses of her, nobly pregnant, in a housedress that covered her clavicle. The writers and artists who took over The Fantastic Four after Kirby and, later, Lee departed the series, seemed impatient with the squareness of Sue and Reed's domestic situations. Surely, these weren't the hippest of the Kirby/Lee creations. Nevertheless, if you (I mean, I) accept my premise that the mid-to-late 1960s Fantastic Four were the exemplary specimens, the Revolver and Rubber Soul and White Album of comics, and if you further grant that pulling against the tide of all of Kirby's inhuman galactacism, that whole army of aliens and gods, was one single character, our squeaky little Sue, then I wonder: Invisible Girl, the most important superhero of the Silver Age of comics?
If you are a fan of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, here's bad news for you. Sit down, have a drink, please don't bite my head off when I tell you. OK, here goes: it's being made into a film written, directed, and starring Edward ("Fight Club") Norton as Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette's. Oh, yeah, and it's being "loosely adapted," according to Norton's website (which I'm not linking to) to be "set in the 1950s." If you're wondering why that's bad, I mean good, please read my preReview. And while you're there, check out all the new preReviewers: since the site was last plugged here, it got listed on memepool and a bunch of "cool site" indexes and its traffic went up into the stratosphere. It is now the Internet Phenomenon this page always said it was. Joe McKay, the editor, is tooling around Gotham in a Lincoln town car, smoking Te-Amo Toro Lights, and has taken to wearing a pinky ring.
I still haven't finished Lethem's "Great Book," Fortress of Solitude. The idea of revisiting 7th and 8th grade (and summer camp!) with him, even with adult hindsight, is just too grim. The last passage I read, describing a Brooklyn street party where he's the only white kid, rang false somehow, even though the book is based on his own childhood: it read more like pop culture research than something that actually happened to anyone. Let's pray he goes back to writing intellectually suspect fiction and stops believing his own hype about being the "poet of Brooklyn" or whatever.
A book you should read, though, is Takedown, by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century. Cowan is the undercover cop who singlehandedly broke open the Mob-run garbage-hauling cartel that cheated New York businesses for 50 years. Like many people, I believed the spin that it was District Attorney Morgenthau and the out of town corporate criminals at BFI who did the hit--the book is partly to set the record straight. Until Cowan infiltrated the Mafia, at the highest levels, pretending to be an executive with a DUMBO paper recycling company, every building in NY had to pay up to ten times market rates to have their trash hauled away. The book gives an excellent history of how those conditions came about, and is as gripping and amusing as a Sopranos episode in its retelling of Cowan's story. I laughed, I cried, I broke up with my goombah 'cause I couldn't put it down.
Following up on my Jonathan Lethem post, I'm going to out-geek him here by noting that the cover he describes for an imaginary science fiction book (by "F. Fred Vundane") actually blurs two distinct eras of sf book illustration. The Miró/Tanguy-style cover mostly came out in the early '60s (below, left), a wildly experimental and exciting time (imagine: quirky abstraction on book covers!) but by the '70s, the period Lethem is describing, book jackets got much more blandly illustrational (right); the "computer style letters" he mentions, however, would more likely be seen in the latter decade. The "electric yellow," "Peter Max" influence did survive into the '70s (e.g., Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head cover), but never with as much style as those early '60s editions. A nice picture essay on the Ballantine book covers, from which the blurry images below were taken, is at Strange Words, a regrettably-not-very-active sf e-zine.
Lethem also plays fast and loose with his Marvel Comics chronology, muddling Silver Age ('60s) stories and characters (eg, Silver Surfer, Black Bolt) with books produced almost a decade later (Luke Cage, Power Man). In 1974 he has kids looking at a book that wouldn't come out till 1976 (Dr Strange #12) and another that in '74 would be hopelessly vintage (The Incredible Hulk #115, 1969). OK, maybe the latter's not so implausible. Also borderline but still dubious is whether a kid would say "Use the Force, Luke" the "morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade" in 1977 when the movie opened in limited theatrical release May 27. (Star Wars opened in a few select theatres and word of mouth built over the summer; if Dylan had been part of the first-month vanguard for this generation-defining epic, you'd think Lethem would have at least mentioned it.) The discrepancies only irk because Lethem's so casual about forsaking the dweebs he claims to be one of--he doesn't have to get his facts right because these people don't matter any more; the readers and writers of Great Novels he wants to run with can be easily fooled with some comics lore tossed off for "authenticity."
