WRONG WAY

A woman with a long history of temporary employment finds her latest gig as a driver of a new, supposedly driverless vehicle.

“This could be a good job,” Teresa thinks aboard the shuttle bus taking her and 50 fellow trainees from Boston’s South Station to the gleaming suburban headquarters of AllOver, an “experience company” that claims to “shape the digital economy to fit neighborhood-centric needs.” She’s had plenty of jobs to compare it with; McNeil’s debut novel opens with Teresa swimming laps at a local Y while she recalls the many jobs she’s had and lost for one reason or another over several decades. At 48, living at home with her mother because she can’t afford her own place, all she hopes for is a decent paycheck. She is bemused but doesn’t really care that she will be hidden inside a “working prototype” that AllOver is promoting and putting on the road as an actual self-driving car. This seems like a possible setup for a thriller exposing a sinister corporation with some evil plan, but the insufferably woke AllOver never appears to be more than just another profit-centered business pretending to care about customers and employees. McNeil, author of a well-regarded critical history of the Internet (Lurking: How a Person Became a User, 2020), focuses here on America’s disorienting transition from an industrial to a service economy and its consequences for working people. Teresa is her case study, and the major flaw in this sharply observed, extremely well-written novel is that we are more than halfway through it before readers learn why this obviously intelligent woman is so passive and has such minimal expectations. When we do, it supplements McNeil’s powerful portrait of an unequal economy with a biting example of class privilege as an instrument of upward employment mobility. Unfortunately, the novel has been permeated for so long with Teresa’s alienated, apathetic personality that it never develops narrative momentum, and a dramatic final event leads to a painfully ironic last line rather than closure.

Strong, stinging social observation that doesn’t entirely work as fiction.