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Title: A Complete Disappointment
Review: This is a dangerous and ultimately disappointing book for the writer.By setting Pattern Recognition in the present, Mr. Gibson aims to lend his cynical, "cyber-punk" eye to the (presumably oppressive) uniculture that America is exporting. The problem isn't that it's a lazy device, though it is. Or that it lends itself to the kind of armchair, pedantic observation that you're supposed to grow out of after college. It's that Mr. Gibson succumbs to the tyranny he tries to observe.This is less a novel than a numbing series of lists. Where there should be plot, he gives us vaguely connected riffs about the emptiness of Tommy Hilfiger and plasma TV. But the real heartbreaker is that the man who wrote perhaps the best opening sentence of all time -- "The sky...was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -- is hacking here.Pray he rediscovers his chops, because you won't recognize them in Pattern Recognition.
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