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Sensation Machines Hardcover – July 7, 2020
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Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: he lost the couple’s life savings when a tanking economy caused a major market crash. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to solve a national crisis of mass unemployment and reshape America’s social and political landscapes. When Michael’s best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy’s client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple—and the country.
Set in an economic dystopia that’s just around the corner, Sensation Machines is both an endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, and a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, wearable tech, revolutionary desires, and a broken justice system. Adam Wilson implicates not only the powerbrokers gaming the system and getting rich at the intersection of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Capitol Hill, but all of us: each one of us playing our parts, however willingly or unwillingly, in the vast systems that define and control our lives.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSoho Press
- Publication dateJuly 7, 2020
- Dimensions5.74 x 1.23 x 8.54 inches
- ISBN-101641291656
- ISBN-13978-1641291651
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Reads a little bit like Tom Wolfe in a futurist dystopia. There are full-throated riffs on materialism and tech surveillance, on simulation video gaming, white privilege and the lyrics of Eminem. A spirit of exhilaration fires the book’s best moments. We may be going to hell, but at least it’s fun to rant about.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A witty, incisive commentary on the fallout from a generation betrayed by the promise of the American dream that, it turns out, masked a foundation of greed, broken social structures, and the topsy-turvy values of capitalism first.”
—The Daily Beast
“Brilliant . . . Peel [it] one away, and it’s a paranoid near-future thriller with a deep swirl of dark humor circling around it . . . Wilson is a stylist with few contemporaries.”
—Inside Hook
“Sensation Machines might be set in the near future, but the concerns that fuel its plot—systemic racism, economic anxiety, and corporatist entities looking to sink laws that could lead to real change—feel decidedly relevant in 2020 . . . The characters are grappling for a better life; they’re also trying hard to keep their souls intact. And in the not-so-distant future, pulling that last one off is even harder than it is today.”
—Tor.com
“Despite the book’s current relevance, Sensation Machines could have also been published a decade ago, alongside post-Great Recession, New York novels like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, which engage in similar humorous yet sad searches for the heart of a thoroughly mediated world . . . Yet Wilson’s various gadgets are secondary to more lasting concerns of love, grief, inequality, and uncertainty. Wilson wants to believe that human connection, though refracted by capitalism, branding, crises, and augmented reality visors, has not been degraded, that it is not a thing of the nostalgic past or the utopian future but a constant possibility, if we can just stop playing characters in someone else’s game long enough to create it."
—Full Stop
“For a book set in the near-future, Sensation Machines feels pretty damn current. Social upheaval, antisemitism and class wars swirl in the background of the high-intensity novel.”
—Hey Alma
"With remarkable grace and wit, Adam Wilson puts the stethoscope to our national heart and diagnoses our deepest ills."
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations
"Sensation Machines is pitch dark and pitch perfect—a whip-smart take on marriage, capitalism, grief, and loneliness in a farcical, not-so-distant future. Adam Wilson effortlessly toggles between wry humor and genuine existential dread; the result is lyrical and lewd, brilliant and bleak."
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
"Adam Wilson is a prose savant, and Sensation Machines is a not-so-small miracle. With its precise details about our current moment, profusion of voice and sound, Wilson's new novel brings to mind everyone from Saul Bellow to Paul Beatty, Grace Paley to Zadie Smith. But his ideas and his syntax and his humor are entirely his. This is a great book by one of our funniest smartest sharpest contemporary novelists."
—Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West and Boomer 1
"Sensation Machines is precision-engineered to entertain, enlighten, and unsettle. Adam Wilson is a master craftsman with a globe-sized heart."
—Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
"Sensation Machines is part techno-political thriller, part social satire, and part family drama, and it succeeds wonderfully on all fronts. The book is smart, funny, and fast-paced, with lots to say about the mess we're in, but the thing that has stayed with me is its heart. Adam Wilson exemplifies that old Pynchonian dictum: Keep cool, but care."
—Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
"Wilson’s observations are often sharp-witted, extracting humor from sources like video game addiction, cryptocurrency, and herd mentality . . . as Michael and Wendy’s marriage fractures, the author carefully braids their individual narratives to a satisfying, if inevitable, crescendo. This feels all too real."
—Publisher's Weekly
"A deft juxtaposition of contemporary American classes on par with Richard Price's Lush Life."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Wilson delights with his pop-culture savvy, crisp prose, and unapologetic observations of revolutionary aspirations."
