Going, Going, Gone — Jack Womack

“Futurist wunderkind Womack concludes his heralded Ambient series with this intriguing, clever novel set in an alternate, semi-historical 1968” (Publishers Weekly).
 
It's 1968, and Walter Bullitt, part-time US government freelancer and collector of “race records,” stays busy testing new psychotropics on himself and unsuspecting citizens. Walter's conscience never interferes with his work -- until he's asked to help sabotage Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign. The ghosts who've moved into his apartment aren't much comfort. Then two outré femmes fatales show up and frog-march Walter out of Max's Kansas City before the Velvet Underground can finish their first song. The ladies have a mission. They need to save New York -- both his and theirs.
 
Bringing his acclaimed Ambient series to a close, “Womack has crafted a fast-moving, hipper-than-hip science fiction novel meshing the exuberant wordplay of Anthony Burgess with the high-concept what-if history Philip Dick made famous with The Man in the High Castle” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“A bizarre mating of William S. Burroughs and Robert Heinlein, though the over-the-top, hipster, first-person narration might also make readers think of Jack Kerouac channeled through P. G. Wodehouse.” -- The Oregonian
 
“Like Damon Runyon and James M. Cain, Jack Womack has a gift for inventing oddball language. . . . Daringly, scaringly distinct in contemporary fiction.” -- Philadelphia Weekly
 
“The action moves with amphetamine quickness, and Womack's surefooted control over his material completely sucks us in. . . . Has roots in the paranoid, conspiratorial bookends of Norman Mailer's near-delirious An American Dream and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.” -- Bookforum