September 24, 2024
HUM, by Helen Phillips
In Helen Phillips’ HUM, as with her previous novel THE NEED, the most unsettling parts of the narrative are those that are most familiar, and I don’t even mean the post-apocalyptic backdrop that certainly draws on the possibilities of our present (the forests have burned, May’s children have never seen strawberries growing on a plant, unhealthy air quality is a baseline, the heat is unrelenting, and society is structured on a network of AI systems called “hums”), but instead the anxiety underlying every sentence, an echo of the title. This is not so much a plot or character-based novel as a vibes-based novel, and the vibes are bad. Desperate for money after losing her job, AI developer May agrees to undergo a slight facial modification procedure that she believes is part of a counter-surveillance movement in a society where everything is tracked, and with the payout she splurges for tickets for her family to three days at The Botanical Gardens, a Disney-esque simulation of the natural world she so longs for: “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place.” May leaves her phone behind when they leave home, and makes her husband and children do the same (the children, like all children, wear gadgets on their wrist called “bunnies”), and May dares to suppose her family might have a reprieve from the relentless tracking and advertising from the devices they’re all attached to, but she comes to regret her choice when things go wrong and there is a chance her children might be lost to her. None of this description really doing justice to what’s going on here, to the force that drives the story forward, to the accelerated beat-beat-beat of May’s anxious heart as she struggles to hold her family, her marriage, her whole world together. Any parent who has ever considered picking up Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION will see themselves in May, and while all this might not sound so appealing (who really wants a mirror-image of their most stressed-out self?), Phillips’ taut narrative reads up fast and is utterly gripping, and is rooted in that part of the maternal experience that’s even more essential than worry, and that is love.
