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Summary
Summary
A dazzling new novel from the author of the "weird, thrilling, and inimitable" Woke Up Lonely ( Marie Claire )
Meet Phil Snyder: new father, nursing assistant at a cutting-edge biotech facility on Staten Island, and all-around decent guy. Trouble is, his life is falling apart. His wife has betrayed him, his job involves experimental surgeries with strange side effects, and his father is hiding early-onset dementia. Phil also has a special talent he doesn't want to publicize--he's a mind reader and moonlights as Brainstorm, a costumed superhero. But when Phil wakes up from a blackout drunkand is confronted with photos that seem to show him assaulting an unknown woman, even superpowers won't help him. Try as he might, Phil can't remember that night, and so, haunted by the need to know, he mind-reads his way through the lab techs at work, adoring fans at Toy Polloi, and anyone else who gets in his way, in an attempt to determine whether he's capable of such violence. A Little More Human , rife with layers of paranoia and conspiracy, questions how well we really know ourselves, showcasing Fiona Maazel at her tragicomic, freewheeling best.
Author Notes
Fiona Maazel is the author of Woke Up Lonely and Last Last Chance . She is a winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times Book Review , Harper's Magazine ,and Tin House. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Maazel's (Woke Up Lonely) third novel blends science fiction, satire, farce, literary mystery, and comic book adventure that probes the human heart even as it describes drugs and robotics propelling us into a bionic, posthuman world. During the week, nursing assistant Phil Snyder works at SCET, his family's Staten Island biotech firm specializing in new and experimental treatments for brain injuries, while weekends he dresses up as popular superhero Brainstorm for toy stores and children's events. Like Brainstorm, Phil can read minds; unlike Brainstorm, his life is spiraling out of control. Without his knowledge, his wife has become pregnant through a sperm bank. His father, Doc, an SCET cofounder, is rapidly succumbing to dementia. Worst of all, Phil receives four photos in the mail showing him in his Brainstorm costume, stripped to the waist, standing over a battered woman. Unable to remember what happened the night the photos were taken, Phil seeks out the victim, Effie, and embarks on a journey involving an unidentified dead body and a series of unanswered questions. Maazel's clever, incisive prose makes the roller-coaster plot a fun if exhausting ride. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Fresh fiction from the author of Woke Up Lonely (2013) and Last Last Chance (2008).The story begins with Phil Snyder astride a horse, dressed in the blue Spandex costume of a superhero named Brainstorm. Phil is just waking up from an alcohol- and karaoke-fueled stupor, and the image is arrestingfunny and pitiful at the same time. But, as the crowd assembled before him starts clamoring for autographs and photos, it's impossible not to wonder why parents don't shepherd their children away from a supposed superhero in tights caked in mud, blood, and algae. It's easier to accept that Phil can actually read minds, just like Brainstormwhich he canthan it is to imagine grown people letting their youngsters anywhere near this obviously troubled imposter. This is one of the challenges of writing in the absurdist mode. How much is too much? When do readers willingly suspend disbelief, and when do they dig in their heels? Fans of Maazel's earlier work will undoubtedly keep reading and find much to like here. Phil isn't just an honest psychic freak who pretends to be one on the weekends. He's also a nursing assistant at a facility that specializes in cognitive disorders and a man about to become the father of a child his wife conceived with sperm she purchased without his knowledge. For someone who can read minds, Phil is easily flummoxed, and the limits of his ability to understand anyone at all are put to the test when he's presented with evidence that he, himself, has committed a terrible crime that he does not remember committing. Maazel gets the manifold ways in which contemporary life is ridiculous. She also understands the ways in which comedy trends toward disaster. And, finally, she's smart enough to interrogate the ways in which comedy and tragedy are the same. A treat for Maazel's fans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
On weekends, Phil has a job dressing up as Brainstorm, a superhero with mind-reading powers. What nobody knows is that Phil himself really can tap into other people's thoughts. That special ability is pushed to its limits when Phil wakes up one morning with his costume bloodied and torn and no memory of the previous night. He's given photos that appear to show him assaulting a woman in the park, and the complicated machinery of the novel is set in motion. As Phil desperately tries to recover what happened that night, he is also confronted with challenges where he works at the SCET, a biotechnology institute founded by his parents. The SCET is doing groundbreaking work, but it increasingly seems to be up to something sinister, too. The story's twists and turns, which can come at blistering speeds, also involve detective work by Phil's father, who is hiding his encroaching dementia, and a first-time scammer trying to afford her mother's medication. Maazel takes a dark, inventive look at the cost of pushing humans to their limits.