Gibsons New Book Reviewed

What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His storys central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigends goal: Tap into The Footages primo street cred strategy for profit. The gig isnt unusual for a professional "cool hunter" like Pollard. Her job is to walk around cities, spot new trends, and advise advertising agencies and marketeers how best to commodify them. Indeed, shes so good at her job that shes literally allergic (read: fainting spells and sneezing fits) to overexposed trademarks. She can be reduced to jelly by a drawing of the Michelin Man. She clips the labels off all her clothes, even going so far as to grind down the Levis logo on the metal buttons of her 501s. Mickey Mouse is just this side of tolerable. Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition - the books acronym is PR, after all. Pollard "knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on." But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. Its one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/play.html?pg=9