Amnesia Moon

The best way to approach Amnesia Moon is to treat it like reading the telling of a dream. It is disconnected and nonlinear and weird, like a dream. Some terrible apocalypse has happened but nobody seems to remember exactly what it was. A nuclear war? An alien invasion? Something strange, sometimes referred to simply as 'the break'. By the end of the book, it really doesn't seem to matter. There's not much of a plot - it's more about learning what's going on, about why everything is so weird.

Not only is the story dreamlike, dreaming plays more and more of a role as the story advances. It has an element similar to the dreams in Ursula K. Le Guin's great book The Lathe of Heaven, except that our hero isn't the only dreamer (maybe?) and until late in the story he isn't aware that his dreams affect the weird world he lives in.

The title comes from nobody being able to remember much of anything and that the protagonist's name, one of his names, is Moon. Jonathan Lethem is supposed to have been influenced by Philip K Dick. That's easy to see, but his writing, in this book at least, is dreamier than PKD's.

Much of the situation finally is explained in a conversation between a clock and a bonsai tree. It's not an unpleasant book to read, and it does move along. In the end, though, we still don't know what the hell is going on or what caused all this weirdness.