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ONE OF THE main characters in Fiona Maazel's third novel, "A Little More Human," is a mind reader who has a chip inserted in his brain enabling him to "retrieve otherwise irretrievable memories" and to "scrub" others' memories of him. Trying to remember the novel's numerous minor characters and follow its involuted plots, 1 coveted that chip. Maazel's first two novels - "Last Last Chance" and "Woke Up Lonely" - were casually plotted but insistently literary in their style, their buzzing verbal energy and left-field aperçus. In "A Little More Human," all the characters are plotting or plotted against, and are furthermore linked to an overarching corporate conspiracy. Lisa (whose husband, Phil Snyder, is the mind reader) secretly arranges her artificial insemination. Phil is being blackmailed by a woman named Effie he may have assaulted when drunk. Her sister, Ada, takes a job with Phil's cognitively impaired father (who suspects his wife was murdered) and scams money from Phil's best friend, Ben. These men, who are approaching 40, are nursing assistants at the Snyder Center for Enhancement Technology, or SCET, an idealistic but vaguely sinister medical institution founded on present-day Staten Island by Phil's neuroscientist parents. As 1 said, the plots get involuted. Maazel's omniscient narrator performs a more conventional kind of literary mind reading, revealing the thoughts of these characters and detailing their various motives. But the prevalence of plotting tends to reduce potentially complex figures to narrative devices. Dr. Phillip Snyder Sr. is a hoarder whose overstuffed house is a labyrinth of tunnels. This maze is clearly a metaphor for a brain that can no longer access its own memories, but it might serve equally as a stand-in for the novel itself, a set of pathways through which Maazel moves her experimental subjects. Dead ends abound, secrets surprise, good folks early are evil later and an unlikely hero emerges. Maazel's prose, meanwhile, is less style-conscious than it was in her previous books and more lab-manual functional - sometimes technical, usually straightforward and active, rarely figurative or buzzing. For these reasons, "A Little More Human" seems intended to be as much a high-concept entertainment as a literary novel. To be sure, Maazel is working in a sci-fi subgenre - call it brainiac fiction - with some distinguished precedents: Gibson's "Neuromancer," Vonnegut's "Galápagos," Percy's "Love in the Ruins," McElroy's "Plus," Powers's "Galatea 2.2" and, particularly, DeLillo's "White Noise" (in which the central characters perpetrate desperate plots to get the drug that will relieve their fear of death). Here, Ada needs thousands of dollars to buy her moribund mother "ARA-9," given to her after a cardiac operation at the Snyder Center. The drug, as Phil learns when he takes it, quickly makes one healthier and smarter, but it is highly addictive and exorbitantly expensive. Questions about who profits from the drug and who might withhold an antidote drive the conspiracy investigation in the novel's second half. Maazel includes some textbook neurology throughout, and has a minor character with left-brain-right-brain conflict, but the cognitive science is ultimately more a mainspring for the plots. "A Little More Human" works best on the meta level - readers might imagine their processing of the novel as its "real" subject. Our Occam's-razor brains are always searching for the simplest story line to explain disparate data. We want to understand all the information the book is hoarding, and we'd like to scrub dissonant information that interferes. Maazel suggests all of us (whether readers of her book or not) want our minds to be "more human" - more powerful, even "posthuman" - but this desire for advanced cognition can in fact make us less human, less understanding in our relations as we ignore or forget what doesn't fit our schemes and schemata. Maazel includes characters' actions that should remind self-aware readers there are liabilities to becoming "more human." Phil the nursing assistant turned amateur detective ignores his overwhelmed wife and sick child. Ada the scammer turned investigator forgets her secretive sister is more than a sex addict. Dr. Phillip Snyder wants his medical center to pursue "immortality" ; his wife had more limited and humane motivations. Read as a novel about reading, "A Little More Human" is more interesting than a merely entertaining addition to brainiac fiction. The novel's setting on present-day Staten Island feels deliberate: Even on this isle of middle-class "normalcy," Maazel seems to suggest, "Tempest"-like plots are hatched and mysteries surface. Washing up in a boat graveyard is a body that newspapers call "the Swimmer." (To identify him, characters travel to Denmark, which gives the novel's conspiracy a Pynchonian multinational quality.) The brain-damaged patients in the Snyder Center present the kind of cognitive idiosyncrasies reported by Oliver Sacks. Maazel refers twice to Nietzsche, whose "Human, All Too Human" celebrates free spirits against conventional mentality. This is, in other words, an unquestionably brainy book. I only wish it were as free-spirited and buoyant as the two that preceded it. In true meta fashion, readers might imagine their processing of this novel as its 'reeil' subject. TOM LECLAIR'S "Harpooning Donald Trump: A Novelist's Essays" was published in March.
Library Journal Review
Phil Snyder can read minds, a superpower that serves him well in his job as a nursing assistant at a Staten Island biotech hospital and is even more useful in his part-time job at a toy store, where he engages customers as the superhero Brainstorm. While it seems that mind reading should help keep his life on track, it's actually no help at all when he wakes up after a night he can't remember. As he tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to him, he must also reconnect with his estranged wife and his ailing father. Complications mount as blackmailers coerce him into having a memory chip implanted in his brain, and the conspiracy grows ever more complex and difficult until he realizes that the power of the chip in his brain can solve his problems. This chaotic and humorous romp by award-winning author Maazel (Woke Up Lonely) will challenge readers to keep up, consider the pros and cons of biotechnology, and ask pertinent questions about the choices we're presented by life and what we can or should do about them. -VERDICT Recommended for Maazel fans, lovers of tragicomedy, and all who enjoy the absurd. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.