Author: Jennifer Graham

(Riverhead, 400 pages)

Elizabeth Gilbert is not known as a humor writer, but a few pages into her latest book I laughed out loud when she apologetically wrote that she hadn’t yet said much about herself. “How very typical of me, to have immediately put my focus upon the other,” she wrote.

What? Say again? This is the woman who made the confessional memoir a genre when Eat, Pray, Love detonated on the world nearly 20 years ago. That bombshell of a book, and its subsequent movie, and its subsequent sequel (2010’s Committed) made Gilbert so much money that, had she lived modestly and managed it prudently, she wouldn’t have to work again, ever. She could have just flitted around the world eating and praying.

But as Gilbert reveals in her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, she gave money away as fast as it came in. She paid off credit card bills, medical bills and student loans, paid for friends’ homes and vacations, invested in businesses and covered college tuition. She sent checks to women she heard were getting divorced. At one point during the financial crisis of 2008, she says, she literally walked down the street of a small town in New Jersey asking business owners if they needed any money.

Some people might call that extraordinary kindness. Gilbert calls it co-dependancy. It was a symptom, she says, of a larger problem that has ruled her life: “love and sex addiction.” And with that, we kind of know what we’re in for here.

All the Way to the River is a book-length confession, told through the unfolding relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life: a hairdresser/musician named Rayya who at first was an acquaintance, then a best friend and eventually a lover.

Rayya was also addicted to drugs. She had gotten clean, but then, a week after her 56th birthday, learned that she was dying of cancer. And in the course of her illness, she again spirals into addiction.

Rayya died in 2018, and Gilbert has said that she is just now telling this story because it took “years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that happened between us and why.”

She sees her own compulsive behavior reflected in Rayya’s addiction and entwines their stories in a narrative that is alternately harrowing, mystical, strange, unhinged and deeply touching. Could a less gifted writer publish a book in which she describes herself as being a conduit for a dead woman to hold and kiss her dying daughter and find a world receptive to this story? Unclear.

But Gilbert sees herself as both a radiant soul and a painfully flawed human being, and this sort of mysticism infuses her life. (At one point, Rayya told her that the first time they met, when Gilbert came to her apartment for a haircut, she saw “a big circle of golden light around my head” and later wondered “Who has that much freaking sunshine? What’s that all about?”)

Anxiety and fear has always infused her life as well. Without specifically assigning blame, Gilbert says that her parents “made it clear to me growing up that I was expected to leave the house right after high school and never live there again.” She did so, but with a “lifelong quest to make other people into my home,” a strategy that didn’t work especially well. She bounced from relationship to relationship and estimates that between the ages of 20 and 48, she lived in about 20 different homes. She left men she describes as good and says she broke up marriages. She could bear neither intimacy nor living alone.

Then she fell into the rabbit hole of Rayya, the woman that Gilbert let move into a church that she had bought sight unseen off Craigslist, planning at first to make it her forever home and then to turn into a working sanctuary for artists. Gilbert was still married at the time, but over time, she was falling in love with Rayya as they spent more time together and their relationship deepened.

After Rayya’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, Gilbert writes, “I cried so hard, I fell out of time and space.” She ended her marriage and became Rayya’s lover when they thought Rayya had six months to live. It turned out she had more time than that, and it wasn’t a Taylor Swiftian love story, but a dark, chaotic tunnel in which Rayya’s treatment depleted both women. At one point, Gilbert confesses, she considered killing Rayya with an overdose, and while she didn’t do that, she did finally ask her to move out of church.

When Rayya leaves and gets sober through the help of another friend, Gilbert is distraught and angry that someone else was able to help Rayya when she couldn’t. Theirs is a messy and complicated relationship, right to the end, except there really isn’t an end, because Gilbert believes that Rayya continued to communicate with her after her death.