—Booklist
"[A] biting comedy of a post-Trump America . . . A murder, next-gen tech, videogame addiction and every kind of illegal drug figure into Wilson's lulu of a plot, but the pleasure here is the sharpness of Wilson's prose, his observant satire and the richly evocative feelings of loss."
—Shelf Awareness
"A delayed bildungsroman for a whole generation . . . It draws upon Occupy Wall Street, criticisms of neoliberalism, the affronts represented by the presidency of Donald Trump, and New York cultural mainstays . . . As its earnest leads laud fairness but establish themselves as the greatest impediments to progress, Sensation Machines nods to the adage that, the more circumstances change, the more they stay the same."
—Foreword Reviews
"Adam Wilson’s new novel is the first entry in a genre we might soon call ‘American pre-topianism’ . . . There’s grappling with internalized misogyny, hedge funds collapsing, treatises on Eminem, and oodles of invasive technology, and at the center of it all are Michael, Wendy, and a murder that might upend the whole country’s order. If each generation has a defining emotional bearing, like Gen X’s stranglehold on apathy, and the Boomers’ late-stage lurch from idealism into me-me Zen selfishness, Wilson posits the Elder Millennials (the Oregon Trail Generation) are perhaps defined by a strange sort of grief—an unshakable hope in the hopeless. It’s the kind of book that’s hyper of-the-times in order to understand recent history, and Sensation Machines understands America so well it’s almost mean."
—Chris Lee, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ON MONDAY, THE THIRD OF December, roughly twenty-four hours before my oldest and closest friend would be murdered, I woke with sinus pain, an itchy scalp, and the accumulated clog of postnasal drip. At 2 a.m. I’d taken a Trazodone—a mild antidepressant prescribed as a sleep aid—and in the cocoon of the drug’s afterglow, as dawn shot itself through our casement windows and a bacon scent blew in from downstairs, I watched my wife sleep: pillowless, chin tilted to ceiling like a dental patient’s.
Wendy’s nostrils flared on each exhale and she issued grunts in a lower register than she used in waking life. Her speaking voice is affectedly high-pitched, the product of being five foot ten and embarrassed about it, but these grunts came from her gut, from the bile-scorched basement of her intestines. Most of the bedbug bites had scabbed off her forehead and cheeks, but some leaked pus and blood from where she’d scratched. Still, she was stunning, like an actress made up for a zombie flick, who, despite the artist’s best efforts with latex and greasepaint, remains implausibly lovely. No scabs could distract from the neat plane of her nose, or the buoyant, red curls spread across our new SureGuard anti-allergen sheets.
We’d discovered the bedbugs the previous week, and our apartment had since been emptied of clothing and other possibly contaminated items. In the absence of curtains, the sun now striped the wall where our dresser once sat, a Civil War–era showpiece bought above market value in a heated eBay auction. The image brought to mind the afternoon, three years before, when Wendy and I stood in the empty loft and surveyed the space, bright with promise, soon to be filled with everything we owned.
Most of that stuff was still here—Wendy’s Miró and Kandinsky prints, my books on hip-hop, Apple products and other electronics, cookware and baby gear, plus our collections: nineties cassingles, ceramic hands, antique hat mannequins, deadstock Air Jordans, inherited Judaica—but the room felt bare, more warehouse than home, though here we were, inhabiting, and here was the cat, leaping onto the air bed where she perched atop Wendy’s head. It looked like Wendy was wearing one of those sable hats that protect the bald domes of oligarchs from frosty Moscow winters. She threw the crying cat across the loft.
The cat landed on four feet and scurried toward the bathroom. A gaunt, acrobatic animal with silver fur and green eyes the color of a faded military rucksack, she was a stray I’d found picking at garbage outside our building a few weeks prior. The cat’s aggression toward Wendy spoke to an interspecies female territoriality, and my wife, defensive, had later accused the cat of being bedbug patient zero. Wendy still appeared to be asleep.
I leaned in and kissed her. Our accounts were overdrawn, creditors called me by the hour, my job was in limbo, and Wendy knew none of this, but at least we appeared to be bedbug free.
IT WAS EARLY WINTER, AND would reach eighty by noon, but at 6:30 a.m. bodega owners braced themselves in jackets and hats as they rolled up their chains to signal the commencement of commerce, diurnal music as yet undisturbed by the market crash that had put the dollar in freefall and Clayton & Sons, the bank where I worked, on the verge of insolvency. There would be no bailout this time, and in this panicked climate, a proposal for Universal Basic Income had passed through Congress and was headed to the Senate for final approval.
