Wrong Way: A Novel

by Joanne McNeil

Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New Yorker and one of the Top 20 Best Books of 2023 by Esquire magazine.

For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.

Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, Technology, Contemporary, Literature, Literary Fiction

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 14, 2023

Reviews

[Christopher Febles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boston: the not-so-distant future. Teresa has had a long history of transitory employment, but finally it seems the (fictional) internet conglomerate AllOver has offered her a steady job with their “driverless” fleet of cars (or, as they call them, “CRs”). Of course, it’s not what it seems, and she finds herself an invisible “seer” in her AllOver vehicle, witness to a whole host of human behavior when they think no one’s watching. Throughout her rides and her back-and-forth commutes, we’re given a look at her attempts at connection and establishing herself, as she now approaches middle age.

Kudos to McNeil for taking on a fascinating topic. She clearly has a lot to say about the emerging “gig” economy and the massive companies that seem to control it all. Through her MC she manages to convey that dystopian sense of loneliness and isolation for which we’re headed unless things change. Teresa’s an interesting person, a drifter of sorts, and her insecurity serves as a good launching pad for some strong ideas. She and characters around her seem to reject the traditional status symbols of wealth and achievement as benchmarks of success. McNeil’s prose is journalistic but sharp, and she’s good with the occasional metaphor: Teresa’s a swimmer, so “Lap 29” means her 29th year of living and what she was doing at the time. There’s a shocking climax I didn’t see coming, and it livens up the story significantly.

From the beginning, I identified this novel as “high concept.” McNeil employs something of a third-person stream of consciousness style, which means a very non-linear plot and a fluid timeline. Flashbacks abound, sometimes just as I was concentrating on an interesting anecdote. That made the brilliant ideas she proposes hard for me to follow. One character begins to discuss college admissions, for example, and I had a hard time seeing how that fit with the other concepts. Before I could figure it out, we were onto something else. Also, I had a hard time visualizing things, most notably the “nest” in which the AllOver seers “drive” the CRs.

I also found the character relationships odd. There seems to be an affection between Teresa and coworker Al Jin, but he vanishes twice, and she gives him not another thought. Teresa (McNeil) also has a strange way of referring to other characters: “Blue Jeans” and “She Who Gives No F*cks” seem more appropriate for a humor novel. Some characters come out of nowhere with no description, and it takes a switchback to grasp the image. I also might have liked a bit more from her relationship with Sinisa, as it felt unfinished.

Overall, Wrong Way uses an unorthodox storytelling style, but it’s a bold effort, an insightful look at labor relations in the coming world. Readers interested in economics, technology, and even politics will take an interest.

Thank you to the publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Wrong Way by Joane McNeil gets released via Farrar, Straus, and Giroux November 14, 2023.

[Denise Ruttan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won’t be for everyone but it really was the book for me. So often I read books by young MFA grads that glorify or objectify poverty in beautiful sentences and you can just tell they’ve not lived it. I think it helps that the author is a journalist who has intimate knowledge of these issues from talking to the people who have lived this life and covering the social impacts of technology and AI.

It’s very slow paced and not much happens in the story but it’s literary in its deep interiority and exploration of back story, which I appreciated. This is the kind of book that inspires me to write because the attention to craft is so good.

Teresa is stuck in a dead-end life where she takes a series of odd, underpaid jobs in the gig economy. She lands her best job yet for a fintech company that produces driverless cars - or at least, they claim to be driverless, but they are really piloted by a human driver in an extremely uncomfortable portal, like a drone. But it pays better than any of her other jobs and she finally has financial security.

The social commentary in this book was just wonderful. It really digs deep into the psyche and motivations of gig economy workers, AI and the future of labor. Plus the prose was beautiful and Teresa was a fascinating, complex character, if a bit maddening at times.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Wendy Liu]

i used to want self-driving cars but now that i’m older and wiser, all i want is better public transit

[Sammi Cheung · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spent the entire book waiting for the meat of the story to begin until I realized I finished it. The book is basically just all the exposition, though not unenjoyable, with some pleasant scenes of gig work and rumination on technology. I liked this quote in the new yorker article about the book: “everything is wrapped in an air of mournful belatedness, the literary equivalent less of a sci-fi hellscape than of an especially gray day in Boston.” A little humdrum, but a nice read! (and I liked the extremely Boston suburb core mentions like porter square books and framingham commuter rail and the star market above the highway that I drive under every time I go into Boston)

[Joanne McNeil]

A considered review of the novel in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

After reading the novel (or before), I recommend listening to my interview with Tech Won't Save Us https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

and This Machine Kills https://podcasts.apple.com/sv/podcast...