As in Eat Pray Love, which proceeds from a middle-of-the-night instruction delivered from God, Gilbert has a running conversation with the divine, which is likely not the same kind of divinity perceived by her readers, especially those, say, in the deep South. The God that speaks to Gilbert throughout is one who addresses her as “my love” and “my child,” a love language that disbelieving cynics might call “wackadoodle.” And to be sure, there are scenes throughout that might also be described as cringe. But Gilbert answers her critics with her talent — she is, first and foremost, a creative force of nature expressed through a keyboard — and with her unwavering belief in the spiritual realm.

All the Way to the River is a memoir about addiction and love, but it is also a memoir about death — what it costs the living to watch someone close to us die, how it changes us. It’s a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.

It is a reminder that even in the genre of memoir, not everything is revealed, although it’s hard to see what Gilbert could have possibly left out here. Yes, we are entertained, touched, riveted. But there is an underlying ickiness to it, the sense we’ve been enlisted as voyeurs to another’s pain without their consent. But Gilbert has an answer for that: Rayya, she says, told her to write this book, told her after her death. “Tell them every single thing that happened! Don’t worry about protecting my dignity or yours — just go full punk rock with it. Lay it all out there.” Rayya assures Gilbert that she doesn’t mind being dead. “But I do miss grilling.” A

Featured Photo: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

(Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

There are few relationships in life as complex as that of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. This is true not only as the two women prepare for the union of their children, but throughout the course of their lives. It becomes more true if there are ever grandchildren involved.

Marisa Silver dives into the dynamic in At Last, a sharp and perceptive novel that is heavy on characters if light on plot. The story follows the lives of Evelyn Turner and Helene Simonauer, who are thrown together, unwillingly, when their children decide to get married.

Helene was not at all happy about the union of Ruth — “this tall and rashly opinionated girl” — to Tom, her “otherwise responsible son.” Evelyn, for her part, sees the upcoming wedding as a tragic accident of timing. “Two years ago, [Ruth] met a young man on the street, and now they were getting married. If either she or Tom had been at that same spot five minutes earlier or five minutes later, Evelyn would not be driving around with a woman who clutched her purse on her lap as if she thought Evelyn might steal it.”

“The woman was a disturbance. Evelyn needed to be undisturbed,” Silver writes, letting us know that however disagreeable the women are, her own prose is going to be delightful.

Both Evelyn and Helene are widows, and the sort of women that are often described by others as a “piece of work,” but of course they don’t see it in themselves. They think if they can just get through the wedding and its preparations, they can retreat to their lives and not have to pretend to be nice to each other again.

That’s not how life works. But as the women’s relationship develops over decades, we learn stories from the past that turned them into who they become. Their own mothers are very much architects of their daughters, at least to a point. We witness Evelyn’s attempts to get out from the shadow of an insecure and sometimes cruel mother, and Helene’s efforts to keep her family functioning after her two siblings die in unrelated incidents.

The past is interspersed with the relationships of the present, always with Silver’s shrewd humor and her deep understanding of human nature. In one scene Helene takes Ruth to a hair salon, where she says, with all good intentions, “it looks to me like you haven’t had a good cut in quite a while.” As Ruth sits in the chair, the hairdresser looks at Helene.

“What a feral cat you’ve brought me, her raised eyebrows seemed to say. Oh, don’t I know it, Helene’s eyebrows responded. Satisfied, Helene picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and pretended to read about tapioca.”

The story’s complexity owes not just to current events but to past ones. At one point Helene comes across a packet of letters in her late husband’s things that indicate a secret relationship overseas. The letters were written in German between 1939 and 1943 by someone named Irina. (“It was the string, wrapped several times around the letters horizontally and vertically and then knotted, that made her know she was in the presence of something dangerous.”)

As Helene tries to figure out their meaning, she sets into motion the events that will culminate in Tom and Ruth meeting, and ultimately getting married, and having a daughter named Francine. The grandmothers, as grandmothers are wont to do, compete for the child’s affection as she grows up into a person old enough to have her own narrative in this story — it’s Francine who tells us, in her own words, what it’s like to be told by her parents that they’re getting a divorce, what it’s like to see her grandmothers ravaged by age and memory loss.

