Summary
The novel opens with Bix Bouton, CEO of tech company Mandala, sitting in his living room as he reflects on his past with his wife, Lizzie, remembering the aimless philosophical conversations they used to have in college. Feeling restless, he goes for a walk and discovers a flyer for a discussion of the work of anthropologist, and prominent Mandala critic, Miranda Kline. In disguise, Bix joins the discussion group, run by art critic Ted Hollander at Columbia University. He finds himself unable to come up with his next major innovation, continually drawing a blank when he tries to envision something new, and hopes to find inspiration from these conversations. One day after one of these meetings, Bix runs into Rebecca, a member of the group, on the subway and she realizes who he is. She informs the group and they are initially shocked, but still allow him to stay. After someone mentions the work of animal psychologists digitizing the consciousness of animals, Bix begins to formulate a new idea. He walks home, feeling excited about his discovery, and calls his mother-in-law, who encourages him to keep working.
The next chapter follows Alfred Hollander, Ted's youngest son, recounting his early life before detailing an eventful trip home. From a young age, he shows a preoccupation with the idea of authenticity. He feels that, like characters on television, the people in his life merely go through the motions of their domestic roles. This leads him to make off-color remarks and engage in strange behavior, like wearing a paper bag over his head at dinner, in an effort to force genuine reactions from others. In high school, he becomes close friends with Jack Stevens, a charming young man who Alfred believes makes other people act naturally with his demeanor. Alfred attends college at SUNY New Paltz and is initially happy, making some worthwhile friends. However, when he graduates, he is disturbed to find that his friends all immediately leap into predetermined roles, taking corporate jobs and entering into long-term relationships. He eventually distances himself from these people. Shortly thereafter, he puts a great deal of effort into a documentary about the migratory patterns of North American Geese. He arranges a small screening and everyone finds it to be unwatchably dull. It is revealed that the narrator of this chapter is Rebecca Amari, from the previous section. She approaches Alfred and says that she would like to work with him, as she is also interested in researching authenticity. He is initially hesitant, but later contacts her.
Alfred experiences an unusual moment of genuine emotion with his brother Miles. They discover their mother has been sleeping with Jack and Miles calls him, enraged and tearful. Alfred holds onto this memory as one of the only times Miles let his guard down. Later, he begins to seek other means of extracting "authentic" reactions from people. After hearing a woman scream on the street, he starts to do the same in public, eliciting startled, unfiltered responses from the people around him. In one of these instances, a woman named Kristen notices him doing this at a Duane Reade in Union Square. They talk after she asks him what he was trying to do, and they end up having dinner together. They begin dating.
A few months later, Kristen travels with Alfred to visit his family in Michigan. He screams on the airport shuttle, much to Kristen's embarrassment, and is calmly, but firmly, told to stop by the bus driver. Kristen and Alfred arrive at Miles's home and meet him, his wife Trudy, his mother Susan, and his brother Ames, as well as his children. Alfred, feeling uncomfortable, instigates an argument between Miles and their mother by bringing up Jack. This erupts into a scene and Trudy comments that she and Miles had been taking bets on how long it would take Alfred to say something contentious. Alfred announces that he is leaving and wants to go see Jack. In the car, he and Kristen do some internet sleuthing and discover Jack's address. They go to his house and discover that he has fallen on difficult times, as Kristen quickly notes. He is divorced, recently unemployed, and drinks heavily. The three of them sit on his front porch and drink beer, as Alfred describes his documentary about geese, mocking it to make Jack laugh. Rebecca then reveals that she is Kristen.
The third chapter alternates between the perspectives of Miles, Alfred's brother, and Drew, his cousin Sasha's husband and college friend of Bix. It begins with Miles recounting his fall from grace. He was originally a well-paid lawyer with a happy family. In order to get through the day, he took a combination of sleeping pills, caffeine, and prescription drugs. When laws were enacted to crack down on the easy availability of medication, Miles turned to purchasing drugs illegally. He also began having an affair with his wife's friend Janna. As his addiction grew more severe, his life began to unravel. Eventually, his wife discovered his affair and confronted him. He responded by picking up Janna while he high, driving dangerously, and getting into a terrible accident, which led to the loss of her leg and the need for a metal plate in his skull. In his current life, he works at a methadone clinic and lives alone. On a curious whim, he decides to visit his cousin Sasha in California.