[Petar Marčeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s like sociology except it’s well written

[Erin Crane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thrilled to get this ARC from FSG as some of my favorite weirdo novels are from them (Annihilation, The Insatiable Volt Sisters, The Rain Heron). Sadly, I didn’t love this one, but I very much appreciate what it was doing.

This is the story of Teresa, a struggling middle-aged woman (yay! For once!) living with her mom. She has a new job as a driver for this massive corporation, and ethical murkiness ensues. She also reflects on past jobs and past relationships.

I do love the wave of anti-capitalist worker stories I’m seeing. It’s commentary that I eat up, so I was glad to have found another one in Wrong Way.

The first part of the book was the best for me. Teresa’s training felt so dystopian and bizarre, and I was full of dread waiting for the reveal of what she’d actually be doing. Once I got there I was horrified. It’s so demeaning and exploitative.

I also liked the questions the book brought up about Teresa’s responsibility or not for what happens in the vehicle. She’s not prepared at all for those situations by her employer and struggles to figure out how to report, which is very believable.

The tone of the story reminded me of something like The Lobster in that it’s very subdued. The intensity is dialed way down. It’s very consistent throughout, and I could get along with it, but it’s definitely a *choice* and not all readers will be on board.

I had a few problems that kept me from rating the book higher. One is that I did not know what to picture. I didn’t understand exactly how the nest worked or how everything was positioned. I don’t know if a diagram is appropriate to add, but I felt like I needed one. 😂

The book also read as muddled and too meandering. I understood why Teresa was reflecting on her job history and that mostly worked for me. I could see a running theme of employer exploitation and issues of privilege. But the reflections on her relationship history felt incomplete and didn’t fit into the story as well. In the present day she has some interest in this guy Al, I think, but there’s not a lot said about it. She has one, long, odd conversation with him near the end about how he feels he’ll step back in time one day - and I truly had no idea what to do with that. It was so twee in a book that otherwise felt nothing like that.

I wanted more focus on the job and the exploitation commentary. I wanted more about Falconer, more tricky situations in the CR, more corporate bureaucracy. There were too many meanderings that just didn’t add to the strongest themes of the story. And I really loved those themes!

I recently read Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee which is a more speculative take on corporate exploitation, and tonally quite different, but I’d still recommend that if you like these dystopian workplace stories. Also Severance by Ling Ma, The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams, Users by Colin Winnette, and even The City Inside by Samit Basu.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Sarah’s Shelves · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book was very intriguing and alluring, but the execution fell a bit flat for me. I feel like it never really accomplished the commentaries it was trying to make and the ending felt oddly unfinished.

I honestly don’t know how to feel. It was written well, but at the end of the day…what was the point? I think maybe I am just not the right reader for this and that others would fair better with it.

[juliemcl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't encountered this protagonist before in any book. It me.
Well done, Joanne McNeil. The lived experience is apparent. It's so important to have representation, to be finally seen.
And, you know, it doesn't seem like such a bad job, you know, comparatively...

[Rodrigo · Rating 1 out of 5]

A boring character, a boring story, a boring book. The story lacks a conflict outside the personal moral battle an employee wages against the corporation (and capitalism) while extending a hand out for a meal, a salary, or security. I stopped reading several times because nothing captured me. There was no hook, no greater element of narrative intrigue to entice the reader. This is just a story about working, and past jobs, and things that I would want to escape while reading, not be reading about.

[Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book through a recent interview with the author on Tech Won’t Save Us (highly recommend this podcast!!) and found it so fascinating to read a technology journalist exploring ideas through fiction / in a novel. Yea it’s slow moving but a quick read that is very much worth it. An antidote to the endless praise of the automated and autonomous, and an ode to the vast amounts of (hidden) human labor that facilitates it

[Doug Mckeever · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wrong Way takes modern themes of the negative side of technology like: artifice, alienation, and hypocrisy and examines them closely through how AllOver supports and dehumanizes Teresa, the protagonist. For readers of leftist or anti-capitalist material many of the viewpoints will ring true both conceptually and personally and for those who are beginning to wake up to these ideas the information is delivered succinctly and without political bent. One of the most interesting things to me about this book was how McNeil is able to avoid the trap of couching a book about the modern era in arguing for the solutions espoused by a party or ruling class. Rather, the facts of the stress and strife in Teresa's life speak for themselves and show clearly to the reader that even if you are not in her position you could find yourself there easily.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you have ever been in the cycle of weird entry level labor and/or you have lived in boston this book is for you. i ended up enjoying this a lot

[Olivia Ungar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am never getting in a fucking driverless car ever in my life

[Emily Carlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Near-future big tech light dystopia black mirror-esque novel. I found the critiques and complaints one-dimensional.

One star for the Jungian shadow work opportunities occasioned by how much I disliked this. Another star for the greater Boston area setting.

