Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2021

Philosophy, genetics, and mental illness are the building blocks of Double Blind. They rest on the foundation of family, the anchor of all Edward St. Aubyn’s work.

If it is about anything, Double Blind is about relationships. Nature is the setting that informs those relationships — in particular, a country estate called Howorth that has been given over to wilding. If we lived in a state of nature like the deer in Howorth, copulating freely and without attachment might be the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is the natural thing for humans to do when they are not in a relationship, but after relationships form, natural behavior could be too destructive to contemplate. That’s the philosophical question that confounds Francis, whose job is to give tours of Howorth while monitoring the resurgence of species.

Francis’ girlfriend is a biologist named Olivia. Notwithstanding Olivia’s pregnancy, Francis is tempted by Hope’s repeated offers of sex, beginning when they swim together in the nude. Nudity should be natural for Francis. He’s a naturalist who is restoring the cultivated fields of Howorth to their natural state. Nudity seems to be Hope’s preferred state — she sheds her clothing whenever she’s alone with Francis — making temptation, in the form of “grasping at Hope,” a force of nature that Francis struggles to resist.

Another key relationship involves Olivia’s friend Lucy Russell, whose bright future is threatened by a brain tumor. A venture capitalist and fund manager named Hunter Sterling persuaded Lucy to move to London and run a venture capital firm that focuses on science and technology. Since the offer gave Lucy an excuse to leave her rich American boyfriend, not much persuasion was needed. Lucy agrees to stay in Hunter’s London flat while she’s getting situated. Hunter is usually elsewhere, indulging in his cocaine-fueled life of megalomania. Hunter’s “love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself” until Lucy gave him cause to alter his perspective.

The final relationship of importance involves Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin Carr is a psychotherapist whose fascination with a schizophrenic patient named Sebastian pushes him toward his ethical boundaries when he begins to suspect that Sebastian, who was also adopted, might be related to Olivia.

An odd but amusing subplot involves the Catholic Church’s relationship with Lucy and Hunter. Lucy is developing a project called Brainwaves. The project scans the brains of people who are in a desirable state of mind and attempts to reconstruct those states in others using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. A Cardinal has tasked a Franciscan Abbot named Father Guido with making money from a brain scan of “the greatest mystic of modern time.” Using Brainwaves technology, the church plans to market a helmet that will stimulate the mystical centers of the brain by replicating the mystic’s brainwaves. Father Guido provides some comic moments as encounters and inadvertently enjoys a world that is foreign to his ascetic life.

When St. Aubyn isn’t developing relationships, his characters indulge in far-ranging discussions about the mind and the natural world. They talk about mental illness and genetics, the efficacy of psychotherapy, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the mental health diagnosis one is likely to be given, theories surrounding the development of consciousness, the nature of science (“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,” Hunter opines), the tension between determinism and freedom, and the potential of immunotherapy as a cure for cancer. St. Aubyn advances a number of interesting thoughts, including the semantic use of “side effect” to “pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental.” I also liked the notion that “experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal, and self-deceived.”

St. Aubyn tosses out dozens of well-formed thought pearls, many of which would make intriguing essays, but can they sustain a novel? The plot scatters its threads, never weaving them into a tight story. Digressive paragraphs about population biology and genetics go on for pages, interrupting any momentum toward telling a story.

The characters generate enough family drama to sustain two or three novels, but the drama gets lost in the swirl of ideas that St. Aubyn uses as a substitute for storytelling. The plot eventually reaches what seems like an arbitrary stopping point, leaving every thread dangling. The result is disappointing. Working intellectual intrigue into a plot is always welcome, but not at the expense of abandoning the plot, as if the writer realized that none of the stories he started were really worth telling.

