By Gee Henry
Tracy O’Neill’s second novel Quotients is what used to be called a “systems novel,” which is to say a book that attempts to show how the world is connected through invisible strings being pulled by powerful, malevolent, sometimes governmental hands. It’s basically a “we’re all fucked” novel, the kind made popular by writers like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. But at Quotients heart lies a genuine, complicated romance between a young couple named Alexandra and Jeremy, even if they do spend most of the novel lying to each other.
Some of their lies are tiny, almost sitcom-like in their innocence, like when Jeremy notices that Alexandra has been mouthing prayers around their apartment without acknowledging that that’s what she’s doing or even that she even believes in a god. Some are whoppers, like when Alexandra travels from their home in London to New York to meet up with her long-lost brother—who may be a pawn in an international spy game—but tells Jeremy she’s actually going to a class reunion. And some are truly devastating, like Jeremy’s construction of a whole new identity to hide his past as an intelligence operative.
Throughout, O’Neill’s masterful language dazzles and her ability to frame Alexandra’s and Jeremy’s relationship through her literary lens is amazing. The sun throws “ballsy colors through the sky.” Alexandra thinks out silent arguments with Jeremy using quotations by Shakespeare and Kant. They both, perhaps somewhat passive-aggressively, leave notes for one another in books around the house. “What does it feel like to make someone happy?” he leaves in a magazine. “Don’t play stupid,” she writes in response, the note left in a cookbook. “You know.”
Hypertext spoke with O’Neill post-coronavirus and post-George Floyd—at a time when a lot of us are truly witnessing some “we’re all fucked” moments in real time and at lightning speed. We wanted to find out how she feels about releasing an ambitious new novel about surveillance, paranoia, and terror at a time when we’re all more than a little freaked out already.
Gee Henry: One of your main characters, Jeremy, was basically a spy in a former life. I’m curious about what made you want to write about spying and the damage it leaves in its wake at this moment in time.
Tracy O’Neill: The spy as someone who watches and is aware of being watched encapsulated for me the individual in the Internet Age. We’re scanning information about others in feeds and online. We’re being scanned too. The question of what is “fake” and “real” feels omnipresent. So do questions of identity and alliance. I wanted to think about how these phenomena can pervert our relationships with ourselves and others, and how as a society we fail to recognize that our efforts to become safer are often what endanger us.
There’s also that we imagine the spy to be in danger even as he believes information can safeguard his society. This made the spy character seem suitable to my purposes in the novel. I wanted this character to be complicit in state-sanctioned violence, even as he is harmed by it.
I felt it was important to write against the narrative we’re fed that state-sanctioned violence—police, military, law enforcement agencies—keeps us safer. We’re told that new high-tech surveillance and data collection make us more secure. Yet the moment in which we have access to more information than ever before, so do state actors who have been given license to use violence and so do corporations of questionable ethics. They enjoy a great deal of privacy when we don’t, which skews the distribution of power. And this is occurring at the same moment that well-resourced legacy media is fracturing and losing authority, so that the press’s ability to check these forces is somewhat diminished.
GH: Can you talk a little bit about Alexandra’s work as an international marketer?
TO: I remember when Obama was elected, there was celebration of how the campaign had won the race for voter data and had then been able to win through data-driven messaging. It was treated as something like a victory of science and reason amongst democrats. At the time, though, I was anxious about data being mobilized for insidious political purposes. I was wondering if that narrative would change when someone else figured out you could take the same data and win a different rodeo.
When writing Quotients, I knew Alexandra needed to be someone who understood the power of optics, yet couldn’t always keep track of what was optical and what was real. She would be a cog in political machinery she didn’t quite understand. She would be a little swept up in the idea her work was adjacent to important things but also harmless, or even good.
I’d read a book called Branding the Nation by Melissa Aronczyk about nation branders, and I thought it was the perfect profession to point to how marketing has intersected with global politics. It was a career for Alexandra in which it would be easy for her to confuse creating worthy appearances for creat
ing a worthy world.
GH: How do you feel Quotients fits in with similarly big-picture novels by writers like David Foster Wallace and Philip K. Dick? Was the romance between Jeremy and Alexandra a way to humanize the “systems novel” in some way?
TO: I’m a huge Don DeLillo fan and fascinated by Thomas Pynchon’s work. What I think is exciting about the systems novel is that it offers rich political possibility. It attempts to move us beyond narratives of individualism to tell the narrative of a society. Part of that is illustrating how systems do affect us. You can show how power moves in ways that are outside direct expressions of violence, and how it nevertheless can affect something like whether a couple can stake out a good life together.
I knew from the beginning that Quotients would revolve around a couple. I wanted a reader to grapple with parallel frustrations: why can’t Jeremy and Alexandra relinquish the tactical maneuvering and just build trust in each other? And, why can’t we relinquish the tactical maneuvering of surveillance and just build a society worth trusting? So to me, this couple’s problems are both microcosm and symptom of the systems in which they move.
GH: This novel is so different than your first, The Hopeful, which was a much more intimate story—that of one teenage girl vying to be an Olympic skater. Was the much bigger scope and much bigger cast of characters of Quotients intentional?
TO: Absolutely, I wanted to try telling a story in a way I hadn’t. I wanted to get into other voices and minds. I wanted to try creating a larger novelistic ecosystem. My interest in writing fiction began with minimalist writers, but to write a novel about the omnipresence of surveillance and the vast networking of the internet that has enabled it required some spread.
