Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson
Reviewed by Joe T.
William Gibson, for me, was one of those writers who comes along just a few times in a lifetime and completely changes the way you look at the world. I first read Neuromancer back around 1989/1990 when I was a freshman in high school and it blew open the doors of my mind that had previously closed to anything that wasn’t swords and sandals fantasy books. Soon I was consuming The Beats and the Russians while simultaneously discovering the depths of the writers of speculative fiction’s new wave such as J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, and Michael Moorcock until all the lines dividing great literature from great genre fiction became blurred.
All of this due to William Gibson.
I have to admit that I kind of quit reading Gibson sometime around page 50 of his 1996 novel Idoru and, though I’ve reread the sprawl trilogy a few times since then, I haven’t read anything new. It was with a certain trepidation that I picked up his collection of articles and essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I wasn’t quite sure if I was a fan, if his writing was something I might have outgrown.
I shouldn’t have worried.
Distrust That Particular Flavor is a fantastic read, one that, had I read it when it was released, would have been a contender for one of the best books of last year. It’s not arranged chronologically so it jumps through time and space and reads almost like a weird novel written in essay format. It careens from place to place, image to image, theme to theme: thoughts on George Orwell and 1948 rub shoulders with the memory of meeting Moby Grape’s Skip Spence in the sixties and how amazing his jeans were which slides into thoughts on the Shanghai photographs of Greg Giraud that helped inspire Neuromancer in 1984.
Running through the book is the lifeline of an idiosyncratic character named William Gibson. We get his obsession with watches and his brief and intense love affair with Ebay auctions where a timepiece could be had from anyplace in the world, a village flea market writ large. There’s a chapter devoted to his love for Steely Dan “..to the frank dismay of friends in the Punk camp….” There are ramblings about Tokyo and the Japanese that posits that they are a nation that actually lives their present in our future, that they are our guides to and through futureshock. It eventually closes with a 2008 talk for the Vancouver Institute that lays bare what the real cyborg is and how it’s been with us for decades and also the themes inherent in his work without once mentioning his novels.
Distrust That Particular Flavor is an interesting book. William Gibson as journalist can’t stop being William Gibson the novelist. Where neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks is clearly a collection of articles that were published in magazines, this collection of essays, like I mentioned earlier, reads like a novel disguised as truth and fact and journalism.
I think it’s time for me to finally read the novels of his that I’d previously disregarded. This book has reminded me how and why William Gibson meant so much to me.
William Gibson will speak about and sign Distrust That Particular Flavor here at BookPeople on Thursday, September 6 at 7p.
BookPeople 