My point here isn't to engage in literary class warfare but merely to express disappointment that Lethem has written an old-fashioned bildungsroman after a few forays towards a new kind of narrative, with one foot in popular trash and the other in post-humanity. For a writer grappling with the realities of the disassociated, multitasking electronic media age, the novel, Great American or otherwise, is a limited and convention-bound vehicle. Being obsessively true to pop culture without shucking literary skill could be a way to a different, more relevant verbal art, in the tradition of Burroughs, Kathy Acker, et al (and from there to performance video, games on CD-ROM, web-writing...) Hmmm. This may be circling back to the "Why is Wm. Gibson Writing and Not Blogging?" question. Theory in progress--more later. Also, I really need to finish Fortress before popping off again.
Jonathan Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon read like better-adjusted Philip K. Dick: what's missing in authentic brain-addled paranoia is (almost) made up for in wordplay pyrotechnics. Motherless Brooklyn represents a quantum leap: suddenly an emotional undertow appears beneath the dazzling language and off-the-wall premise (a detective with Tourette's). The emergence of its unlikely heroes from a Brooklyn boys' home keeps the reader on the verge of tears, while the Tourette's creates constant suspense, because you never know how or when the protagonist's outbursts will get him in trouble.
Suspicions about the newest book, The Fortress of Solitude, should have been aroused when some fool came out in Salon, pre-release, calling it the greatest American novel. That's clearly the kind of accolade Lethem's after, because he's turning his back on that silly surrealistic stuff and Writing About His Childhood, thus satisfying English teachers, librarians, and people who give out book awards. Cause for concern number 2: the main characters are named Dylan Ebdus (a Jewish kid growing up in all-black Gowanus in the 1970s) and Mingus Rude (his black best friend). Bad, obvious sociocultural call.
This isn't a review, because your correspondent is only 153 pages into the 511 page book. I keep putting it down; I had already finished Motherless Brooklyn in this same amount of time. I'm enjoying the snippets of cultural criticism, written by the same guy who rhapsodized about nerdy collecting of Dick paperbacks and the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Marvel Comics) in the pages of Bookforum and who wrote so engagingly about Prince and Don Martin in Motherless. Like Motherless, parts of the book make me sad, but other parts seem really contrived. (Just as Mingus is about to get Dylan in tight with his homeys by taking him on a subway-car-spraying expedition, a white woman walks up and asks Dylan if he needs any help, thus tagging him irrevocably as a privileged white.) I found more humor and pathos in the fall of Dylan's father from artist to paperback cover hack, as captured in this passage, where the book with his first published cover arrives in the mail, wrapped:
When he finally tore it open a shudder of self-loathing went through him, and he nearly ripped the package in half down the center [...]"R. Fred Vundane" breaks me up every time I think about it. This is Lethem getting in touch with his inner sci fi nerd, and it's more convincing than the race theme, which as Joshua Cohen writes in the New York Press, seems awfully sensitized:Neural Circus by R. Fred Vundane, the first in a series called the New Belmont Specials, heralded as "Mind-Warping Speculative Fiction for the Rock Age." Jacket art by Abraham Ebdus: a third-rate surrealist landscape or moonscape or mindscape of brightly colored yet somehow ominous biomorphic forms, indebted to Miró, indebted to Tanguy, indebted to Ernst, indebted even to Peter Max, and repaying none of those debts in the least. The art department of Belmont Books had overlaid his gouache-on-pasteboard with an electric yellow sans serif font meant to resemble computer screen lettering. Abraham Ebdus wished now he'd denied them the use of his real name, substituting a pseudonym instead, as the author apparently had: A. Fried Mothball or J.R.R. Foolkiller. The colors he'd applied with his own brushes hurt his eyes.
[T]he great white-written New York race book, especially Jewish/Black book, has already been written: The Tenants by Bernard Malamud. Published in the '70s as a direct response to racial tensions in post-hippie New York, it’s a heartfelt novel that makes Lethem’s attempt seem too little and too late. [...] In the last pages of Malamud’s masterwork, [the protagonists] end up killing each other; whereas Lethem, expounding upon the decades, offers something some critic or marketing exec would call "more complex" or "nuanced" or "textured."More when I've finished the book. If I do.
