This wonderfully strange, thought-provoking, and hilarious novel defies simple categorization. Is it a study of the soulless mining of personal data for the greediest of ends? Is it a suspenseful tale of a battle of the wills–one Apollonian, the other Dionysian? Is it an artful melding of poetry and prose? Yes and yes and yes. As disparate as these elements may seem, in the end they add up to an entertaining, enlightening whole.
All the action of the novel plays out at Longshot Insurance, where powerful algorithms–and access to just about every byte of personal data imaginable–have given the company such great predictive powers that it hasn’t paid out a claim for years. That all changes when a policyholder makes a seemingly legitimate claim on a homeowner’s policy, infuriating the CEO, who asks an underling to “take care of her,” his words having the edge of a mafia don’s.
That underling is the novel’s central character, Caleb, who designed the ad for the ill-fated policy. (Longshot’s algorithmic prowess having rendered many Longshot employees redundant, the CEO believes that Caleb is the only remaining worker suited to the task.) Because the company can still hire janitors, the CEO adds the claimant, Vera, to the janitorial staff, as a way to start paying off her claim–until Caleb can make her go away, literally. According to her policy, if she departs the premises of Longshot without completing “all appropriate pre-processing procedures,” she’s no longer entitled to compensation.
With his Apollonian virtues of rationality, dutifulness, and respect for the prevailing order of things, Caleb accepts his mission, trying at first to bar Vera from her room in the Longshot dormitory, with a lock and chains. But as he soon discovers, Vera is no respecter of locks and chains, or any other limitations. Despite Caleb’s many efforts to trap and release her, she roams freely through the seemingly endless halls, floors, and innards of the Longshot building, surfacing only to make trouble for him and other employees. Just as quickly, she vanishes, seemingly beyond anyone’s reach–most frustratingly, Caleb’s.
But the trouble she makes is often artful. Though she harasses everyone in Longshot’s directory with “nonsensical, multicolored messages,” these messages read like poetry. And as she slops about with her mop, making messes no responsible janitor could bear, it turns out that she’s actually dancing, and singing. Vera, in other words, is Longshot’s Dionysus, and one of the great joys of the novel is how Massa portrays her chaotic powers and pits them against Caleb’s exacting, strategic ones. For his part, Caleb is a man of resolve, and his efforts to best Vera–while also trying to earn god-worthy respect from those he manages–lend tension, intrigue, and a whole lot of humor to the story. (This is the funniest book I’ve read in a long time.)
Another pleasure of the book is the poetry woven throughout, not just Vera’s verse but also the Longshotian praise-singing that Caleb takes to repeating. (Vera’s and Caleb’s poems appear as snippets throughout the novel and are then presented in full at the end of the book, as “Dionysian Dithyramb” and “Apollonian Hexameter,” respectively.)
In the end, the novel leaves open these larger questions: Can order or chaos ever claim a decisive victory in any institution? And would we really want either of them to? This inventive novel offers no neat answers, and it wouldn’t be as interesting if it did. As readers and as citizens, we are left to come to our conclusions, unleashing our inner Veras or Calebs as circumstances may require.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":▪ Novels of ideas
▪ Stories of workplaces in crisis, like Then We Came to the End
▪ Generous servings of humor
