SIKE

Two ambitious and cerebral young adults navigate their relationships and careers with (or without) the psychoanalytical help of artificial intelligence.

Adrian, a 27-year-old rap lyric ghostwriter, is enjoying the recent glow of a writing credit on a track raking in millions of streams. Maquie, a 28-year-old half Japanese, half Swedish data maven, uses her predictive model to help a venture capital fund spot worthy investments. These two spend their days pub-hopping in London with friends, contemplating topics like rap, business, love, and most significantly, Sike, an AI psychotherapy app that tracks “subtle changes in your personality, while a real-life psychologist can’t (or won’t).” As Adrian and Maquie start seeing each other, Adrian often consults Sike for advice (although using Sike in public is “considered a little graceless, like giving real estate advice, or discussing crypto”). The therapeutic authority of Sike’s AI language is particularly engrossing, but while the benefits of Sike are vaunted, the dangers and potential complications of such a breakthrough in mental health technology are only disappointingly glanced at. Lunzer is eager to demonstrate his awareness of the thorny issues his book raises, and initially succeeds with clever, self-assured prose. He even acknowledges the uncomfortable “race and…class thing” of Adrian being a “white and university-educated North London Jew,” an identity Lunzer discloses only after painting Adrian as a passionate and encyclopedic student of hip-hop history. But Lunzer’s acrobatic exposition stumbles in the second act. The emotional truths of Adrian and Maquie’s lives are muted through overintellectualization; much more oxygen is given to granular snippets of privileged life in an alternate present-day reality. Still, Lunzer relishes in delightful phrasing and figurative language; Maquie is once described “as though the jaws of an unpleasant thought had snapped at her eyes from inside her head.”

A smart, elaborate, and discursive modern romance.