And maybe they aren't. Francis' potential affair is hardly groundbreaking fiction, while Martin's therapeutic relationship with a possible relative of his adopted daughter seems a bit contrived. The Brainwaves subplot seems better suited to a science fiction comedy. Maybe St. Aubyn decided to plow all the plot threads under and let the story grow as a wilding in the reader's mind. Only the hapless Abott struck me as an original character, but St. Aubyn has enough talent to have grown his other story fragments into a literary garden if he had set his mind to it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Version Zero by David Yoon

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 25, 2021

Recent novels are targeting big tech, often with good reason. We Are Watching Eliza Bright explored misogyny in the male-dominated tech industry. Version Zero takes a broader, less focused shot at the supposed evils of tech businesses. Unfortunately, the plot becomes too scattered to score a direct hit on the target.

The story begins with a well-defined evil. Max Portillo, an American of Salvadoran parents, works for a social media company called Wren that is a thinly disguised Facebook. His creative approach to problem solving gets him invited to participate in a high-level working group, where he learns that the company has a plan to acquire even more information about its users and to sell that information to the CIA, the Russian government, and any other buyer that can pony up billions of dollars. Max makes a naïve but well-intentioned effort to bring his ethical objections to the attention of the CEO and is fired for his trouble. Not only fired, but his career is destroyed to send a message about defying a powerful employer.

Max’s best female friend, Akiko Hosokawa, still works for Wren. She helps Max conduct a bit of sabotage that drives users to close their Wren accounts, but only temporarily because who can live without Facebook? So Max conducts a slightly more effective bit of sabotage using a group called Version Zero. The group initially consists of Max and Akiko and Max’s best male friend, Shane Sataw, who is also Akiko’s boyfriend. Shane is a decent guy who cleans pools for a living and doesn’t know or care much about the tech world. He exemplifies one of the novel’s themes — it is possible to live a satisfying life without the artificial ego strokes that come from getting “likes” on the meaningless social media posts that distract us from a world we can’t see because our eyes on glued to our smartphone screens. That’s a more amorphous harm than the novel’s initial complaint — the loss of privacy that occurs when big tech justifies stealing our data by pointing out that the fine print in user agreements pobody ever reads allows them to do whatever they want — but it’s still a valid concern.

Version Zero’s antics come to the attention of Pilot Markham, a wealthy tech innovator who dropped out of public view three years earlier after his daughter died. Pilot blames internet trolling for his daughter’s death. He also blames himself and the internet’s enablers. Pilot befriends (or manipulates) Max, Akiko, Shane, and his 18-year-old neighbor, Turpinseed Brayden. Brayden’s voice represents the average young internet user who feels validated by the feedback he gets from friends on social media posts. Brayden isn’t overly bright but he’s harmless and fundamentally decent.

The novel’s plot follows Max and his gang as they conspire with Pilot to wake up the world to the perceived damage caused by the internet. One of their better schemes involves doxing trolls, exposing the real identities of white supremacists and misogynists who use the comfort of anonymity to post vile screeds about Jews or blacks or women or Asians or immigrants or whomever they happen to be hating today.

The story eventually brings in four other CEOs from companies that might be the equivalent of Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Reddit. At that point, the targeted evil is simply corporate greed and the elevation of profit over consumers, as exemplified by Uber’s business development model (move in fast, ignore all laws, and put out the fires after you’re too big to stop). While greed is another valid target, it is hardly limited to the tech industry. Consumer harm linked to corporate greed is considerably greater in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, to name only a couple of obvious examples.

The plot moves quickly. It is sufficiently strange and unpredictable to deliver solid entertainment. The story adds human interest by developing a potential love triangle involving Max, Akiko, and Shane that challenges Max’s perception of himself as a decent person.

Still, I’m not quite sure what message David Yoon means Version Zero to send. After condemining big tech with a broad brush, the message seems to come down to “internet bad.” The internet itself is just a tool, not an evil entity. The novel acknowledges that marginalized people depend on the internet for support. Organizations that do everything from cancer research to animal rescue rely on the internet for fundraising. Some of us have been liberated by the internet. I have the freedom to live wherever I want (within financial reason) because of the internet. Without it, I’d probably be a Walmart greeter. And while I could keep this blog as a handwritten journal in a moleskin notebook without posting my ramblings for the world to ignore, I don’t think the blog unleashes any particular evil in the world. Heck, I don’t even bother readers with ads, as do some of the amusing blog entries imagined in Version Zero.