TV news flashed shuttered windows and boarded doorways, but here, in my corner of upmarket Brooklyn, things appeared status quo. The day’s first delivery drones descended from tree height to eye level before lowering landing gear and making soft contact outside the remaining brownstones and the high-rise condos that had mostly replaced them. Pigeons scattered, wary of the claws that carried shrink-wrapped Gap sweaters, flatbread sandwiches, and other objects impossible to print at home. Earlier drones were sci-fi chic—floating orbs and baby Death Stars—but people found them sinister. The solution was to design the objects after actual birds, and now it was Hitchcock twenty-four seven. I turned up Court Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
I SHOULD MENTION THAT I’M not from around here. I was raised off an exit ramp in East Coast exurbia, where every gas station sells Red Sox crapaphernalia and the strip malls aren’t yet full franchise; they’re still half occupied by local bars and burger joints, blue-lit, filled with Carhartted Brosephs and their female companions—Tara, Britney, Aurora, etc.—sassed in green eyeshadow, in beerlight shadow, in Bud Light soft-stupor, whittling away their middle twenties with wet eyes and dry skin, wet bars and dry heaves, and Japanese trucks that somehow still run after all those miles spewing dust and American fumes.
Of course, that’s a romantic half-truth because (1) I’m from the Berkshires, twenty minutes from the quaint town of Lenox, which is home to both Tanglewood and a community of retired Bostonians who antique on Saturdays, then head to Williamstown Sundays for a taste of the theatre. Their cottages are dotted with Rockwellian Americana (purchased from the nearby Rockwell museum), scented by potpourri and sawdust, cinders in fireplace, local kale simmering on stovetop, steeping itself in red wine reduction as grandma dusts off the viola, prepped to serenade grandkids with riffage from the Charles Ives songbook; and (2) my family was different, not your typical townies, what with gamer dad, immigrant mom, face-tattooed sister, and my Long Island cousins calling me toward femininity with their floriated perfumes and ethnic rainbow of American Girl dolls.
Not that we were special. In most ways, I resembled my classmates, who lived in Colonial-style homes that spiraled out from the abandoned factory. And though the local recession stayed in remission through the early aughts, the current crisis had brought unemployment back to where it was when GE pulled out in ’91 leaving ten thousand jobless, including my dad. Terms like highbrow and lowbrow had ceased to have meaning in a place where, no matter one’s tastes, you were stalled in what was outmodedly called the working class. Pittsfield was a microcosm for what I’d come to think of as the Great American Unibrow, an unruly line that connected East and West across the painted plains dotted with the same mediocre takes on what had once been regional cuisines. You could get a Southwest-style quesadilla from Seattle to the southern tip of Florida, and find no difference in the chipotle rub or soggy Jack cheese. So, I left for New York, forgoing Audubon trails for the feeling I get on the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn, the feeling I got as I walked and scratched and called across that dirty river for someone to save me.
WHEN I HIT MANHATTAN, I was soaked in sweat. Duane Reade was alive with the faint smell of carpet shampoo and the insectoid traffic of the day walkers, middle-aged men in Canal Street bling and velour tracksuits, which were mostly maroon for some reason. These guys were everywhere. They loitered on subway platforms and outside bodegas, even in rain, sipping cigars, tapping canes, and scaring tourists with their scars and shiny watches. But they weren’t criminals, just unemployed men, vaguely lame, with a healthy share of love and other problems, or so it could be gleaned from the baskets filled with lipstick, prophylactics, and reams of wrapping paper. Consumer spending had bottomed hard, but people still paid for cosmetics. Vanity, it turns out, is the last sturdy pillar of society.
By the time I reached the counter, my basket was filled with what I’d need to make it through the day. Ten ChapSticks, two bags of cough drops—one mint, one cherry—Tylenol, Advil, calamine, aloe, moisturizer, deodorant, Sudafed, NyQuil, DayQuil, Benadryl, Gas-X, condoms, D vitamins, a men’s multivitamin for prostate health, an issue of Men’s Health, the New York Times, AA batteries, eight packs of Emergen-C (two orange, two lemon/lime, four cranberry), one photo frame, Rogaine, reading glasses (+3), Band-Aids, bacitracin, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and two packs of cigarettes.