Sasha's husband Drew picks Miles up from the airport. He is a doctor. He dislikes Miles for his inability to talk about meaningful things and his snobbish attitude toward Sasha. Drew is described as being haunted by the death of his friend Rob in college. Many years prior, they went swimming, while high, in the East River and Rob drowned. Drew blames himself and revisits the memory often. When Sasha and Drew visit Bix in New York, they watch Bix's memory of this moment on a viewing headset, and Drew keeps rewinding it, in the hope of identifying a moment where he could have made a difference. While Miles is visiting, Drew has a strong urge to go to his clinic, to avoid him. Back in Miles's perspective, he goes with Drew to look at Sasha's art, statues made of recycled material and trash, and does not like it.
Later that day they all have dinner together with Drew and Sasha's kids, Lincoln and Allison. After hearing them mentioned at the table, Sasha says that the next day Miles and Drew should go for a hot air balloon ride, much to Drew's irritation. Drew accompanies Miles, not intending to go on the balloon, and uses Sasha's name to secure him a last-minute spot on one of the balloons. Drew also has a sudden change of heart and decides to join him. Miles sees the sculptures from above and is deeply moved by them, feeling like they are a symbol of the wreckage of his life. Miles attempts suicide by leaping off the side of the balloon, but is saved at the last second by Drew. In the weeks after, he is placed in a psychiatric ward and begins to recuperate. Things between Miles and Drew are initially very tense and heated, but eventually they develop a close friendship. Miles decides to move to California and eventually runs a successful political campaign for local office. He ends by noting the strange arc of his life.
Analysis
One of the primary threads of this section of the novel is technology and innovation. Bix finds himself at a career crossroads, unable to come up with a new idea to push his company forward. He wants to be around the kind of loose conversation that he experiences with his friends at NYU, in order to come upon something that will allow him to fundamentally alter the work that Mandala does. What he eventually lands upon, in the final moments of the chapter, is the possibility of uploading consciousness to a digital storage space. This idea, the reader soon learns, becomes the basis for his company's Own Your Unconscious application.
Notably, this theme syncs almost immediately with one of the novel's other main themes: privacy. Bix disguises himself to join the discussion group, in part because the scholar they are discussing is a significant critic of his work and in part because he wants a conversational openness that he does not get at his own company, as everyone is constantly trying to please him. For all of the invasive data-mining that Mandala engages in, Bix still recognizes the personal benefit that privacy and identity concealment provide him with. This privacy issue is also the driving force behind Miranda's criticisms, as she is angry that her research was misused by social media companies to harmfully collect data on their users. The right to personal privacy becomes an increasingly prevalent theme throughout the book, and it is made clear that even before Own Your Unconscious is released, Mandala is encroaching on its users' right to close themselves off from surveillance.
Another major theme of this section is authenticity. In Alfred's chapter, he shows a constant fixation on people expressing themselves artificially. At a young age, Alfred observes that people adopt roles in life, in much the same way that actors inhabit characters in television shows and movies. He finds this superficial behavior deeply disturbing and chooses to act provocatively (wearing a paper bag over his head, asking rude questions, screaming) in order to force people to drop their everyday defenses and engage in a genuine manner. He finds it particularly upsetting in his family, where people seem to constantly bury difficult subject matter, especially his brother Miles, who seems incapable of not being polite and cheerful all the time. Alfred finds these disingenuous actions disturbing because he believes people do them to suppress their true feelings and responses to things. He cherishes a moment in which Miles called him in tears about an affair their mother had, because it represents a moment in which he was entirely authentic and unguarded with him.
A major theme of Miles's chapter is redemption. He initially marvels at the fact that his cousin Sasha has a happy marriage and career, given all the trouble she had as a teenager and young adult. In contrast, he describes how he had spent so much of his youth acting in a way that was socially approved: doing well in school, getting married, finding a well-paying job, and having kids. However, he then says things all fell apart when he became addicted to prescription drugs and began having an affair with his wife's friend, Janna. This culminates in a terrible car accident in which Janna loses part of her leg and he has to get a metal plate in his skull. He visits Sasha largely out of curiosity about how their lives could take such different turns, given their markedly contrasting choices. Miles attempts suicide in a hot-air balloon, but is saved by Sasha's husband, Drew. From that moment on, he attempts to turn his life around. He moves to California, starts doing legal work, and eventually becomes a successful politician. What Miles suggests, at the end of the chapter, is that he finally understands Sasha's unusual path to a happy life, as he too has found redemption in this next part of his story.
One of the most important ideas in the book is fixating on the past. Many of the characters identify a moment in the past that was a major turning point in their lives. For Miles, it was his car accident. For Drew, it was the drowning of his friend Rob. Characters focus on these moments, as they believe that by reliving them they can somehow understand them better with hindsight. However, as the novel reveals, this mostly leads to unhelpful obsession, as the reader sees when Drew keeps watching the moment Bix was with him and Rob on the night Rob died. Watching these memories again does not alter their outcome or their impact on the present.