Silva has said that At Last has its roots in a childhood memory. One of her grandmothers, driving her to the other’s grandmother’s house, said “I know you love me more than her.” She was 4 at the time, but those words were burned into her memory and provided the scaffolding on which she built Helene and Evelyn’s story.

We hear her own experience when she writes, “When Francie was a newborn and Helene would go over to visit, Evelyn would be there more times than not holding Francie while Ruth rested. And so it was Evelyn who would ask Helene if she’d like to hold the baby, or if she’d like to give Francie a bottle, and it was Evelyn who would take the baby from her when Francie started to fuss, as if Helene didn’t know how to calm a child.”

This is Silver’s eighth novel, and it is expertly crafted. Despite the fine writing, it’s hard to imagine what audience it might find among men. It’s a novel of and about women and the intermingled tensions that hum through their lives. Mother-in-law and baby experience is not required to enjoy the story, but it helps. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Knopf, 304 pages)

Did we really need another book about food? Yes, foodies, we most certainly did. Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming is a fresh take on an old subject, a disjointed romp through the world of bubble tea, Magnum ice cream and TikTok recipes that is both an indictment of and a tribute to food culture.

Tandoh was a runner-up on The Great British Bake Off, one of the most popular TV series to cross the pond. Just 20 years old when she applied to the show after being encouraged by her mother to watch it, she parlayed the experience into a food- and cookbook-writing career. As she demonstrates in a New Yorker piece about the show, not only can Tandoh cook, but she can write, in a breezy tone and with a sardonic wit that invites you to follow along whether you’re interested in this stuff or not. You may not have realized you wanted to know the history of the All Recipes website or the vagaries of the New York automat, but Tandoh somehow makes even the most useless information fascinating.

She begins with a reflection of why we eat what we eat, and how that has changed. Until the past century, our food choices were shaped by availability and family tradition: “Conversations, meals together, some person you want to be more like, some person you hate, a myth about this or that, a recipe taught to you, a story about witches.”

“Not always, not for all people, but as a rule: almost everything you knew about food, you probably learned either in the kitchen or at the table,” she writes.

But in the middle of the 20th century, she explains, tastes and diets began to be determined by corporations and advertising. This trend was exacerbated by the internet, which shapes our appetites with photographs and recipes that seduce us into embracing whatever is the hot new trend (think sriracha and kombucha) while we order groceries and meals from our couches while salivating over TikTok recipes and restaurant reviews on our phones. The most influential restaurant critic in America right now, Tandoh says, is a TikToker named Keith Lee who has 15 million followers and admits he knows very little about food.

“I love it. I love humankind’s inexhaustible capacity for nonsense,” Tandoh writes. She herself has fallen under the spell of TikTok food, saying as soon as she saw the videos of a certain kind of chocolate-covered strawberries, “I knew two things: I was going to buy them, and it was going to be a mistake. … The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet.” The staggering number of people looking at these strawberries — 150 million at her last count — added to the appeal, just like lines outside a Shake Shack make the meals inside seem more desirable than they are. Fear of missing out, she says, is responsible for 80 percent of her biggest food mistakes.

She devotes a chapter to explain the rise of bubble tea — usually a concoction of tea, milk, assorted add-ins and tapioca pearls — that originated in Taiwan, soon overran China and started showing up in California in the 1990s. “There is no practical reason to drink bubble tea, no culture to which it is truly traditional…. In fact, in most places, the point is exactly that it’s fun and unserious.” It’s also hard to define, having become “an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don’t have tea, milk or even tapioca pearls.” (Her recommendation to friends who want to try it but are bewildered by the choices: get the brown sugar boba milk tea, the archetype.)