But partial disagreement with (or uncertainty about) a book’s message isn’t enough reason to dislike a provocative book unless the message itself is evil. Yoon’s indictment of big tech is well intentioned. The book is likely intended to make people think about social harms that tech businesses cause. Thinking is never a bad thing. Yoon plays fair by acknowledging counterarguments to the anti-tech message and by suggesting that the balance of benefits and harms does not weigh entirely on the side of harms. Putting aside the novel’s lack of a clear focus, I enjoyed the characters and the surprising (if sometimes absurdist) plot twists. Those are sufficient reasons to recommend a provacative book even if I'm not entirely sold on the provocation.

RECOMMENDED

Revival Season by Monica West

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 25, 2021

A teenage daughter comes to realize that her father, “the Faith Healer of East Mansfield, Texas,” in whom she has invested her whole-hearted support, is a liar and a sinner. Actually, Samuel Horton is a grifter with a serious anger management problem, but Miriam Horton is too young to see her father in those terms. In her early teens, Miriam is beginning to consider rebellion against her father’s strict rules, although she doesn’t dare express those thoughts in his presence. Nor does she have the typical motivation for rebellion, having apparently never entertained a sexual thought in her life. She does have a mild crisis of faith, which at her age and in her situation is indistinguishable from a crisis of family. Unfortunately, Miriam never makes the intellectual leap that would cause her to look beyond her father’s overbearing behavior and to understand that she’s living in a religious subculture that will never value her, despite her growing belief that she is every bit as capable as her father of performing miracles.

Miriam’s mother apparently believes that Samuel has the power to heal, although she might just be playing her role in the family. Miriam’s brother Caleb definitely believes. He’s being groomed as the family’s next great faith healer. Samuel’s failure to heal most people who come to him is easily dismissed as God’s choice or a lack of faith on the part of the infirm, while his few apparent successes are embraced as proof of Samuel’s spiritual power. Blaming God for failure is the great convenience of a religious con. Those who might wonder why Samuel can’t heal his daughter Hannah, who was born with cerebral palsy and needs crutches and braces to walk, are told that her condition is God’s plan.

Miriam’s best friend Micah is diabetic. The story suggests that Samuel failed to heal Micah, that Miriam secretly healed her, and that Samuel is taking credit for it. The “miraculous” change in blood sugar levels is temporary, leading to one of many rifts between Samuel and his deacons. That rift and some violent episodes in Samuel’s life are dividing the parish and making it difficult for Samuel to pay the mortgage.

Miriam secretly enters the healing game with a fury when she learns that she can heal more capably than her father. Samuel is infuriated when he learns that she is a usurper. Even Miriam’s mother has been taught to believe that it’s a sin for a woman to do the work of men. Miriam’s biggest test will come if she decides to heal Hannah.

Revival Season is told from Miriam’s perspective as a teenager whose family travels the summer revival circuit. The novel’s focus on Miriam is dictated by the story’s first-person narration. The problem is that Miriam, having been home-schooled and largely homebound, isn’t an interesting character. She speaks in clichés (“I watched Papa like a hawk”) because her life as a southern evangelical is a cliché. A teenager who seems to have no interest in moving beyond the narrow confines of her existence (apart from secretly using her healing powers) has little of importance to share with the reader.

Miriam’s deeply flawed father is a more interesting character than Miriam simply because of his flaws. How does he feel about his crumbling life when parishioners abandon his church and other churches stop booking his revival appearances? If he really believes he can heal, how does he feel when that power dissipates? We get a sense from a sermon that he feels threatened by Miriam. We get a sense of his distress or frustration from Miriam, who perceives his growing tendency toward violence and rage, but Miriam’s perspective is shallow and self-absorbed, befitting her age and upbringing. How does Caleb feel about being the heir apparent to a father who is on the verge of losing his revival empire? We only catch a glimpse of Caleb’s evolving realization that his father can’t really heal people. A third person perspective that looked more deeply into the lives of Samuel and Miriam’s other family members would have offered greater insight into the world that Miriam inhabits.