The checkout clerk was a college-age woman with bright white teeth and an assortment of neck and arm tattoos. Her face bore the cratered remains of teenage acne, a piercing sat bindi-like between her eyes, and a dyed pink stripe ran at a slant from her forehead’s peak to the tip of her bangs. I had chosen her line, despite its length, over the six self-checkout machines. A recent federal law mandated that retailers keep at least one human employee on premises. This was a meaningless gesture, the vestige of an immuno-compromised jobs bill. One employee per store would not put a dent in unemployment. Still, I’m a people person.
Andrea K. took me in like I was a specimen from some alien world, the last remains of an earlier evolutionary stage. I was wearing the one wrinkled suit I’d saved from quarantine, and with my three-day beard and bedbug scabs, I must have given the impression of someone in mourning, or someone in global transit, or a killer on the lam in an old film. Suffice to say, there were problems at home: with Wendy, with myself, with modern-day America that sliced our lives into curated blocks hubbed around an eighty-hour workweek—at least for those, like us, still gainfully employed. Whisk in trips to Pure Barre and therapy, plus allotted minutes for shopping, streaming, and sleep, and the sum was a doomed approximation of marriage, unprecedented by parents.
My own parents were governed by the social laws of an earlier era in which Adderall and a competitive job market hadn’t inflamed the work ethos, and the task of procreation had imbued all else with a whisper of profanity. Now procreation was its own profanity between Wendy and me. It was a word we ignored, or spoke only in bedtime darkness, in the loose mumblings of pre-dream.
I’d wanted a child from an early age, sophomore year, when I first met Wendy. I bought into the laugh-tracked fantasy of fatherhood, saw it as the end at which my future means would gain nonmonetary meaning. Or maybe I just wanted to please my parents.
Wendy wasn’t as eager, and wouldn’t be until our mid-thirties, when her feeds filled with friends holding newborns like mucus-slicked trophies. What followed was scheduled, utilitarian sex, which, like pizza, was finished in seconds and left stains on the couch. After, we would cuddle and binge-watch Project Runway, or read aloud from a book of baby names. These were happy, hopeful times, and when they culminated, soon after, in the desired result—nausea, swollen nipples, and a faint blue cross on a pregnancy test—we felt elated and deserving, like Olympic medalists whose discipline and training had paid off. A few days later the pregnancy was lost.
It was the first in a string of early miscarriages, until we found ourselves passing forty—frustrated, exhausted, losing hope. For years, doctors had suggested IVF, but Wendy was hesitant. The treatment was expensive and invasive and how shitty would it feel if even this potential remedy resulted in failure? I pushed and she yielded, and though she’ll never forgive me, the treatment did work. After seven years of trying, Wendy carried past the three-month mark.
Like many parents-to-be, we left Manhattan for Brooklyn, staking out a gentrifier’s guilty claim on a Boerum Hill penthouse. There, we prepared for our retro-nuclear unit, bought the necessary accessories, rubbed her belly and sang to it, my out-of-tune baritone penetrating her epidermal walls, piping Boyz II Men
covers into the almost-baby’s watery bedroom. We took birthing classes and researched strollers, bought tiny Air Jordans and spent evenings babyproofing the loft. When Amazon sent someone to assemble the crib, I watched like a hawkeyed foreman. We could not have been more prepared.
Our daughter wasn’t technically stillborn—the monitor showed a heartbeat when she emerged—and the term is a misnomer anyway. So much is moving, like the slithering liquid surrounding the body, or the doctors’ and nurses’ scurrying hands, creating a charade of motion, a defiant charade against the situation’s fixity. And I don’t know if Wendy knew something was wrong when the room fell silent in the absence of our daughter’s cry, but either way I saw her first, this beautiful human, crowning into air she couldn’t find a way to breathe.
