Even for tech geniuses, climate change may soon be beyond any algorithm’s ability to repair.
A debut novel rewrites the history of big tech into a mythic immigrant story of dystopian proportions.
King Rao is an Indian immigrant of Dalit origins who comes to the U.S. in the 1970s on a graduate school fellowship and finds success in the Seattle-area tech scene. His story could be common enough, but in Vara’s boldly reimagined history, he’s made to embody all such immigrant dreamers, inventing a computer, software, and social network that ultimately dominate the world with an algorithm-run Shareholder Government. Rao and Margaret, his Irish American wife and design partner, become the most successful businesspeople of the last two centuries until an attempt to introduce artificial intelligence into human brains goes awry. The novel is narrated from prison by Rao’s estranged daughter, Athena, who provides details about her father’s origins in India and her own experiences with the resistance, known as the Exes (as in Ex-Shareholders). Vara’s strengths are in her clever wordplay and trenchant observations of an algorithm-led dystopia made up of a highly stratified and inequitable population: tech IP holders, good-looking influencers, and a global worker/servant class. Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop even make an appearance. Some of Vara’s minor characters are less well drawn, though, and the line between satire and stereotype at times grows thin. For example, the sole Vietnamese character is described as having “a subservient expression, this man of at least thirty years, as if he expected the young white cop to pat him on the head”; a female Chinese singer is hypersexualized for a convenient plot point; and there are few women tech entrepreneurs apart from Margaret. However, as Athena and fellow Exes race to awaken Shareholders to the dangers of ignoring the phenomenon known as Hothouse Earth, the reader may realize that the existential threat is not quite as science fictional as it may at first seem.
Even for tech geniuses, climate change may soon be beyond any algorithm’s ability to repair.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-54175-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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