Well, I suspect this is an author that you are really into or where the stories fall flat for you, and I am definitely all in. He tackles big subjects in a big way, and there is often an undercurrent of climate change that he is basically screaming that we need to get serious about or we are seriously screwed (and suspects that the later is therefore true because the former is not happening).
The palette of this is the ocean and as always there is a big interconnected story that pulls the reading in a lot of directions and winds it all together.
The friendship between Todd Keane and Rafi Young is one such story. Todd is a computer nerd from before there is much in the way of computers and Rafi is intensely into literature and there area of overlap is a love of playing games. Todd is white and rich, Rafi is black and poor, and they do have a major abruption in their relationship that centers on betrayal and a woman.
When we meet Todd, he’s been diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies, which is rapidly eroding his mind. Across the scope of the novel Todd sets down what he calls the story of my friend and me and how we changed the future of mankind. The most unbelievable element of this speculative novel may be Todd’s thoughtful, plaintive voice, which has no parallel among real-life social media moguls.
Two other equally compelling stories grow through Todd’s deathbed memoir-- One begins in Canada in 1947, when a girl named Evie Beaulieu is pushed into a pool wearing a contraption that lets her breathe underwater, and she becomes a foremost expert on underwater life. Then there’s Ina Aroita, an artist who lives on the thinly populated island of Makatea, an atoll in French Polynesia. It all comes together in a thoughtful and thought provoking way, and I very much loved it.
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