Katie Williams

Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either.-Amazon

a novel

Tell the machine goodnight

Ryan Mateyk

3.5 stars

This book was strange but quite beautifully, delicately written. I feel it read almost more like a collection of stories, following a variety of connected characters and common themes of technology, love, and happiness.

Lindy

What is Tell the Machine Goodnight not? Tell the Machine Goodnight is not funny. Or at least, I did not laugh. I had thought it might be, considering the inherent hilarity of positive psychology once you look at it from the outside. Tell the Machine Goodnight is not SF. Although set in San Francisco in 2035, the characters in this novel have the anxieties, desires, habits, and beliefs of present day Americans. (Actually, it would probably be most accurate to say that they are Americans from five years ago.) A middle-aged woman recalls reading fashion magazines as a teenager; teenagers use Facebook. The technology and the ways the characters interact with it, including the titular machine, are nothing that doesn't basically already exist. It's like if I wrote a book involving a fast food restaurant called Burger Hut that did delivery via drones. 

 What is  Tell the Machine Goodnight? To answer this question, here are some more questions I would put in the study guide for it; these are themes the book "explores":  Are negative emotions necessary to living functional lives? What are the roles of scapegoats in society? What is emotional catharsis and why is it necessary? What is the relationship between happiness and production of art? Do we empathize with machines/do they empathize with us? (view spoiler)[Disappointingly, Williams doesn't go deep enough to get to questions like  What do we fear, emotionally speaking, and why do we fear it? (hide spoiler)] The author is not subtle about her opinions on these matters. The prose goes down smoothly. The characters are MFA-approved literary fiction archetypes, cleanly drawn. You've got the Divorced Couple, the Hot Young New Wife who is also (view spoiler)[a Psycho If You Choose To Read It That Way (hide spoiler)], the Troubled Teen, someone works in art galleries/is an artist, there's a Commentary on Celebrity. In fact, the greatest irony, and the reason I cannot rate this higher than three stars, is that I did not feel the need to question or to challenge my beliefs in any way whatsoever; I did not feel an intellectual struggle, nor was I deeply emotionally moved by the characters' arcs. The book kept me sane on a long bus commute. It's competent, but not much more. I dunno, it's probably not fair that I just came off of reading Kafka's "Hunger Artist" and now I kind of want to reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, "The Minority Report", and probably also "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".

Tell the machine goodnight a novel

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