There’s another chapter on food influencers like Nara Smith, who absurdly show us how to, for example, prepare grilled-cheese sandwiches for toddlers by first making the bread from scratch, and then the cheese, and the fresh pesto, and eventually, yes, even the butter, seasoning it delicately with parsley, garlic and sea salt. These sorts of influencers make Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and they have arisen even as the gold standards of food magazines, like Gourmet, have gone out of business, which she clearly rues.

Martha Stewart does not go unskewered; in fact one of the chapter titles, “Cook remaining 100 lobsters,” is apparently one of the more precious lines from her debut book Entertaining. Real cooking, Tandoh informs us, is “making the same five dishes on rotation for 363 days of the year, and then getting wildly above your station for the remaining two.” And about entertaining? It is, she says, “an invented and avoidable problem. Nobody is making you do this.”

This is a very British book — it begins by examining how food content in British newspapers led to the foodies of today and ends with Tandoh’s visit to Wimpy, a U.K. fast-food chain. But it’s impossible to talk about food without America being a large part of the story — for example, how a handful of tech nerds at the University of Washington, in the early days of the internet, were casting about for websites that would be enormously profitable and landed on the idea of cookierecipe.com. Launched with just a couple dozen recipes in 1998, the venture expanded to other categories — there would be a pierecipe.com and a thanksgivingrecipe.com, for example, before all this gloriously combined into allrecipes, which is usually one of the first websites to turn up when you look for a recipe on the internet.

Tandoh talks to the Iowa woman who uploaded “Banana Cake VI” to the website in 1999 — distinguishing it from many other banana cake recipes is that you put it in the freezer for 45 minutes after taking it out of the oven — and explains how “Carrot Cake XII” — a disastrous cooking experience because of its use of canned carrots — made it onto the website. She also explains the origin of “crockpot squirrel” which is another one of those things that I didn’t know about, but very much needed to know.

After a spin through cookbooks, ice cream and tonic water, Tandoh grants us all absolution. She wonders whether she’s ever had an original craving for anything. “For anyone who has ever been anxious about food, getting pulled over the event horizon of your feelings, I have to tell you — it feels amazing when you realize that your appetites don’t just belong to you.”

There’s little in the way of deep thinking here and nary a recipe, but Tandoh is the dinner guest who will keep everyone entertained, and All Consuming is a delightful read, much better than its staid title suggests. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages)

Riki is a temp worker at a hospital, barely making enough money to feed herself and pay the rent. She is responsible enough and punctual, showing up promptly at 8 in the morning and working until 5:30, taking a break only to eat her lunch, often a hard boiled egg dipped in soy sauce. But Riki is bewildered by people who know what they want to do with their life, people with energy and ambition. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life; she just knows she wants to escape the constant worry about money, to be able to occasionally splurge on a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven.

Then comes an offer to bear a child for a married couple for what seems a life-changing amount of money. It would require a complete upheaval of her life, the subjection of her desires to others, and going against the mores of her family and culture.

This is the ethical quandary at the heart of Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and released in the U.S. this month. (It was published in Japan in 2022 with the title The Swallows Always Come Back.) The novel explores the issues surrounding surrogacy, which, while legal, is more controversial in Japan than in the U.S.; here, the auxiliary issues of class and privilege might resonate with readers more.

Riki, who is 29, didn’t set out to become a surrogate; a younger coworker, who supplemented her own insufficient income with sex work, suggested they both look into “donating” eggs to help couples struggling with infertility to conceive. While that’s not allowed in Japan, they would travel to Thailand for the procedure and be paid 500,000 yen, about $3,500 in U.S. dollars. But during Riki’s interview, she is asked to consider going further and being a surrogate, since she looked remarkably similar to the wife of a couple who needed one.

