Across several novels and short stories, writer Helen Phillips has explored the alienating effects of surveillance capitalism. Her glorious debut novel, “The Beautiful Bureaucrat,” centered on a character whose work involved keying strings of letters and numbers into a database: the apotheosis (or nadir) of depersonalization. The protagonist of that work answered to a boss known simply as The Person with Bad Breath (he has “no face”; or rather, his face has a way of “chameleoning into” the gray walls of the office). Phillips has called her second novel, “The Need,” an “existential thriller with lots of breast milk”; it features a mother who confronts a doppelganger who takes up residence in both her psyche and her home — and splits parenting duties.
Her newest book, “Hum,” is her most science fiction-forward: we’re plunged into a world where people “vee” from place to place instead of taking a Lyft; retreat to egg-shaped pods known as “wooms” for privacy; and interact with machines known as “hums” that fulfill their orders at pharmacies, perform dental surgeries, and act as therapists, customer services agents, and salespeople. Children also wear smart devices known as “bunnies” on their wrists. The protagonist, May Webb, was one of the people recruited to “help refine and deepen the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence.” When the book opens, she has been made redundant by the tech she once helped refine; with no employment prospects in sight, she agrees to serve as a test subject for a start-up working on “adversarial tech.” The former colleague who hooks her up explains that the company is studying ways to outfox security cameras so they “can’t recognize you.” Or as a doctor puts it to May before she goes under the knife: “Your face will become unlearnable. You’ll be incognito.” Considered in the abstract, the idea of having an unrecognizable face does not strike May as entirely bad: “Hadn’t she herself — spotting a cam on a lamppost or in a tree, reminded that the air around her was abuzz with data — sometimes had the urge to hide her face or peel it off, to do the same to the faces of her children?” It’s only when she’s regurgitated back into her home that May experiences test subject’s remorse. Her young children, Sy and Lu, find her face “weird” and “creepy” and she silently considers that she has made “an obscene mistake.”
If the face, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has argued, “is meaning all by itself,” then altering one’s face scrambles all meaning. Hours after the surgery, May thinks that “she had disfigured herself. The exterior no longer matched the interior.” The third-person narration nicely evokes this sense of disjunction; the becalmed prose is often deliberately at odds with the mental chaos that May experiences. Yet at times, Phillips’s language slides in ways that feel less than intentional, as when she uses “manifesting” — a term frequently associated with the hums — to describe the changing expressions on May’s children’s faces.
With the windfall from her surgery — worth 10 months’ salary at her former job — May impulsively decides to splurge on a three-night trip with her family at the Botanical Garden, a paradisiacal enclosure full of flora and fauna rarely encountered in the humdrum world. Her husband, Jem, who works a series of Task Rabbity odd jobs, is hesitant at first — he believes the money should have been set aside for necessities — but grudgingly relents. In an attempt to have a distraction-free vacation, May decides to leave her phone at home and also, somewhat impulsively, relieves her children of their bunnies. “What she wanted was her children in a forest at dusk, their bodies invisible and then visible and then invisible again as they moved untracked among the trees, their wrists unencumbered.”
The Garden more than lives up to May’s sylvan expectations: they are greeted by “an extravagance of flower and ferns,” the water is pristine, the air unfouled, there are strawberries galore, and their freshly prepared food bears “no faint chemical aftertaste.” Yet their idyll is disturbed when Sy and Lu wander off on a jaunt to Jewel Falls, the saccharine name of a waterfall that sounds like something out of “Animal Crossing.” One moment, May and Jem are dowsing on a sun-warmed rock, within earshot of their children frolicking near the foaming falls; the next, the children are nowhere to be found. A hum, which May encounters in an obligingly ominous hallway, offers to track down her kids: it only asks for “permission to send an emergency search inquiry out to the network.” Should May trust — if trust is the right word — this hum? Or any hum? The machines, we learn early on, are “designed to obey human requests” — a description that all but vibrates with the potential for its own unraveling. And unravel it does, but not on the grand scale that readers might initially be led to expect.
It’s to Phillips’s credit that “Hum” is not simply a poison pen letter to Big Tech or a David v. Goliath allegory about woman facing off (pun very much intended) against machine. Phillips, who has received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and the Iowa Review Award in nonfiction, is abundantly aware of the perils of face-reading technologies like Clearview AI and the threat they pose to democracy and people’s right to privacy; somewhat unusually, the novel comes with endnotes and a bibliography of nonfiction works about AI, climate change, and facial recognition. Yet with “Hum,” she works on a smaller canvas: the book begins and ends with May in a doctor’s office.
Another reason that the stakes don’t feel quite as large as they could be is that the concept of being unrecognizable quickly loses its purchase: the hums, after all, can still identify May by her palm print and, as one machine in the Garden tells May, “you are the only one here with an unidentifiable face, which makes you stand out.” So much for flying incognito. Here’s the final turn of the superfluity screw: even in her vaunted facelessness, May has become supremely legible.
HUM
By Helen Phillips
S&S / Marysue Rucci Books, 272 pages, $27.99
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, frieze, The New Republic, Vogue, and more.