Book: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

When Ted Chiang was asked about his influences, he said he'd studied under Karen Joy Fowler, and if we hadn't read her 2013 novel "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" we should leave "Exhalation" there in the store and buy it instead.

Which was terrible advice, since tickets to his reading included a copy of his book.

But I made a note of it, and ordered the book when I got home.

It's clever writing, very ironic and punny, but maybe a few notches too showy for its own good. We'll see how the rest of the book develops.

It won a Faulkner and was a finalist for the Man Booker, so it can't be too bad.

Okay, the book settles down into a less-pretentious mode and reads along fine. About halfway through there's a twist, and that twist makes the story a lot more interesting.

The author did a lot of research. It shows.

In all, a very good book. Not great, but better-than-average.

NoCoPilot wrote:

#5 was about a robotic nanny, and how it raised neurotic kids. Chiang didn't mention the experiments conducted in the 1960s where baby chimps were raised by wireframe chimp dolls with embedded baby bottles, but the results were similar.

In what must be considered an eerie coincidence (or maybe not), Karen Joy Fowler DOES mention Harry Harlow and his disturbing experiments.