Stuff I Read: Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson

A Brooklyn couple in a bedbug-infested apartment finds their marriage suffering as their careers take inverse tracks. As they drift apart, he floats into a murder mystery while she finds herself in the center of a shady client’s extensive data-mining operation. Knowledge is the ultimate power in Adam Wilson’s 2020 novel, Sensation Machines.

Sensation Machines follows Michael and Wendy Mixner, an upper-middle-class

Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson

couple in Brooklyn who have been married almost a decade. Their relationship has ground to a halt following a miscarriage, and communication has basically stopped. For instance, Michael hasn’t yet told Wendy that he lost his job and all their money in a series of bad investments. As Michael retreats into himself and his failures, Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, lands a lucrative contract with the creator of a ubiquitous alternate reality game. The billionaire wants to up the ante on his game’s domination of the market by putting into play a complex data mining scheme, one that is so intense it advertises to you subtly, in your own voice, to the point where you think it’s your own thoughts. In order for it to work, though, one important thing needs to happen: a bill introducing Universal Basic Income must be shut down before it makes it to the floor at Congress. And when a high-profile, good-time friend of the Mixners dies, apparently as a result of a pro-UBI rally, Wendy’s assignment seems gift-wrapped. Michael, however, suspects foul play and goes off to investigate. And at the intersection of dirty cops, wrongful arrest, Big Tech invasiveness, and drug-fueled bacchanalia, Michael and Wendy must sort through the complex realities of their relationship.

Sensation Machines is ambitious in its scope. As a relationship drama/political satire/near-future sci-fi/murder mystery, it fills a unique space and stands alone among the stuff I’ve read. To say that I’ve never encountered a book quite like this is an understatement. The characters don’t seem completely like caricatures, and that’s rare in satire as those characters tend to be exaggerated archetypes. The narrative weaves together several eclectic plot threads into an inventive story that’s an easy read.

I just wish I liked it. I found the characters mostly grating, especially Michael. His central self-defining qualities are an encyclopedic knowledge of Eminem’s musical catalog and his pride in having the One Black Friend (yeah, he’s that guy). Wendy isn’t much better; her need for career recognition led her to make choices that made her a demonstrably worse person as the story wore on. And while the main characters aren’t caricatures, a bunch of the supporting cast certainly are. The gay best friend is a cocaine-addled sex fiend; the main antagonist is such a megalomaniac you expect him to do a tech bro version of a mustache-twirling villain laugh; and the crooked cop seems to have learned police work from The Shield (great series, watch it if you haven’t). There’s very little nuance here, and when one of your themes is the evil of performative wokeness, some finesse is helpful. Sensation Machines was released in July 2020, which means it could have been written at any point between 2017 and 2019. It has the feel of the early Trump presidency in that there’s a shift toward nakedly turning the things that make us angry and afraid into commodities, then selling them to us so frequently that it almost feels like it was our idea. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems a bit less like the near future and more like the world outside your window, and that’s pretty bleak.

Sensation Machines has a lot of great little things going for it, but it’s messy and doesn’t quite get it pulled together to make a coherent story or a point. Good effort, though.

Pros: Biting satire, excellent critique on social media and performative wokeness.

Cons: Cynical and bleak; doesn’t know what it wants to be; messy and haphazard.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.