Revisionism runs rampant these days: first we had Gerhard Richter as loving family man and now we have a non-creepy Spider-Man. (I haven't seen the movie yet, but please let me critique the hype.) First Scintillatin' Stan (Lee), Spidey's co-creator, gets a crack, in a New York Times op-ed: "I have often thought Spider-Man's worldwide appeal also owes something to his costume. Sharp-eyed fans are sure to have noticed that Spider-Man's costume covers every inch of his body. There is absolutely no skin showing beneath his oh-so-trendy red and blue fashion statement. When Steve Ditko first dreamed up our hero's threads, he created one of the most unique designs in comic-book history. But more than that, Spidey's costume is completely user-friendly. Any reader, of any race, in any part of the world, can imagine himself under that costume — and fantasize that he himself is Spider-Man." I'm not sure friendly, user- or otherwise, is the word I would use to describe those malevolent, pupilless eyes, muscle-hugging cobwebs, and black widow between the pecs, but Lee's "big, sloppy heart" (as Jonathan Lethem calls it) tends to make us forget such details. While you wouldn't expect the creator of a lucrative franchise to admit that it has any dark underpinnings, what's critic David Edelstein's excuse? Here's his take in Slate: "The Marvel Spider-Man comic was born at the beginning of the Pop Art era—its colors are primary. Unlike Bruce Wayne's Batman and Bruce Banner's Incredible Hulk, Peter Parker's Spider-Man has no metaphoric component. The spider persona doesn't emanate from any aspect of Parker's troubled psyche—it's just a cool conceit." C'mon, the kid looks like a Mexican Santo wrestler, creeps and crawls around buildings, has connections in the underworld (remember "Patch"?), spurts semen-like goo out of his wrists--sure, Lee and Ditko made him a lovable everyman with personal "hang-ups," but let's face it, the appeal of the strip was the "normal" kid flirting with the Dark Side. This was never stated by the Marvel's merry men (who were ever mindful of the Comics Code) but the message came through loud and clear to us 8-year olds who enjoyed the strip back in the day.
Another early-'60s creation that artfully mixed the heroic with the macabre was The Scarecrow, played by Patrick McGoohan, before he was the Prisoner or even the Secret Agent. This Disney-produced mini-series (later released as the feature Dr. Syn and the Scarecrow) had good guys fighting King George III to save the public from punitive taxation, but in costumes guaranteed to keep sensitive children awake at night. McGoohan's raspy voice and crooked smile, Hellspite's "leatherface" mask, and Johnny Banks' Evil Barn Owl get-up were the stuff of pure black nightmare. By day McGoohan was the mild-mannered Vicar Syn, hanging out with the aristocracy; by night he roamed the marshes on horseback, robbing the King's supply caravans. Today we would call him a terrorist, though all the violence in the show was implicit. The Scarecrow's specialty was psychological warfare: in an unforgettable scene his band of masked men judge and "hang" a traitor: at the last minute he is cut down, his near-asphyxiation serving as a warning. I saw the film in my late teens and was a bit let down but my childhood memories of the show are potent: I recently discovered a website devoted to the character [since disappeared] and got a case of goosebumps that wouldn't go away.
The end of the year is approaching, and with critics everywhere publishing their Top Ten lists, I decided to do a narrative wrap-up of stuff I obsessed about in 2001. Organized into the broad categories of "film & TV," "art," "books," "politics," and "music," these events (or things) didn't necessarily happen (or come into existence) during the past year--in the true solipsistic weblog spirit, the only common thread is that they "happened" to yours truly.
Politics. You would have thought that after the Gulf War, when Mr. Cheney used his newfound contacts with the Saudi sheiks to obtain lucrative business contracts for Halliburton while ailing veterans got the shaft, that we'd be a lot more skeptical about rolling out the American War Machine abroad. All it took was one day of (admittedly cataclysmic) mayhem to turn us back into a country of howling football fans, endorsing whatever dubious and unnecessary plans our unelected leaders proposed. I've been enormously thankful for three websites since 9/11, which served as a kind of reality check against the Official Media Version of things: the left/progressive CounterPunch and Cursor and the libertarian site Antiwar.com. The brave dissenting voices on those pages reassured me that the entire country hadn't gone nuts.
Books. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I bought Jonathan Lethem's post-apocalyptic novel Amnesia Moon at the World Trade Center bookstore a few days before 9/11. Further upping my personal "disaster synchronicity factor" (I warned you this would be solipsistic), I also read three novels by Greg Bear over the summer that had a weirdly prescient bearing (no pun intended) on 9/11 events. Blood Music features a frightening trip up the North Tower of the World Trade Center by a young Brooklyn girl who is the sole survivor of a nation-engulfing plague (the tower itself eventually dissolves into organic goo). In the The Forge of God and its sequel Anvil of Stars, Bear deals with the ultimate terrorist event: the reduction of Earth by hostile ETs to a ring of pulverized rock orbiting the Sun. Forge describes, among other things, the ineffectual response to looming global catastrophe by a Bible-thumper in the White House who essentially loses his marbles, while Anvil explores the morality of revenge, as the few survivors who managed to escape Earth head across the galaxy in search of the planet-killers. Published in 1987, Forge vividly captures the unreal-but-doom-laden feel of the mid-'80s, when Reagan was ramping up the nuclear fear factor. It's great to have the Republicans back in office, isn't it?
