I finished reading Pattern Recognition tonight. I have roughly the same feeling I had after reading his first three novels—something akin to "What just happened?"

Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive all followed the same pattern, to my experience. Gibson starts with a great hook, spins it out using several seemingly-unrelated plotlines and characters, weaving them together as the story progresses. Then, about three-quarters of the way through the book, it's as if he realizes that he's forgotten where he was going and why, rushes to the conclusion with the literary equivalent (albeit much more verbosely, and far more interesting to read) of "yadda yadda yadda", but still only delivers 95%, leaving the reader to fill in the rest. I freely admit to a tendency to inhale fiction—I'll suddenly notice a character, or an object, and have to back up several pages to see where it was introduced. With Gibson, though, it's consistent in how and when in the book it happens. Either his writing sucks me in, or he elides big chunks of it, or, I suspect, both.

I thought Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties were tighter, and I figured maybe Gibson had reached a different stage in his writing style. Pattern Recognition feels like a step backwards. There's only one overt plotline, but at the end I had the same feeling that I was lacking closure.

On the positive side, I learned about Curtas.