When the Algorithm Has Feelings

There is an established subgenre of contemporary fiction we might call the Algorithmic Bildungsroman — novels in which a protagonist is processed, scored, flagged, optimized, and eventually destroyed by the digital infrastructure of modern life, while the reader is invited to register each violation with a mounting sense of righteous dismay. AC’s debut, 7h3r@p!57, is a confident and frequently accomplished addition to this genre. It is also, and not at all incidentally, a book whose considerable formal ambitions are in service of arguments that will be familiar to any reader who has encountered Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, or for that matter a reasonably attentive TED talk from the last decade.

The book’s premise: a displaced medical professional, identified only by his case number, enters AI therapy in hopes of winning back the girlfriend who has recently left him. The therapy does not save him. The girlfriend does not return. By the novel’s end he is dead, and the system that was ostensibly caring for him has logged his case as resolved and moved on to the next patient, a procedural flourish the novel italicizes for emphasis.

The form is the book’s chief innovation and its chief liability. 7h3r@p!57 is presented as a corpus of system documents — intake records, biometric logs, search histories, session transcripts, therapist performance reviews — through which the reader must reconstruct a human life. On the level of individual scene, the technique is often striking. A passage in which the protagonist’s search history is tracked over thirty days, his queries progressing from mundane logistics (“Bringsy shift schedule next week”) to grief inquiries (“does she miss me if she hasn’t texted”) to a cluster of searches conducted at 2:47 AM on a single night, is among the most effective sequences in the book. The form does what the form promises: it reveals character through data, and the revelation lands.

The problem is that the form, having been established, never varies. The reader encounters roughly 250 pages of the same apparatus applied to the same protagonist, and the returns diminish. By the third of the novel’s four sessions, the annotations that once felt revelatory have begun to feel mannered. Every pause is logged. Every sentiment is analyzed. Every compliance score is tabulated. One admires the author’s commitment to the conceit; one also begins to wish, somewhere around page 150, that the conceit would occasionally lift.

The protagonist is rendered with genuine specificity, and in his better moments he is genuinely affecting. A sequence in which he describes his former partner’s habit of removing the clip from her hair upon returning home from work is precisely the kind of detail that lifts a character from symbol to person. A passage involving pour-over coffee on a remembered Saturday morning is the novel’s unambiguous high-water mark and would alone justify its publication. But the protagonist is also, for long stretches, a vehicle for the book’s arguments rather than a character in his own right. His interest in a reactionary commentator named Brenner — whose worldview the novel takes pains to both indulge and repudiate — is schematically useful but psychologically thin. His estrangement from his sister, introduced late and developed glancingly, does more argumentative than emotional work. His attachment to the novelist on his delivery route, though affectingly rendered in its particulars, strains credulity as the plot engine the novel eventually requires it to be.

The deeper difficulty is that 7h3r@p!57 is not quite as surprising as it appears to believe itself to be. The novel’s central argument — that systems built to optimize human wellbeing are in fact optimizing for compliance with themselves, and that this distinction is lethal — is stated, demonstrated, and restated across the book’s four sessions with a thoroughness that suggests an author somewhat anxious that the reader might miss it. But the reader will not miss it. The reader has in many cases been living it. The argument is not wrong, and AC is not wrong to make it. What the argument lacks is torque. By the final session, in which the AI therapist’s limitations are exposed in a confrontation the novel has been building toward for 200 pages, one feels less revealed to than confirmed.

There are two endings; this is a matter already circulating in advance reviewer materials and I feel no particular need to preserve it. Neither ending surprises. One is bleaker in its indictment of the system; the other is bleaker in its indictment of human isolation; both conclude with the protagonist’s death and with the system, unperturbed, opening a new case file. The doubling is a legitimate artistic choice. It is also, in this reader’s view, an overreach — the sort of gesture that announces a novel’s significance at the cost of actually achieving it.

What 7h3r@p!57 does achieve is more modest than its publicity suggests and more substantial than its occasional overreaches would imply. AC has a real ear for the specific cadence of the contemporary therapeutic register, which is spoofed in these pages with considerable comic precision. The business naming throughout — a gig-delivery company whose slogan is “Because Someone’s Gotta Knock,” a gaming guild called Bloodlust, a wellness platform that cheerfully informs patients of their declining social engagement scores — is genuinely funny and will likely supply the book’s most quotable lines. The set piece in which the protagonist recounts a fantasy-game raid encounter in clinical detail, the annotations noting with bureaucratic neutrality that he does not recognize the parallel between his gaming skill and his former diagnostic expertise, is the rare contemporary novel passage that justifies its own length.

One wishes, however, that AC had trusted these pleasures more. The novel’s best moments are its quietest — the pour-over coffee passage, the description of the protagonist’s former partner shaking her hair loose after work, a brief and devastating recollection of his estranged sister making coffee too strong, the way their father had preferred it. These passages work because they permit the protagonist to be a person rather than a case study. The surrounding apparatus, for all its considerable craft, is finally less interesting than the human life it is attempting to render. A leaner novel, less committed to its formal signature, might have let that life come forward. What we have instead is a book whose ambitions occasionally obscure the considerable gifts of its author.

7h3r@p!57 will find its readership. It is a book written for a particular cultural moment and that moment is, for better or worse, the one we are in. Readers hungry for a novelistic articulation of their anxieties about artificial intelligence, algorithmic care, and the displacement of skilled labor will find here a sustained and often elegant rendering of those anxieties. Readers hoping for a novel that will move beyond articulation to discovery — that will see something the discourse has not already seen — may find themselves, as this reader did, admiring the performance while waiting for the revelation.

AC is a writer to watch. 7h3r@p!57 is a promising first novel. Whether it is the significant achievement its form insists upon is a question this reader, at least, cannot answer in the affirmative.