Jonathon Lethem’s second novel, Amnesia Moon, centres around a man named Chaos living in the post-apocalyptic town of Hatfork, Wyoming. The bombs have fallen, society has crumbled, the sky is tinted with radioactivity and the mutated townsfolk are reliant on a tyrant named Kellogg for their food. Less than 30 pages into the book, after making him admit that he can’t remember how long ago the bombs fell or what he was doing when they did, Kellogg convinces Chaos that the truth of their world is “a little more complicated,” and Chaos sets out on a post-apocalyptic roadtrip to uncover the truth.Lethem’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, felt like a neat concept for a short story that had been stretched out into a novel. Amnesia Moon feels more like a collection of short stories patched together to make an extremely surreal novel, and I was unsurprised to learn, after finishing it, that this is precisely the case. Chaos travels across an America devastated by wildly different apocalyptic events – everybody agrees something bad has happened, but it appears to be different everywhere he goes. The only unifying element is that each location is dominated by a “dreamer,” somebody forcing their version of reality upon others. The different locales are all drawn from various unpublished short stories Lethem had written.This is a lazy way to write a novel, but I found Amnesia Moon readable enough, and it has a particularly good ending which suggests that one of the more disturbing realities is in fact the truth. It deals quite a lot with dreams and memories and amnesia, which I normally find tedious, but Lethem is a skillful enough writer that Amnesia Moon is rarely tiresome. I didn’t see much point to it, as a novel, but he’s a good writer and I’ll keep reading him. I look forward to when I get to the point in his career when he’s actually writing novels rather than short stories in disguise.
"'It isn't all our fault, you know. This place sucked before we even got here.'"Amnesia Moon is a weird, wonderful piece of apocalyptic fiction. I've been a big fan of Jonathan Lethem for awhile now, especially his early, strange, PKD-inspired sci-fi, so his take on the collapse of society was something I was very interested in. It begins like many of these stories - a loner surviving in a desolate landscape, mutants, vague recollections of the disaster that left the world nearly abandoned - and very quickly becomes something much more interesting when it's made clear that society hasn't been wiped out so much as the shared delusions that it consists of have. Reality itself is warped and distorted, and the human ability to make any sense out of it ceases to function. Lethem's bizarre approach to this bizarre idea at first takes the form of a road trip, with a man named Chaos and a furry girl named Melinda traveling across the States, stopping occasionally to see the way people try to restore what once was and create any kind of order. It's a carnival-mirror version of the real world - people confine themselves to fast-food restaurants and worship "government celebrities" and latch onto anything they're told is acceptable. During and after all this, it becomes a surprisingly moving story of self-perception and identity ("There might be things worse than being a clock, the clock realized."), but the real joy of this novel is the way Lethem is able to subtly convey the existential fragility of our understanding of reality.
What do You think about Amnesia Moon (2005)?
Jonathan Lethem did it to me again! I am not a great fan of science fiction but I enjoyed "Amnesia Moon" just as I enjoyed "Motherless Brooklyn" and yet do not read many murder mysteries. Here is one gem from the book, "Vance being real doesn't mean the aliens are, said Fault. It's just another dream, Everett. What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort." This is a story about a lost, single man named Chaos who discovers the meaning and importance of family, they are the people who take care of you every day and reward you with love.
—Faye
I've always liked the gestalt theory of horror novels--that every character is an aspect of one self and the horror element could not exist except for that specific self--and the theory fits this book even better than most, despite it wading in the Venn space between horror and science fiction. This dystopian story is much more philosophically substantial than the cover blurbs would have you think. It's also pretty far down the "literary" end of the speculative fiction spectrum, so it ends abruptly (although appropriately) and may annoy readers who really want to know about the sci-fi things impinging on our protagonist's struggle.Lethem doesn't do much with the female characters; most merely exist to complement the (male) protag in some way, whereas male characters are much more likely to be defined and challenging.There was a jarring, pointless transphobic slur about midway through the book. It actually took my breath away and I wondered if I'd continue reading. Obviously, I did, but I was really uncomfortable for awhile. There was also some nasty ableism and fat-hating (physical differences and fat both being used for "horror" value) near the end. These things felt like authorial intrusions, because nothing up to that point suggested the protagonist had these prejudices--which was why I was able to continue reading. Other readers may not be as privileged or generous.
—Lisa
It is always difficult to read an early book by a writer without being influenced by the quality of the later works. That said, this is an early work in many ways, yet well worth reading.The dream-like plot reminded me of Steve Erickson's novels, as well as the laisse-faire approach to plot. Now, I have never minded Erickson's handling of plot because the logic of his narratives seems more archetypal. In Amnesia Moon, the plot seems to reach a moment where resolution is possible, and then falls apart. I doubt I would have minded if I weren't so interested in the resolution in general. Of course, Lethem is very good indeed and the images and scenes are indelible. The post-apocalyptic landscape and the sheer creativity of the premise should not be missed by Lethem fans.
—Lesley
