In my youth, I
was baffled by the persistence and popularity of horoscopes. They
seemed leftover charlantism in a world that appeared to have moved
on. But the older I got, the more I understood that the world, or
more precisely people, had not evolved. The name on the door may be
different (science, Christianity, corporate ladder, etc.), but for
the majority of people some higher power is needed to offer faith, to
provide structure or purpose in life. Katie William’s subtle but
affecting Tell the Machine Goodnight (2018) takes a look at
our society just a couple years down the road where a small
DNA-driven device takes on the role of mother horoscope for many
people.
While it’s
easy to make a case that certain characters are prominent and others
not, it’s impossible to say Tell the Machine Goodnight has a
protagonist. A family in the spotlight, the novel shifts comfortably
in and out of the lives of the unnamed group, telling the influence
Apricity has on them. Apricity a small device into which a person
enters a swab of cells from inside the mouth, it spits out a piece of
paper that describes, sometimes in certain and sometimes in vague
terms, what will make them happy. The divorcees Pearl and Elliot,
their teenage son Rhett, Val (Elliot’s new wife), and others in
their lives all react to the device’s cryptic scriving in different
ways.
Though uncertain
how to apply the Apricity’s obscure recommendations, Pearl
nevertheless has strong belief the underlying technology knows
something people do not, and trusts it implicitly. Rhett has a
strong, standoff-ish take on Apricity, preferring instead to watch
its effect in the lives of his highschool classmates. Elliot, still
close to Pearl and Rhett, uses the machine’s advice in anti-form,
creating living art by taking its recommendations to the extreme.
And Val is just plain confused. While believing it has some general
value for her life, she is unsure how or when or where, and as a
result semi-randomly makes decisions based on its output.
A personal,
character-focused novel that rewards the reader looking for layers
within relationships and the psyche, Tell the Machine Goodnight
is the soft, human side of science fiction, i.e. the area that that
doesn’t get near enough attention. Technique-wise, the book is
neither well nor poorly written; Williams has a workaday style
describing characters in basic but effective form that, before the
reader knows it, has created a warm rapport. Despite their faults
(or more likely precisely for that), a subtle empathy for the
characters slowly develops that one recognizes as three-dimensionally
human—human in a way a lot of science fiction would like but so
often fails at.
The overall mode
of Tell the Machine Goodnight is somewhere between novel and
collection. Apricity, family, thoughts, and work relationships the
glue holding the character threads together, the book gently shifts
perspectives, introducing a new character here, returning to the life
of another there. These slow, swirling eddies of character/story
steadily concatenate to create the novel’s larger vision, namely
the trust or lack thereof we place in science, how it drives our
actions and decisions, and also how it connects and disconnects us
individually and socially. That is a broad swathe, but by
approaching the subject matter through well-developed characters,
Williams stays focused.
Overall, Tell
the Machine Goodnight is an interesting novel that exists at the
juncture of science-driven horoscopes and the personal. Flying under
the radar for a lot of readers (I guess what book doesn’t these
days…), it takes its time building momentum, allowing its array and
movement to gently arrive at a larger vision than the realistically
rendered individuals which populate it. A slow burn, it’s
certainly also a book that rewards patience, understanding, and
empathy for the degrees of normalcy we see in our family, friends,
and colleagues. Or, from another perspective, subtly a very good
book.
No comments:
Post a Comment