Fiction allows readers to imagine, and perhaps to understand, lives that are far beyond their own. The novel doesn’t help the reader understand enough about the subculture that embraces revivals and faith healers. The novel is missing the atmospheric detail that creates a sense of realism. The characters seem like stereotypes — the abusive preacher who puts self-interest above concern for those he claims to heal, the meek wife who wants to leave but can’t bring herself to abandon her children — and the story does too little to give them personalities outside of their stereotypes.

I imagine Revival Season is intended as an allegory of female empowerment. It almost works on that level, although Miriam’s empowerment is equated with having an equal right to be a faith healer. Whether Miriam is actually healing anyone rather than creating the appearance of healing, like her father does, is never clear. The story would have been more honest if it suggested that Miriam was just as capable as her father of being self-deluded or a grifter. That would have preserved the allegory while adding intellectual honesty, but it also would have made Miriam just as unsympathetic as her father, so I understand why Monica West chose not to go in that direction. If Miriam wanted real empowerment, she’d encourage her mother to walk away and take the kids (a moment that is foreshadowed but never happens).

The novel might also be read as an indictment of faith healing, home-schooling, and a culture of ignorance, but that doesn’t seem to be the novel’s intent. This is a book that might appeal to certain readers of faith, depending on the nature of their faith. The story has some merit, but it just didn’t appeal to me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Scorpion by Christian Cantrell

Published by Random House on May 25, 2021

Scorpion is a near-future thriller. The protagonists both work for the CIA. Quinn Mitchell is an analyst and Henrietta Yi is a quantum physicist. They approach the same mystery from very different perspectives.

The prologue tells us that while she was working on her doctorate, Henrietta reviewed data from the Large Hadron Collider particle detector. Buried in the data, she found an encryption header and encrypted data, as well as two lines of text from Shakespeare. The data comes to be known as the Epoch Index.

Quinn was assigned to a task force that searched for enriched nuclear material, a good bit of which has gone missing over the years. As that project ends, Deputy Director Vanessa Townes assigns Quinn to investigate a series of murders. That’s not a normal assignment for the CIA, which usually commits rather than solves murders, but these are international killings and Interpol has asked for an assist. Each victim has been killed in a different, usually high-tech way. The murders are clever and untraceable. The victims seem to have been killed in descending order by age, ending with a nine-month-old baby. The killer brands each body with a four-digit number for reasons that Quinn will eventually discern.

The killer is known to the CIA only as the Elite Assassin, but he is known to the reader as Ranveer. Christian Cantrell does not initially disclose how or why the victims were selected but makes it clear that the list of targets has been assigned to Ranveer. When the novel is well underway, the reader will begin to suspect that Ranveer is not quite who he seems to be. The reader will also be surprised to learn who has been assigning targets to him.

Townes’ boss is Alessandro Moretti. Henrietta now works for Moretti, who refers to her as his “tech guy.” Her job is to decrypt the Epoch Index, which she believes to be a message form the future. When Henrietta meets Quinn at Moretti’s direction to install a new app on Quinn’s phone — a task that seems well below Henrietta’s pay grade — the reader will suspect that the Epoch Index is connected to the murders that Quinn is investigating.

Cantrell traces the obstacles and obsessions that shape his protagonists without distracting from the plot. Henrietta lost her parents when Seoul was destroyed in a nuclear blast. She is an avid collector of Pokémon figures. Henrietta has an unusual disability that seems like a bit of color until it becomes directly relevant to the plot. Quinn no longer cuts herself, but she has engaged in “emotional cutting” since her daughter drowned. She carries a torch for her former husband and reignites it during the course of the novel. Both characters are socially isolated, although Henrietta is isolated more by nature than circumstance. Both are smart and good at their jobs. Quinn is particularly adept at using Artificial Intelligence to help her track down the Elite Assassin. Both feel conflicted about working for the CIA, although Henrietta comes to feel she has sold her soul to Morietti, in part because she might be empowering him to devise history’s most powerful weapon. Henrietta eventually seizes an opportunity to change her future, and perhaps the future of humanity. Character development is more than sufficient for a thriller that is driven by plot and ideas more than characters.

