Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. When award time comes around next year, should Pattern Recognition be up for a Hugo or Nebula award, be prepared for an acrimonious argument about whether it qualifies. It's hard to find anything in this that a purist would readily identify as SF, though it has an SF sort of "feel" to it.
But it's a wonderfully written book-- Gibson may have drifted out of genre waters with this one, but the man has lost none of his flair for imagery:
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.
[...]
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
Gibson has a flair for description and an eye for small details that frequently leaves me saying "Yes! That's it exactly!" His depiction of Usenet-type collections of obsessives is dead-on, his fashion commentary beggars the The Poor Man ("There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."), and his description of the view from a Tokyo hotel room ("a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home") was vivid enough to evoke memories of a surreal dinner at the top of a department store in Shinjuku.
This talent for description, rarely matched in or out of the SF genre, is put in the service of a plot that's decidedly odd for Gibson. For one thing, it's an oddly specific book-- most of his other works take place at some poorly specified time in the future, but this book is set not long after September 11, 2001. The main character's father vanished on that day somewhere in Manhattan, and frequent references are made to the terrorist attacks. These references are somewhat jarring, as most of the rest of the book has the same sort of otherworldly feel as the rest of his books.
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