That couple, Motoi and Yuko, then become the focus of the narrative, and we learn how they got to this point. It is Motoi’s second marriage, the first having broken up because of his adulterous relationship with Yuko. They have tried unsuccessfully to have a child through IVF, and Yuko is resigned to its not happening, but Moito, growing older and wanting to see his DNA passed on, is increasingly adamant, even if they have to hire a surrogate. His mother offers to pay for the IVF and surrogacy — a surrogate would receive about $20,000 plus living expenses throughout the pregnancy, medical costs and gifts.

Motoi and Yuko proceed down this path even as a rift is developing between them. Motoi is a professional ballet dancer and teacher, the son of a mother and father who were also famous in Japan’s ballet world. Yuko is an outsider to their world — she had simply been a fan when she met Motoi. His motives for wanting a child have nothing to do with love for his wife or a desire for them to raise a family, but derive from his ego — his own star fading, he wants a child he can shape into a new star within the “ballet elite.” This, he believes, “would only confirm his own excellence. His obsession with having that proof only grew stronger with age.”

Meanwhile, Yuko, an illustrator, is increasingly cognizant of a sort of haughtiness that Motoi and his mother have toward her own family, especially a brother who is what is known in Japan as hikikomori — a young adult who rarely leaves the home and relies on his parents for support. When her brother came to their wedding, Yuko was delighted, knowing how difficult it was for him to leave the house. Her new husband, however, was contemptuous of her brother, and she later reflects that this moment was the start of the tension in the marriage.

In setting up these characters, Kirino presents a challenge for her readers: Where is a hero to be found in this cast? Who are we supposed to pull for? Despite our sympathies for Riki’s circumstances, there is a moroseness about her, and she makes decisions throughout the story that are reckless and dumb. And Yuko, despite not wanting to raise a child she has no biological connection with, and having doubts about the marriage itself, numbly goes along with the scheme.

The changing perspectives throughout the novel cause the readers to constantly reevaluate our allegiance. When Yuko and Riki first meet, there is the initial sense that they might experience a Thelma-and-Louise sort of bonding. There are some jarring events that occur as we travel from conception to birth; to call them plot twists doesn’t exactly seem right, but the dilemmas facing each character get more complicated. And Riki ultimately makes a decision that I never saw coming.

The setting adds depth for American readers, and the story doesn’t seem to have lost any power in its translation, though it moves a bit sluggishly in places. With advancements in IVF constantly making the news (the latest being the birth of a baby conceived via IVF more than 30 years ago), the field of assisted reproduction technology is ripe for exploration. While fiction, Swallows offers a compelling story that helps us process a mind-boggling world that’s getting newer and braver with each passing year.

B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

(Gallery, 364 pages)

The origin story of Gwyneth Paltrow is well known: The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner, she had a gilded, bicoastal upbringing, and she was kissed by the gods who run the Department of Looks. When your godfather is Stephen Spielberg and you look like Patrow, you don’t seek fame and fortune so much as you tolerate it. And Paltrow has tolerated it exceptionally well.

Just 26 years old when she won the Academy Award for best actress for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow has now been in more than 40 films, but fame stalks her in unexpected ways: witness her controversial wellness company, Goop, and the skiing collision turned courtroom drama turned musical. Most recently, she turned up in a commercial for the company at the center of the Coldplay kiss cam controversy. There’s an awful lot of Gwyneth Paltrow in the public domain.

But we don’t know as much about Paltrow as we might think, the author of the biography Gwyneth writes. According to Amy Odell, “As the main narrator of her own public story, Gwyneth has masterfully shaped our perception of her,” and like any experienced actor, “She knows all her best angles.”

Odell says she wanted to show Paltrow “from all angles, not just her best ones.” To do so, she interviewed more than 200 people, though not Paltrow herself. Not only did Paltrow turn down an interview, but she reportedly discouraged others from speaking to Odell, who also wrote a 2022 biography of Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

With Wintour, Odell had two additional decades of material to work with; Paltrow, for all her accomplishments, is just 52. Presumably there’s plenty more of her story to come, whether we want it or not. As such, Gwyneth is an opportunistic book, rather than a serious attempt to catalog a life for posterity, like, say, Walter Isaacson does. Did we need a Gwyneth Paltrow biography? Certainly not. Will it sell and make headlines? Of course. It is well researched and appropriately saucy, with just enough spicy detail and quotes to wag the dog that is Hollywood.

