BY MATTHEW HERBERT

A Review of Come With Me, by Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman’s new novel, Come With Me, is set in contemporary Silicon Valley. It engagingly portrays the ways high tech wizardry increasingly shapes our lives.

Reflect for a moment on our habits and routines. We are always switched on, working or at least available for work. Our attention is chronically divided by personal devices. Our choices of products or dating partners are framed for us by artificial intelligence. Our language is determined by the tropes of text messaging and Twitter. Our personal histories are uploaded into the cloud, along with everything else, available for streaming in broadband. In fact, we are not full members of a community these days unless our life is thoroughly mediated by technology.

And yet we go on being human underneath it all. Although we are possibly crippled by our brave new way of living, we may be unable to choose any other way at this point. The digitization of human life may turn out to be a bell that cannot be unrung.

Indeed this balance between the contingency and irrevocability of human life is the main theme of Come With Me. It is a story of how we drift or wander into lightly-made choices and then live out dramas whose storylines are determined by the cumulative, swirling consequences of those choices. Life starts out as an unreflective lark and then, to steal a line from Orhan Pamuk, we awake to find we have been living other people’s dreams. How did we get here?

Come With Me tells a story of how one family got there. The heroine, Amy, is a 40-ish public relations specialist recently employed by Donny, the boy-genius son of a friend. Like everyone else in Silicon Valley, Donny is working on a way to enhance then monetize some aspect of the human experience. His idea is a kind of virtual time machine that will let people go back and explore virtual versions of their lives, constructed out of the digital traces they constantly leave in the cloud.

Amy’s husband, Dan, is a former print journalist, now an out-of-work schlub on the verge of a midlife crisis. Their 16-year old son Jack is a California dude, easy going but Stanford-bound and therefore probably on the cusp of achieving some kind of tech genius himself. It’s the way of things in the Valley.

Jack’s eight-year-old brothers, Thing One and Thing Two, are not-so-identical twins. Yin and yang, they are object lessons in the heartbreaking, multitudinous ways childhoods can go wrong when smart, ambitious parents let digital technology do the babysitting so they can stay immersed in the adult world, writing code, having affairs, and that sort of thing.

In fact everyone in Come With Me is a Type, a persona that might well have been synthesized from trenchant magazine articles about the digital world’s transformation of real life. One of the characters, Jack’s best friend Kevin, literally is such a concoction, a profile cribbed from a 2015 Atlantic Monthly cover article about teen suicides in Silicon Valley.

Schulman’s weakness in selling her characters, though, is balanced by the excellence of her storytelling and the timeliness of her themes.

The plot of Come With Me hinges on three pivotal days in the life of Amy’s family. On the first day, Amy is introduced to Donny’s business idea, a digital interface with the cloud that lets the user explore alternate multiverses–ways her life might have turned out differently than it did with even the slightest adjustments to her choices and circumstances.

Amy is shaken to discover that she has deep misgivings about the way life really has turned out, misgivings she didn’t know were there. In a lightning flash of existential uncertainty, she comes to hate Donny for dangling before her all the what-ifs of past boyfriends and an abortion that need not have happened; visions of core happiness guarded by random strangers, ruined by intimates and the drubbing of endless domestic responsibilities. Life, she realizes, would be better left as an undisturbed, irrevocable fact. Or maybe not. She can’t tell.

The reason she can’t tell is because she doesn’t know exactly what is happening with her husband, Dan. But what is happening comes into full view on day two of the story. Dan, who has, for two decades, been a kind of colorless but faithful backstop against passion and drama–the ideal father, in some ways–reveals himself to be a defeated man in need of new sources of meaning. As usual for men of a certain age, “new sources of meaning” actually mean a new piece of ass.

The owner of the ass in question is Maryam, who used to be a man. Interesting twist, that: anything is possible in our virtual-real world. A journalist, Maryam believes in causes. She persuades Dan to come with her to Japan to cover the neglected aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Dan spends money he and Amy don’t have to travel there, sleeps with Maryam, and botches his cover story so badly that Amy can see from 2,000 miles away what Dan is doing, the scale of the disaster he has wrought. This happens on the same day Thing One is expelled from school for (successfully) gambling on Magic the Gathering and Jack’s best friend Kevin kills himself. Amy deals, but then reaches the end of her tether.

“She screamed [into Dan’s voice mail]: ‘I know you’re there! You’re texting me, you stupid asshole! Coward!!! Pick up the fucking phone!'”

Day three is the day of Kevin’s funeral. Dan returns from Japan. All the virtual strands of the plot come home to Silicon Valley to root themselves in the real lives of the characters. The reader is made to behold some durable truths about humans, which survive even the most thorough digitization of our lives. I won’t spoil these, except to say that Schulman seems to believe the way we live now complicates Tolstoy’s observation that happy families are all happy in the same way, unhappy families unhappy in myriad different ways. Many families may actually split the difference these days, given our new tools for achieving self awareness.

Come With Me is a novel about our Zeitgeist, similar in scope and ambition to Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 The Corrections, and it is almost as good. It is very much a novel of right now. It tries to make us see how our lives are caught inside the tumbler of contemporary history, and there is simply no way of predicting the shape they will have when they come out.

And we impose this uncertainty on ourselves. We choose it, up to a point, just by allowing our lives to be mediated 24/7 by digital technology. In placing a bet that technology will continue to improve human life–something it has done for the last 5,000-odd years–the only return we can be assured of is the increasingly radical uncertainty of the next moment in history. We have no idea whether Moore’s Law will accelerate the profits of improved knowledge or the disorientation of enhanced fantasy and plain old error.

Early in Come With Me Schulman observes that Philip Roth, like the generation of he-man novelists he belonged to, tried to write in a way that would cheat death. She got Roth completely wrong. “The meaning of life is that it ends,” he wrote, and believed.

But the story and the themes of Come With Me get Roth exactly right where it counts–on the elusiveness of knowing what humans are up to. Try as you might to understand those who shape your life; try as you might to understand even yourself, and you will hit a bottom layer of guesses–incomplete, misdirected attempts at answers. This is how Roth put it in The Human Stain:

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

The part of Come With Me that should give us pause is this: Donny created the what-if machine because he wanted to help people comprehend their lives as they actually happened. He thought if he could let them view all their past roads untraveled he might heighten their interest in, maybe even deepen their understanding of, their present predicament. But all those roads untaken also opened up onto unknowable terrain and unpredictable consequences. There was nothing firm about them. All Donny really did was to multiply the ways in which “there is no bottom to what is not known,” as Roth put it.

The way we live now means we will not just carry on making ordinary mistakes about ourselves, but we will actually use technology to create new ways of being wrong. So that should be fun.