A self-described "Luddite," Helen Schulman last explored the insidious effects of modern technology in her 2011 novel, This Beautiful Life. Now, in Come with Me, she goes from exploration to speculation with a story inspired by the tech wunderkinds and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, whose billion-dollar attempts to "hack" biology and cheat death are modern answers to an ancient dilemma.
But Come with Me is really about the desire to cheat a different kind of death: the death of possibility.
Amy Reed's adolescent boss, Donny, has developed an algorithm that would allow people to explore their "multiverses"--alternative realities in which they made different choices and their lives played out in infinitely varied ways. Relying on a vaguely described combination of data aggregation, math and virtual reality, Donny wants to offer his customers "a personalized crystal ball" that lets them find out "what if." And he wants to beta-test it on Amy.
Amy is intrigued, but barely has the bandwidth for one universe, let alone an infinite number of them. She's keeping her family afloat on a part-time salary while her three sons struggle to thrive in the Stanford-dominated, capital-driven pressure cooker of Palo Alto. Meanwhile, her husband, Dan, an unemployed journalist, is trying to escape his reality in a more conventional way--by following a brilliant, incandescently sexy photographer named Maryam on an impulsive (and secret) reporting trip to Japan.
Overwhelmed and underappreciated, Amy gives in to the seductive pull of finding out what could have been, and what could have been prevented. She visits loves she left and loves she never met, different cities, unexplored career paths--and, achingly, a beloved brother who died young, as well as a daughter who didn't get a chance to live. But when Amy's real-life community is rocked by tragedy, she and Dan must decide whether to seek out new, separate realities or commit to the one they already share.
Told from many shifting perspectives, Come with Me is more illustrative of the dramatically different universes that can exist within just one reality--or one city, or one family--than it is of technology's increasingly expansive role in our lives. The effect of these shifting viewpoints ultimately feels a bit uneven, and Schulman takes for granted that her readers will be as invested in some characters as they are in others. But, while flawed, Come with Me is a sharply observed, entertaining and occasionally heartrending novel that may help readers appreciate their own, singular, similarly flawed realities. --Hannah Calkins, writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
Shelf Talker: Set in Silicon Valley--an alternative reality all its own--Come with Me beckons with the alluring but dangerous promise of finding out "what if."