An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.
A trend forecaster foresees a solution to the loneliness of this hyperconnected world.
Sloane Jacobsen, “soothsayer of the swipe,” is a hugely successful trend forecaster, having been the one to predict the now-ubiquitous thumb-to-phone motion. She is the “uber anti-mom,” believing that having children is shortsighted in a world where people have been becoming ever more self-centered. For this reason, she has been hired as a consultant by Mammoth, a tech company focusing on consumer electronics and “human-machine integration technology,” to help them prepare for a three-day summit bringing together tastemakers from around the world to consider the theme of “ReProduction”: “What will we make when we stop making kids?” Flying from Paris, where she has been living since the death of her father many years before, to New York brings her closer to her estranged family, and something is nagging at her soothsaying abilities. Very much against the wishes of Mammoth, she cannot help put predict a return to human touch, a “turning against tech.” This is also in direct opposition to the beliefs of her life partner, Roman, a neo-sensualist who has his own prediction: that nonpenetrative, nontactile sex—i.e. a sex life lived online—is the future of sexuality. He has begun, more and more, to wear a Zentai suit, which covers his entire body in a thin layer of Lycra and fetishizes detachment by making true skin-to-skin touch impossible. This discord allows Sloane the space to fall for another Mammoth employee who agrees with her about the return of physical contact and demonstrates his support corporeally. It also allows her to reconnect with her family. While the novel is highly engaging in its representation of the confusing and addictive tech-oriented world we live in, the outcome is predictable and obvious and made more quixotic by a last-ditch dive into the mystical. The exploration Maum (I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, 2014, etc.) is conducting in this book, of human vs. machine, is best served not in the overreaching discussion of global trends but in the more nuanced moments in which Sloane aches to sort out her own feelings.
An uncomplicated novel about the complicated relationship between humans and the tech-heavy world.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1212-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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