Quantum physics is full of surprises. Cantrell takes advantage of that fact to develop the plot in surprising ways. As the protagonists intertwine, they are forced to confront, and perhaps to change, their value systems as they weigh the greater good against lesser (but substantial) evils. The old philosophical thought experiment — would justice be served by killing Hitler as an infant, despite his youthful innocence? — becomes, by analogy, the story’s driving moral question. The story also raises questions that are familiar to science fiction fans about the nature of destiny and free will. Is it really necessary to kill Hitler? Might it possible to make small changes in his early life that, over the course of time, will prevent him from becoming a megalomaniac and German nationalist? Perhaps hugs can shape the future as effectively as bullets.

The near future in which Scorpion is set hasn’t changed much, apart from the destruction of Seoul, but Cantrell does suggest the occurrence of subtle changes that create a credible atmosphere. One thing that hasn’t changed is the revulsion the rest of world feels when America arrogantly pronounces itself to be exceptional.

While the plot is a bit convoluted, the unfolding mystery and the need to keep the reader engaged and guessing demands a certain complexity. An evolution in the relationship of two characters is abrupt, but it occurs during the untold story that occurs during a jump forward in the narrative. Cantrell probably made a wise choice not to waste time showing the reader how it happened. Why it happened seems clear enough. The novel leaves a few other questions unanswered, giving the reader room to wonder what might happen next. The story nevertheless feels complete. Science fiction and thriller fans should both enjoy it.

RECOMMENDED

Against the Law by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on May 25, 2021

The third book in the Joe the Bouncer series returns Joe Brody to the fight against terrorism. Joe is a former Special Forces guy who has conquered addictions and other demons. Now he works as a strip club bouncer who does freelance work for Gio, the Mafia boss who owns the club. His freelance work so far has advanced the New York underworld’s war on terror, a war it fights because terrorism is bad for business. And because doing occasional favors for the FBI and CIA has its perks.

Much of Against the Law will be familiar to series readers. Joe the criminal continues his flirtation with Donna the FBI agent, who continues her distrust of the CIA agent to whom she was once married. Joe continues something more than a flirtation with Yelena the Russian criminal. Donna’s mother continues her friendship with Joe’s grandmother. All of those characters play important roles in the novel.  As one might hope and expect in a series, a couple of these relationships change by the time the novel ends. Even a subplot involving Gio’s marital problems, exacerbated by proclivities that he tried to hide from his wife, appears to be resolved.

The story begins in Afghanistan, where Joe has traveled to kill Zahir, a nemesis he has seen before. Zahir has been smuggling high quality heroin into New York by unknown means. Zahir seems to be trying to corner the New York drug market with better heroin than the locals are supplying. Zahir then funnels the profits to terrorist cells. New York’s criminal organizations don’t appreciate foreign competition. Gio and the other crime czars are paying Joe a half million dollars to take out Zahir.

When Joe’s mission doesn’t go as planned, the plot detours to a corporation called Wildwater (think Halliburton combined with the company formerly known as Blackwater). The CIA is in bed with Wildwater, which is in bed with Zahir and with a psychopathic military contractor named Toomey. Toomey’s take on the war against terror is to inflict some terror of his own, bringing about the clash of civilizations for which people on the far right long, provided they are not personally inconvenienced by the clash. All of those entities in the same bed makes a predictable mess. It falls to Joe and his underworld buddies, with an assist from Donna, to clean up the mess and once again save New York from imminent disaster.

This book seems to bring to an end to a three-book arc, while leaving room to move forward with the development of certain characters and their relationships. While the familiar characters are likeable, the familiar plot — Joe takes on terrorists, fights and kills and survives — has become a bit predictable. I have enjoyed all the Joe the Bouncer novels, but I enjoyed this one less because it seemed like a book I had read twice before. I hope David Gordon moves Joe away from terrorism plots and toward something fresh and original in the next novel. Still, I look forward to reading the next one because Joe the Bouncer remains a unique and engaging criminal protagonist.

RECOMMENDED