Product details
- Publisher : Soho Press (July 7, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1641291656
- ISBN-13 : 978-1641291651
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.74 x 1.23 x 8.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,082,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,938 in City Life Fiction (Books)
- #3,866 in Jewish Literature & Fiction
- #6,967 in Political Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, a National Jewish Book Award finalist. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, among many other publications. In 2012 he received the Terry Southern Prize, which recognizes "wit, panache, and sprezzatura" in work published by The Paris Review. He teaches creative writing at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2021Enjoyable commentary on life and extremely well written. Highly recommended.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2020Timing is all when it comes to a publishing date, and this cautionary tale of speculative dystopia would have had a stronger impact had it been published a year earlier, pre-pandemic. However, since there are forces at work in the real world that render the dangers put forth here irrelevant, this can only be read as an entertainment, and it delivers on that very well.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020This book is a total stunner.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2020I think this novel has a fantastic premise and the writing is smart and entertaining. That said, it's hard to say if readers should approach it as a satire or crime drama. A lot of questions remain unanswered and I prefer clearer resolutions.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2021So often we are presented with futuristic dystopian novels that rely on boarding a narrative train whose tracks are worn down by the jet-set cars that have traveled on the tracks before them. They’re boringly similar. Then, we read books that divert from those tropes like Cormac McCarthy whose world presents a cannibalistic horror embodied by Alex Jones who unintentionally commented on his own potential cannibalistic future and didn’t realize there was a connection until he saw the movie on DVD, wished he had seen it at the movie theater, and opined on its nonfiction narrative of the future.
But then, at times, there comes a unique dystopian story unlike those that came before it. A story that portrays a nonfiction of our current horror by portraying life just as it is. In a way, presenting the Alex Jones presenting his narrative about cryptocurrencies and wishing for a cannibalistic future rather than constructing a new world to fear.
Adam Wilson’s Sensation Machines is just that. A dystopian present of complex characters examining the various ways we are shackled to the narrative train of our horrific present. Our fears of poverty, sexual repression, the reality of indulging in our urges, living with a lack of purpose, the potential lack of support when you learn you don’t know someone as well as you think you do, and so many more existential terrors build this beautifully written character-driven novel.
The book is a slant-portrait of our current age and hinges deeply on the social unrest we are currently experiencing on a daily basis. Our artificial intelligence, artificial currency, post-occupy wall street world sets the oculus stage for Wendy and Michael Mixner’s doomed marriage, and we are pulled into the terror and delusion of their lives reflecting a stark, ironic ennui of our era. Murder, drugs, sex, technology, and the fleeting value of what we spend our whole lives working for are presented in a striking mirror to the experiences of the past twenty years as if anything could be done to pull us up from drowning in modern existence.
This was an incredible book, and Wilson’s methodology in approaching his story makes it difficult to pigeonhole it into any single given genre. His prose is taut, his characters are as solid as you and I but with souls and neuroses as shivery as a Roz Chast gags, and with thematic implications that accuse all of us of insatiably charging forward into a future that is sure to work us to death if we don’t kill one another first. Everything is fleeting, of course, but Wilson’s novel has an uncanny ability to effortlessly set us on the cheese-grater of the hedonistic cycle alongside his tragic characters, and like them, we are completely unaware of it until it is much too late.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020I read S.M. at the request of a friend of the author, and am grateful for the tip.
Sensation Machines is a book for our time. One swipes the pages. No word has a deep meaning. Every affect connects to a social status-defining corporate product There is no promise of redemption. The plot is a sophisticated lesson in marketing suitable for business school.
If marketing is a science, then this is a science fiction, murder mystery novel. Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) invented modern marketing a century ago as propaganda in peacetime, to sell people not what they need, but what they want which is higher social status. Every brand is a status symbol.
Adam Wilson (bless him) makes clear the perfidious impact of narrative art in the service of corporate profit. His characters are financialists plying their pitiless trade in today's New York City of high net worth, low human value capitalism. The culture of status-driven posing and pretense seems only accelerated from the Manhattan of my college years in New York City 60 years ago, when alcohol was legal at 18 and the only drug white kids needed to score was on two legs.
I read defensively at first. I found the characters too shallow to pity or to loathe. Then I became frightened for the innocent victim of a police narrative contrived to convince the public that the police had solved a murder. I realized that the product placement establishes the banality of each character, depriving each of his or her mythology. In Manhattan, Darth Vader uses deodorant. The uber corporate creep’s private bathroom stocks only generic products. At the top of the heap, one no longer needs status symbols. Hitler liked to pose among his decorated generals wearing a business suit.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2020A New York story, a marriage story, a story of what could very well become our near-future. I found it both to be a page-turner, and a novel where I found myself re-reading passages and sentences, because so many of them were beautifully done. Wilson weaves together a handful of voices masterfully. I found myself frustrated each time a Michael or Wendy chapter would end and switch perspectives: I wanted more! But alas, I had to wait another chapter to re-visit Michael or Wendy on their dark adventures.