Film and TV. Japanese animation has been a subject of much enjoyment and "independent study" this year. It blows me away that an entire country prefers moving drawings to live action shows for their prime time entertainment. I'd love to live in a nation where a great mystical work like Princess Mononoke isn't just the highest-grossing animated film of all time, but the highest grossing film, and where subversive psychodramas involving cyborgs and folkloric demons are discussed at the water cooler. (Instead, I live in a country that adores Titanic and Survivor. Ookay.) I've watched and rewatched tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was a hit series in Japan several years ago, and continue to find in it new levels of psychological complexity and political paranoia. I love the series' mood of melancholy, and its use of subtle visual details (rather than explanatory chatter) to move the story along. I've learned a lot about it and other shows from Susan Napier's book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. Napier, a professor of Japanese lit at the U. Of Texas, provides a cultural context that helps explain the themes of mechanization, sex, and apocalyptic feeling that run through so much anime. For my own thoughts on the 2001 rerelease of Akira, please check out this recent post.
Art. 2001 was a banner year for shows involving "the computer"; gradually this device that has touched every aspect of contemporary life is making its way into the last pocket of medieval resistance--the art world. Right now there are several camps operating: (1) Artists who aren't giving up painting, sculpture, photography, and installation art, but feel the need to "respond" in some way to the computer (for an excellent round-up of so-called digitally-inspired shows in 2001, please see this post by my friend Hector Pitts); (2) "Net artists," doing the types of interactive and data-crunching projects (frequently covered by New York Times cyber-critic Matthew Mirapaul) that are conceptually interesting but make little concession to the needs and pleasures of meat space (a few things in this category are good, of course, such as the jodi.org website and Michael Ensdorf's excellent video piece Momentary Distractions); and finally, (3) Fine art-trained artists who question the logic and look of the computer, while at the same time using it to make "decelerated" objects for contemplation in a gallery environment (I include myself in this somewhat paradoxical category, and this weblog will be devoted, off-and-on, to other artists with the same concerns).
Music. I spent most of 2000 dj-ing at a bar in lower Manhattan, and gave myself a crash course in recent electronic dance music. I started out the year playing a lot of hiphop and electro but by the fall I had settled into more pub-friendly deep house and 2-step garage discs. I'm still keeping up in 2001, but my consumption dropped off once I stopped receiving my weekly cut of the bar (after 10 months, I was worn out, so I retired in Nov. of 2000--for now). One of my most interesting "discoveries" was Dusseldorf producer Stefan Schwander, who records as Antonelli Electr. and rhythm_maker. His tracks are minimal but eminently listenable; I'm astonished by his ability to get such warmth and depth out of fairly simple loops. And the production is exquisite--every beat and chime feels wrapped in velvet. Although I like a variety of dance subgenres, I prefer Detroit (Juan Atkins)-style tracks and German "deep minimal techno house" for home listening; this is music that thrives both in the foreground and the background.
The image below, a Kelly Freas (or Freas-ish) jacket illustration for Philip K. Dick's 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney, hails from a near-comprehensive gallery of PKD covers (thanks to dratfink for pointing it out). Of the wide variety of scanned, scuffed editions on display, the Ace Books covers from the mid-'60s consistently score highest in originality and emotional impact (in addition to Bloodmoney, The Simulacra also rocks). Can you imagine an illustration like the one below appearing today in a grocery store rack? It's just too weird, lonely, and raw by today's standards of bookselling. The hand-drawn letters add a hint of Strangelovian zaniness to the ghastly scene, especially the cartoon Fat Boy (or is it Little Man?) around the word "bomb." The flying man possibly merges two characters in the novel: Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut trapped in an orbiting space capsule, reading Of Human Bondage to an entertainment-starved populace after WWIII, and Dr. Bluthgeld, a Nazi scientist who emerges as a strange, elemental being in Marin County, where the book's action takes place.
A more recent novel threading its way through a Dickian, post-disaster cosmos is Jonathan Lethem's excellent Amnesia Moon. Also set in Northern California (but ranging east as far as Wyoming), Lethem's book keeps alluding to a past "crisis event," the particulars of which no one is sure of except to say that "everything changed" (shades of 9/11). People move in and out of each other's dream-worlds, Palmer Eldritch-style, with each scenario offering a different interpretation of what life would be like after a world-shattering disaster. One character imagines living on varmints in a Mad Max-like desert; another envisions a suburban dystopia of endless government testing and surveillance; yet another fights a losing war-of-attrition against an alien hive creature. Or are these really dreams? (Annoying personal synchronicity reference: a copy of Amnesia, which obliquely mentions Bloodmoney, was bought by yours truly at the World Trade Center bookstore a few days before 9/11. Cue theremin.)