THE GREAT COMPRESSION

In Kushnir’s novel, a young woman crushed by contemporary capitalism turns to a novel form of homicide.

Anika Kaminska is like a lot of young Americans today, suffocating under too much debt, pain, grief, and rage—all courtesy of a transactional system built to monetize every injury it inflicts upon working-class people. “She had walked through every circle of modern American hell,” Kushnir writes; “loss of family, financial slavery, digital erasure, and ideological violence. Each trauma peeled away another layer of illusion until only pure, cold contempt remained.” FBI agent Elias Thorne is a seasoned law enforcement professional tasked with stopping whoever is suffocating the life out of a carefully chosen mix of powerful corporate elites and leaving behind pairs of blue women’s underpants meticulously draped over their faces. It isn’t long after the bodies of the aforementioned predatory corporatists and depraved HR executives start piling up that the FBI agent realizes his serial killer may not really be the bad guy in this scenario after all. “This isn’t a sexual fetish, Mark,” Thorne tells his increasingly frustrated partner. “She’s not killing men. She’s killing economic models. She is the inflation come to collect its interest.” In this provocative and intellectually stimulating cat-and-mouse thriller, Kushnir’s prose is sharp as a scalpel that never goes dull, no matter how much it cuts. The author intriguingly adds an additional dimension to the proceedings by going super-meta, introducing characters who gather around a table and critique the whole story as it unfolds in real time. The story includes heavy doses of Thoreau, due to Anika’s penchant for Walden, in addition to references to Enlightenment philosophy (Anika even quotes Jefferson in the midst of killing one of her targets). What about love? The author provides romance, too, even if the burgeoning love affair is hardly surprisingly. If Kushnir hasn’t quite crafted this generation’s 1984, he’s certainly come close.

A finely crafted and relentlessly thought-provoking novel.