Come With Me
Summary (from the publisher): From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert)—a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.
"What do you want to know?"
Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.
Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?
Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.
Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.
"What do you want to know?"
Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.
Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?
Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.
Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.
Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins.
Amy is a frustrated mother of three who works part-time for her college roommate's college-aged son in Palo Alto, California. Her boss Donny is exploring ways to allow people to access paths their lives might have taken had they made different choices through a type of virtual reality technology and is using Amy as his test subject. Meanwhile, Amy's husband Dan is an unemployed journalist and their marriage has taken significant hits due to his layoff and the stress of their three sons. Without telling his wife, Dan travels to Japan to explore his interest in a photographer and to see if he can find passion in a writing assignment again.
There was a lot going on in this novel including marital drama, professional angst, teenage drama and tragedy, the tech industry, journalism, sci-fi exploration of alternate life routes, learning differences, parenting challenges, global crises, and more. Based on the novel's description, I anticipated that Donny's exploration of 'multiverses' would figure more heavily into the novel, but really that was one thread of the novel, with the majority being a family drama focused on Amy, Dan, and their children's struggles. Donny's technology does help Amy explore what might have been if she hadn't married Dan but the few scenes feel so background to the main storyline as to make them feel like random non-sequiturs.
A lot of the characters in this novel aren't particularly likeable. In particular, I found Donny, Maryam, and Dan distasteful in different ways. For that matter, Amy herself wasn't particularly likeable. She seems resentful of her children and her job, spends most of her time running to escape her family, and is only really praised by other characters for being attractive. While the writing was well done, I did feel like the multiple threads of this novel didn't fully come together into a cohesive and meaningful conclusion but were left dangling just as they were haphazardly introduced. An interesting premise with relevant topics that fell short of my expectations.
Stars: 3
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