[Lexi Denee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely adored this book about a woman who has worked a series of jobs, and gotten pretty much nowhere in life. She measures her years in good and bad jobs, and the experiences that she lived because of those jobs.

This book came at just the right time for me as I left a job with a company that I was with for a long time. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends about burnout, and the rat race that we’re all forced into from the moment we reach young adulthood.

I loved McNeil’s commentary on the corporate world and certain socio-economic groups being on a treadmill that they are unable to get off of. I would compare this book loosely to some of Vonnegut’s work with the sci-fi and satire. Kurt Vonnegut is one of my top 3 authors of all time so for me to say this is kind of a big deal!

I genuinely can’t wait to see what McNeil puts out next, and was incredibly impressed with this being a debut novel.

Check this one out if you like Kurt Vonnegut, satire, sci-fi, technology, and if you hate work!!

**Thank you to FSG Books for my advanced review copy of this book and to NetGalley for the eARC of this title!**

[Sara Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtle and insightful speculative fiction for what it means to have a good job in late stage capitalism amidst technocentric snake oil and obscuring progressive rhetoric. McNeil’s descriptions of the traces of industrial history throughout Greater Boston’s make for a rich landscape through which to navigate in a driverless car. Thoughtful, poignant, and most importantly timely critique for our tech present and near future.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though Joanne McNeil is a “technology” writer, she always writes first and foremost about people. In her non-fiction book Lurking, she used her own experience growing up online to explore how over time people became “users.” (Blech! I miss you, 1990s internet!) She starts close and human and then zooms out to larger cultural issues. I think that’s where the power of her insight comes from – the humanity of it.

Mcneil’s debut novel Wrong Way is fiction, but the author employs the same methodology – the individual human zoomed out to larger issues. Teresa, the protagonist, is a relatively anonymous forty-something in the Boston area. Like many Americans in the 2020s, she isn’t exactly in a financial crisis, but she is also never comfortable. Her career is a series of lateral moves between lower-level jobs. Sometimes she is an underpaid creative or assistant dependent on the whims of her manager, sometimes she is a temp, sometimes she is trying to navigate unemployment benefits (which is itself a precarious job). She shares an apartment, she house-sits, she’s at home with her mother for a little. Even though Teresa is a hard worker, even though she does the “right” things in terms of saving and striving, things are never settled for her.

A Craigslist ad for people who like to drive leads Teresa to an interview with a recruiter, and then a weeks-long training with AllOver, a tech company somewhere between Meta, Uber, and Apple. She gets the job, but a couple of very conformable experiences lead her to realize things aren’t what they seem at AllOver.

First and foremost, the book is about Teresa and her rich inner life. That’s what drives the book, and for me, those inner musings are where McNeil shines as an writer.

Of course, as a tech writer, McNeil has plenty to say about AllOver (the big tech company). The AllOver stuff is the zooming out and probably the point of the book. Why is the culture so obsessed with the tech messiahs? Why do we put any faith in them and their systems and philosophies? To me, the way our culture treats these guys (it’s usually guys) is similar to how people used to treat religious revivalists. I don’t know if that is intentional on McNeil’s part, but while reading this book I thought about those parallels a lot in terms of what we let certain people get away with. A 1980s capitalist is easier to ridicule for his naked love of money than someone preaching values of healthy ecology and economic justice. But the exploitation of the invisible working class is the same. The show of invincibility by the elite is the same.

Wrong Way is enjoyable and thought provoking. I’ll read any book McNeil puts out.

[Jillian]

I am not typically a reader of dystopian or science fiction, partially because I despise extensive world-building (which means most fantasy is out for me too) and partially because it always feels incredibly bleak in a way that somehow doesn't feel connected to the actual world we live in. But Wrong Way hit a perfect sweet spot for me.

If I had to categorize this novel, I'd put it in the "speculative fiction" category. McNeil imagines a world not too far into the future in which a giant tech company, which already has its foothold in everyone's daily lives, launches a fleet of "driverless" cars for their elite clients. Of course, I say "driverless" cars because there is indeed a driver hidden in a nest-like structure at the top of the car, controlling everything from behind the scenes. One of this drivers is our main character, Teresa, who has spent years moving in and out of temporary jobs. She accepts a contract job with AllOver, said giant tech company, without knowing much about said job. On the surface, it seems ideal: financial stability, a company with progressive values... However, as Teresa starts to be a driver, she struggles with the contradiction between AllOver's public claims and the reality of what they're doing.

McNeil, who has written about tech extensively before, clearly understands how a giant tech company like AllOver functions and exploits everyone from the low-level worker to the consumer in order to pad their bottom line. As I read Wrong Way, I thought, "God, what if this happens? What if this is the next insane thing Elon Musk wants to do to our society?" But what McNeil writes best about, putting aside the insidiousness of tech companies, is the perilous position of those in the working class working entirely in a gig economy. I don't think I've ever read anyone write about this as intelligently and authentically as McNeil.