GH: Quotients begins in the mid-2000’s, which doesn’t seem like long ago, but which, when you consider that that was before Twitter launched, seems like eons ago. Did you purposefully set the novel between 2005 and 2014 to say something about the technology that era brought?
TO: Yes, I obsess over how various technologies changed how we live during that period. Quotients follows the trajectory of power pooling around data and technology, of intimacy and selfhood changing. This is a decade where our desire to connect is weaponized against us incredibly fast. How we trust, how we love, how we speak shifts.
I graduated from high school in 2004, and at that time wealthy families would buy the DVD of every major Hollywood movie because there weren’t streaming services that predicted what you liked. The iPhone hadn’t been released yet, and I’d buy whatever magazine was available at the grocery counter. Facebook had launched, but I’d been told it was an online group for students from elite colleges.
At seventeen, I was not thinking signing up for some dumb online group could provide data used for state-sanctioned violence, like predictive policing and facial recognition technologies to identify protesters. It would not have occurred to me that Facebook would become a company causing racist harms like digital redlining. I didn’t foresee our own information becoming the raw material sold under surveillance capitalism. And I didn’t understand that in algorithms ossifying what is “relevant” to us, Big Tech would stake out a role in our identity-formation or accelerate societal polarization. I had no idea we’d experience such anxieties about what is real and what is fake, including our affiliations and the expression of our identities.
Big Tech has been largely left to legislate itself, as have entities of state violence like spying agencies and police which have shadowy relationships with Big Tech. This novel is trying to dig into the way unchecked power brings danger to our doors—and the emotional consequences for us. 2005-2014 is a time when the negotiation of openness and privacy becomes one of our primary challenges, reaching into nearly every corner of our lives.
GH: Did you want the reader to wonder how race affected the relationship between Jeremy and Alexandra? I don’t think you bring up them being a mixed-race couple explicitly but there were moments that made me remember they were: When Jeremy invites Alexandra to dinner at his parents’ house in Northern England and she uses the term “fairy tales” to describe her fantasies about meeting these quaint, older white folk.
TO: The most obvious way race factors is in a later scene in which a woman thinks Jeremy is kidnapping their son. As a white man, he’s shocked at his body being misread. It’s such a foreign experience, he can’t speak. He just starts running away with the child, which makes him look even more suspicious to the woman. Later, Alexandra is exasperated. We don’t get an elaboration of her exasperation in that moment, but a smart reader will remember that the first time that the narration moves into Alexandra’s point of view in the novel, I write, “Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn’t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.”
In that moment she’s watching herself being watched as a racial minority. If you ask just about any Asian-American woman, she’ll recognize the experience of having one’s ethnic origins interrogated. I think that desire to be able to categorize Asian-American women comes from a very deep and subconscious fear tied to the idea of Asian inscrutability and a desire to “master” the Asian-American woman by fixing her to a category. So Alexandra knows what it is for her body to prompt misreading, but Jeremy doesn’t.
GH: I’m also wondering what you felt when you were releasing the book just as bookstores were closing down for the pandemic. I had two writer friends releasing books at the same time as you, and the word for what I felt for them was *panicked.* Was that what it was like for you?
TO: Obviously, people have much bigger problems on their hands, but of course I wish Quotients had come out earlier and that the pandemic was not happening at all.
GH: I’m going to ask you a question right now that is peripheral to the book. You and I are both people of color and both writers. Everyone in the country is witnessing the nation’s anger over the George Floyd killing. Do you wonder, like I do, what role writers should be playing right now—especially writers of color?
TO: Of course. I never feel that the work is enough, that I’m doing enough. My dissertation was about the politics of popular aesthetics, and I fear that as writers, we often confuse what is most emotionally-pitched or emotionally familiar with what’s most politically powerful. We’re too quick to write individual acts of flagrant racism that fit a neat scene structure. We’re too quick to write racism as interpersonal struggle, when some of the most insidious racism is systemic, structural, and institutional. And to me, that’s not disconnected from how, for example, an abundance of representations of black death has resulted in so little investment in black life.
As writers, we’ve got to ask ourselves what we want our writing to do in the world. I’m wary of that answer—particularly in relationship to racial politics and anti-blackness—being merely the creation of empathy. Empathy is important, sure. But today, many people who believe they’re anti-racist only mean they have empathy for those who experience spectacular racist violence.
So—and maybe this intersects with your question about the systems novel—I think it’s important to show how systems and structures produce harm or care, not just dramatize obvious instances of violence. Investing in brown and black life requires thinking about zoning policy, housing, wealth instrumentation, education, healthcare, voting districting, surveillance—things normatively considered “too esoteric” or “too technical” to be assimilable with good narrative. Risk writing about these things anyway. If you’re a creative writer, figure out how to creatively represent them, especially if people are closed off to thinking about it. You cannot change society by giving it only what it already accepts.
Outside of writing, some industry-specific anti-racist work could include collective action in which writers demand that their publishing houses refuse to give racism a platform, hire more BIPOC editors, create paid internships and increase junior editor salaries, institute transparent and standardized advances, host events at BIPOC-owned bookstores, so on.
And then there are the actions that aren’t just for writers, like calling your reps, voting in local elections, protest, so forth.
Gee Henry is a writer who was born in Antigua and now lives in Manhattan. Find him on Twitter at @geehenry