'Come With Me' Lays Bare The Risks And Regrets Of Our Online Lives

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Novelist Helen Schulman says in the author's note at the end of her new novel, called, "Come With Me," that her fears about an obsession with the Internet have no bounds. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says Schulman finds an excellent way to deal with those fears - by channeling them into art. Here's Maureen's review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The great Internet novel. Like the great white whale, it's rumored to be out there somewhere beyond the horizon. So far, the novelists who have been hailed as coming closest to writing it have done so in dystopian doorstoppers even longer than Melville's "Moby Dick." I'm thinking of "The Circle" by Dave Eggers and "Book Of Numbers" by Joshua Cohen, both of which tell sweeping cautionary tales about the wired life within Facebook-type cult compounds. But Helen Schulman is taking a different tack in capturing the Internet revolution. She's zooming-in tight and close on all those computers and smartphones scattered around the rooms where we live.

Schulman has a gift for vividly tracing the fallout on the domestic realm from that hard-to-pinpoint historic moment when the Internet first drifted through the walls of the American home. In her best-selling and harrowing 2011 novel, "This Beautiful Life," Schulman described how a sexting scandal broke apart an otherwise solid family and school community. Now, in her new and much more narratively ambitious novel, called, "Come With Me," Schulman splices together an old-school family drama with high-tech fantasy. It's a rich, closely observed story about regrets and stupid risk-taking, set mostly among the coders, crunchers and ordinary citizens of Palo Alto, Calif. The heroine of Schulman's story is Amy Reed. She's a middle-aged mom who finds herself in the humbling position of working as a PR flunky for her old college roommate's 19-year-old son. Donny is a brilliant Stanford undergrad who's founded his own startup. He's just invented an algorithm that allows users to access all the alternative lives they might have lived or as he calls them, multiverses.

Here's how it works. Donny knows a lot about Amy's early life from his gossipy mother and, more disturbingly, from the cloud, where apparently, the most personal information floats, ripe for the picking. Equipped with this data, Donny creates what he calls a personalized crystal ball for Amy. He instructs her to strap on a virtual reality headset and journey into her various what-if lives. What if she'd married her handsome but feckless actor boyfriend? What if she'd tripped that time she was running after her then-toddler son and didn't catch up to him before he ran into the busy street? What if she'd carried that unplanned, early pregnancy to term?

Even as Amy is being traumatized at work by these deep dives into her alternative lives, the Internet is changing the texture of her family's daily routine at home. Amy's teenage son Jack maintains an intimate relationship with his out-of-town girlfriend, mostly via webcam, while her husband Dan, a former journalist who got phased out of his job at a dead tree publication, spends his days angrily tweeting. We're told it's no wonder that Dan, bitter and scared, clung to his iPhone the way some cling to their religion and their guns. It was like an oxygen tank for his breath-starved mind. "Come With Me" is ingeniously structured around three non-consecutive days in the lives, both virtual and real, of Amy and her family.

There are a lot of storylines here, as well as a lot of humor and heart. Amy is the fully-realized moral center of the novel, intrigued by innovation but also graced with a witty, feminist skepticism about the male-dominated tech industry. For instance, reading an article that theorizes that tech may one day cheat death by making it possible to download the human brain into a robot, we're told Amy reflects that when she was in college and studied literature, it was male novelists who had believed they could use their craft to achieve immortality. Updike, Mailer, Bellow - they'd behaved as if the written word could defy death. But clearly, it had not. Her teenage son Jack had never heard of any of them.

Fair enough, but I'm still putting my money on literature to transcend time. In fact, if at this moment I had to recommend one contemporary novel to the readers of the far future to give them a sense of how we newbies are struggling to grasp the unforeseen powers of the world wide web, I'd give them Schulman's "Come With Me." It poignantly captures the wonder, as well as the cluelessness, of how we live now.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Come With Me" by Helen Schulman. If you're looking for a new book for yourself or to give as a gift for this holiday season, NPR has compiled more than 300 titles recommended by NPR staff and critics, including Maureen. You can find the 2018 Book Concierge at npr.org/bestbooks. And check out our podcast if you want to catch up on interviews you missed, like our interview with trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, who's been working for gun safety from the perspective of his experiences treating gunshot victims and as a gun shooting victim himself. He was shot in the neck when he was 17. He responded to an NRA tweet with a tweet that helped launch a campaign mobilizing doctors and nurses around the issue of gun safety.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Meyers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie, Thea Chaloner and Seth Kelley. I'm Terry Gross.

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