Tell the Machine Goodnight

April 23, 2018
Williams’s debut, a savvy take on technology’s potential and its moral failings, imagines a near future in which lives are altered by a happiness machine. The year is 2026, and Pearl is a technician for Apricity, where she’s assigned to analyze and communicate the results of the company’s eponymous happiness machines, which read genetic markers and creates individualized formulas for happiness. Her own family’s “contentment plan” is not as easy to read: her marriage to Elliot is over, and her teenage son Rhett remains vulnerable, having suffered from an eating disorder for years. Other characters’ stories of warped happiness and misbegotten technology spiral out from the central, deeply intimate tale of Pearl’s flailing hopes for Rhett’s happiness—and his own tentative, private steps toward recovery. These include Elliot’s self-destructive performance art based on strangers’ Apricity readings, Pearl’s boss’s ill-advised attempts to use Apricity to gain professional status, and other heartbreaking stories about the intersection of technology, tragedy, and regret. Forays into the realms of celebrity commodification and the absurdities of fame notwithstanding, Williams never allows satire to overtake her story’s moral center or its profoundly generous and humanistic heart, resulting in a sharp and moving novel.

Starred review from May 1, 2018
In her first book for adults, Williams imagines a not-too-distant future in which people find happiness with the help of machines.It's 2035, and for the last nine years Pearl has worked as a technician for the Apricity Corporation, a San Francisco company that's devised a machine that, using skin cells collected from the inside of a subject's cheek, provides "contentment plans" for those seeking happiness. (The firm's name means the feeling of warmth on one's skin from the sun.) The machine's prescriptions veer sharply from the benign to the bewildering, telling one of Pearl's clients to "eat tangerines on a regular basis," "work at a desk that receive[s] more morning light," and "amputate the uppermost section of his right index finger." "The recommendations can seem strange at first...but we must keep in mind the Apricity machine uses a sophisticated metric, taking into account factors of which we're not consciously aware," Pearl reassures the client contemplating going under the knife, in a speech she has memorized from the company manual. "The proof is borne out in the numbers. The Apricity system boasts a nearly one hundred percent approval rating. Ninety-nine point nine seven percent." Never mind the .03 percent the company considers "aberrations." Pearl herself appears to be a generally happy person despite the current circumstances of her life. Her husband, Elliot, an artist, has left her for a younger, pink-haired woman, Val, who has her own secrets--yet Elliot persists in flirting with Pearl. Her teenage son, Rhett, has stopped eating, perversely finding contentment in dissatisfaction and self-denial. Pearl's own contentment plan, which includes painstakingly building elaborate creatures from 3-D modeling kits, keeps her on a steady keel even as she yearns to rescue her son from his unhappy state. Following the trajectory of today's preoccupation with self-help and our perhaps not-entirely-justified faith that technology can fix everything, Williams explores the way machines and screens can both disconnect us, launching us into loneliness, and connect us, bringing us closer to one another. In this imaginative, engaging, emotionally resonant story, she reveals how the devices we depend on can both deprive us of our humanity and deliver us back to it.With its clever, compelling vision of the future, deeply human characters, and delightfully unpredictable story, this novel is itself a recipe for contentment.

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May 1, 2018
What if a machine could tell us what could make us happy? This is the premise of YA writer Williams' (Absent, 2013) first novel for adults, an imaginative tale set in 2035. Pearl, a technician at the Apricity Corporation, takes DNA samples from her clients and runs them through a small machine that spits out results such as eat tangerines and take a trip alone. The machine's 99.97-percent success rate seems inarguable, and yet, as subsequent chapters explore the inner lives of Pearl and those in her orbit, it seems that even the most finely tuned machine can't predict joy. Pearl's teenage son battles anorexia and depression until a former classmate approaches him to help her find out who drugged her, then shamed her on social media. Pearl's ex-husband longs to be close to his new wife, but she's keeping a terrible secret from him. An actress famous for her on-screen deaths goes to extremes to satisfy the public. Daring, inventive, and moving, Williams' novel deftly illustrates that when it comes to happiness, there are no easy answers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2018

Pearl is a consultant for Apricity, a San Francisco tech company that specializes in contentment. "Apricity Is Happiness," and the Apricity Happiness Machine is guaranteed to boost employee productivity with individually tailored recommendations. When the company advises an employee to cut off the tip of a finger, the worker passively complies. Single mom Pearl enjoys her job, but her family life is a mess. Son Rhett is anorexic, and ex-husband Eliot is an artist with a much younger wife. Unhappy, isolated, and surrounded by technology 24/7, Rhett refuses to submit to the happiness machine. This leaves Pearl, dedicated to Apricity, helpless and dismayed; she wants to fix him with her machine, but he will not acquiesce. When an old school friend contacts him, he borrows an Apricity device to help her solve a mystery. Forced to leave his apartment, Rhett rediscovers the messiness of humanity, while Pearl becomes obsessed with her machine. VERDICT The dystopia here is a quiet one, as Williams's first adult novel is interested in how people cope in a hypermanaged society. Highly recommended for readers of Dexter Palmer's Version Control and near-future sf. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2018

Pearl works as a happiness technician to make people's lives cheerier but cannot help teenage son Rhett find the joy he seems willfully to resist. YA author Williams goes adult.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.