Odell spends a good bit of time talking about Paltrow’s famous parents, both of whom had at least a vague New England connection. Bruce Paltrow’s “biggest hit” was St. Elsewhere, the TV series “about doctors teaching interns at a run-down Boston hospital.” And Danner was a perennial darling of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the highbrow summer stock in the Massachusetts Berkshires, which Gwyneth grew up attending with her mother.

“Starting at toddlerhood, Williamstown exposed Gwyneth to some of the best plays ever written, while acclimating her to the realm of Hollywood and celebrity,” Odell writes. The child also was a “sponge,” absorbing her mother’s lines while watching her perform. Once, the stage crew put little Gwyneth up on the stage to watch as she recited lines from the Anton Chekhov play “The Sea-Gull.”

It’s a long way from Williamstown to Gwyneth Goes Skiing, and there are a lot of details on the way that seem, well, overkill. For instance, she wore “penny loafers, a blue-and-white striped Breton shirt, and a white skirt” on her first day of school in seventh grade — that is information taking up space in my brain that could be better used. Then again, some of the detail explains a lot: You can draw a straight line from Bruce Paltrow’s cashmere socks and his insistence on always flying first class with his children to a grown-up Gwyneth hawking $165 T-shirts on Goop.com and saying, “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” She may be royalty, but the people’s princess she is not.

In fact, Paltrow had flown so high above the average American for so long that her friend Robert Downey Jr. had to talk her into Iron Man by saying, “Don’t you want to be in a movie that people see?” She had to take less than her usual rates to do it, but it turned out to be her most financially rewarding film and it lifted her to be among the highest-paid actresses in the world — the dream of so many women in Hollywood.

But Paltrow had bigger plans — writing cookbooks and building an empire called Goop (G and P being her initials, and the two Os born of advice that successful internet companies had two Os in their names (most famously Google and Yahoo, which seems coincidence, but OK). Interrupting the Goop saga is a series of color photos of Paltrow with her various boyfriends and other famous people who circle her life like moons, assorted magazine covers and photos of Paltrow in very short skirts. She is very thin in every stage of her life, not surprising, since one high school yearbook put her biggest fear as obesity. She is also very healthy-looking, all the better to sell the various products that Goop offers, including the infamous jade egg, meant to improve a woman’s sex life.

When she first encountered the eggs, said to be a practice of women in ancient China, Paltrow laughed, Odell wrote. But she later went on to sell them on Goop for more than $50 each, attracting the ire of a San Francisco gynecologist, Dr. Jen Gunter, who began calling Goop out for promoting what she said was a potentially dangerous product. It was not Goop’s only controversy — Paltrow’s prescriptions have at times included an eight-day goat-milk cleanse. But Goop marches on as a leader in “Big Wellness,” although Odell questions its profitability and sustainability, especially if Paltrow ever withdraws.

From her upbringing to her education to her romantic partners (Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck were among them before she married — and consciously uncoupled from — Coldplay’s Chris Martin, with whom she has two children), everything that Paltrow has undertaken seems sun-kissed, so it’s hard to see anything ending for her in ignominy, even though she is constantly and mercilessly mocked. And Odell, in the end, doesn’t seem like she’s much of a fan.

But maybe Paltrow’s gift isn’t so much genetics or the ability to act or withstand strange health protocols; maybe it’s her ability to sniff out a potential bomb.

One of the gems that Odell offers her readers is that Paltrow considered for a while cutting an album, before losing interest and moving on to other things. Yes, we came that close to seeing Paltrow not only constantly in the news and on our social media feeds, but also on Spotify. B

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)