(from the back of the book)
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O’Keefe returns to
New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York
University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his
daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of
loneliness. Walking through the city at
night, he feels as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy’s life begins taking strange turns: boxes
containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a
young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous
phone calls slandering her son. Why, he
wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting,
why would they alert him to the fact he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his
years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious
that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving toward a shattering reassessment of
what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy
is forced to ask himself whether he is “no one,” as he believes, or a traitor
not just to his country but to everyone around him.
Flanery does a good job of creating an unsettling
feeling. You feel uneasy as you watch
Jeremy start to examine his life. All
the people in his life start to have uncertain intentions. Everything from his past starts to take on
new significance. He even starts to
question his own sanity. And it makes
you think about how much privacy you have and if you have to act like you are
being watched all the time, even if you are “no one.” And it examines how something unexpected can
make you question everything, even things you were completely sure of
before. Unfortunately I didn’t like
Flanery’s style of writing. He would go
off on tangents that had nothing to do with the story. Jeremy received a package that was about the
same size as a cosmetics case his mother once had and he goes on for a
paragraph about this case that has nothing to do with anything. I can understand Jeremy, as the narrator,
getting distracted by memories, but it happened a lot and they went on too
long. Then he would analyze simple
things, like someone using his first name, or a look his daughter gave him, to
death. Again, some of it would be fine,
but it is so much and mostly unrelated.
And Flanery tends to use really long sentences. One page was a single sentence. And I find, with sentences that long, it is
easy to lose track of what is being said and to forget where it started. So I liked the idea of this book more than I
liked the way it was delivered. It did
hold my interest and keep me reading but since I wasn’t a fan of the way it was
written I don’t see myself reading any Patrick Flanery in the future.
