Gibson's latest Parties

William Gibson
All Tomorrow's Parties
(New York: Putnam, 1999)

The City as metaphor is nearly as old as history itself. It becomes a site for cultural projection on one whose appeal is illusory but insistent, implying an order that is just beneath the surface, beyond grasp. William Gibson's work reads like a science-fiction extrapolation of such subliminal territories, mapping the City onto a dystopian, noirish world permeated by digital technology. His new novel, All Tomorrow's Parties, continues in this vein.

Much of the novel's locales and characters are lifted from Virtual Light and Idoru, with which it forms a loose trilogy. Again the reader is taken to the Golden Gate bridge, which in the wake of an earthquake has become transformed into a sort of in-between city, populated by a cast of hustlers and hangers-on. The at-times confusing plot centers around the bridge as the site of a radical (and largely undefined) shift in the shape of history and culture.

Colin Laney, a man uniquely gifted at the recognition of patterns in digital information, foresees this change and attempts to insure that its outcome is positive. In the process are involved a variety of characters, including a security worker, former bike messenger, elusive billionaire and the idoruóa purely virtual Japanese idol singer.

These elements have all the makings of a good Gibson novel. Ultimately, however, the novel lacks the strangely beautiful detail that has carried his previous efforts. In Virtual Light, the scenes revolving around the bridge community had formed the poetically resonant core of the story. The descriptions there evoked a wind-swept sadness and longing, creating a people living in the feedback of humanity, thriving amongst the forgotten ghosts (physical and psychic) of the past. So it is with some anticipation that a follower of Gibson's work finds a return to this locale. Yet All Tomorrow's Parties in several respects disappoints.

To be sure, there are wonderful moments. But now he allows himself to anticipate the sight that awaits him, past the last rhomboid: the bridge's mad maw, the gateway to dream and memory, where sellers of fish spread their wares on beds of dirty ice. A perpetual bustle, a coming and going, that he honors as the city's very pulse.

The author can not, however, sustain this atmospheric intensity (his usual strength) throughout the text, and the energy of the novel consequently falters.

His previous books contain a sort of central metaphor of the bridge, Haitian mythology, the sculpture of Joseph Cornell as a formal microcosm which resonates the story itself, leaving whorls of parable in the wake of the action. Like Cornell, Gibson's mode of creation is collage; yet one cannot help but feel that in All Tomorrow's Parties the elements are too haphazardly arranged and too underdeveloped to effect the enigmatic pull the medium can create.

Gibson's explorations of the media -belied by the Warholian reference of the title - and the results of technological saturation of environment are as relevant as ever. And there are several of the ecstatic moments which he invariably supplies. Even so, All Tomorrow's Parties leaves too many ambiguities unanswered to find a satisfying resolution.