Wrong Way should be on your list of must-buy novels in November. It's incredibly propulsive and compelling. I literally could not put it down.

*You can read my professional review of Wrong Way in Booklist's Oct. 1 issue and online here: https://www.booklistonline.com/Wrong-....

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gonna start by saying this wasn't my cup of tea, but maybe it's yours? Teresa is a middle-aged woman who has been through a series of jobs, good and bad but none of them have lasted. She manages to get a job for a glossy Meta-ish company with a WeWork-like CEO that hires thin, short people to secretly drive "driverless" cars.

From the start, this seemed unlikely. I couldn't picture the "nest" (like the space in the Mechanical Turk) where the drivers were supposed to hide and actually drive the car. I thought that the denouement would be the discovery that the cars aren't driverless, but instead there is a car accident that (as far as I could tell) didn't reveal it. I didn't think something this big could be kept a secret by a large workforce. I didn't buy the four months to get a number to report an incident. That would've been in the training material - this company couldn't afford their "seers" going public in frustration. I thought that the drivers' (sorry, seers') human needs would cause a crisis, or that there would be a simple human mistake that would expose them. But nope. I guess the author was trying to get at how AI really relies on unseen low-paid labour, but that wound up not being the main point of the story.

Instead the story is about Teresa's reflections on her jobs, her relationships (or lack thereof, especially of quality ones). She drifts about Greater Boston (a LOT of towns on the South Shore are mentioned, but this felt more like trying to give a sense of place than really necessary to the story). I think MassTech was supposed to be MIT, but Harvard is mentioned by name, so why disguise MIT? McNeil successfully conveys that the "humanless" technology makes the world callous towards the people whose low-paid labour built it. But in the end it was a meandering story that I didn't much enjoy. It was high-concept but it could've been a short story.

[Kelly Lavigne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A life barely lived becomes fodder for a massive corporation that claims their AI is intelligent enough to navigate a driverless vehicle. That claim is a lie, and the secret drives Teresa to the brink of self-destruction.

When i was recommended this book, i had gotten myself into a predominantly nonfiction reading habit. i was struggling to see the merit of fiction. The recommendation was not only to get me out of my rut, but to understand that the semantic content of fiction can easily be as powerful, if not more so, as reading about concepts directly. Moving into a new year had me reassess my reading habits. i’m so glad this is the book i started a fiction habit with.

Somewhere between slice-of-life and near-future science fiction, Wrong Way is a powerful warning against trusting rhetoric, always searching for the next best thing, and misusing resources to force change.

Throughout the book we learn about AllOver, the fictional company that co-opts progressive language thanks to CEO Falconer Guidry. Guidry seems to have good intentions (or is doing a fantastic job paying lip service to the disaffected). He’s trying to launch the technology of tomorrow today, well before it’s ready.

Teresa, our main character, buys into the hype in the hope of finally being able to live her own life away from family and trauma. Along the way we see what a mistake Teresa has made, but by the time she realizes it she’s already made a habit of excusing the behavior of a corporation that claims an ultimate morality (Guidry’s Holistic Apex, a system of living he’s built into AllOver) but rarely acts in the best interests of its own employees. AllOver wants the public’s attention and favor. Thanks to employees like Teresa, they get it.

There’s so much more to dig into here. In summary, if you want to see one possible encroaching future for tech, AI, and corporate culture, Wrong Way is glimpse into it that will cut deeply.

[Ellen Jenkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

My issue with this novel is that it felt like a true stretch for McNeil. You can tell that she has some poignant insights into the current gig economy and how that is somewhat awkward inserted into this novel at points. This feels like someone who is trained, and maybe talented at non-fiction, attempting to write fiction. My frustrations are as follows.

Teresa doesn't feel like a full character. I get the sense of loneliness. She shuts herself out from people around her, and doesn't seem to know how to effectively create connections. That's fine, but that makes all the other characters and Teresa feel flat and one-dimensional. I don't feel any sort of championship for Teresa, even if I see a lot of myself, and possibly my peers, in her.
Further, this sort of disconnect that Teresa results in a LOT of descriptions of the world. I feel like that results in a lazy world-building. So, again, it feels one-dimensional. I think that she needed more effort to put in why there's so much inequality, how does it effect anyone besides Teresa beyond five second blurbs about people who we don't know or care about. That's how reality is, but when we're reading there needs to be stronger connections to strangers. I understand the technique was so that Teresa was isolated and was more of just living to work and wasn't involved much beyond bearing witness. But, it really resulted in a boring world and rather than a reflection of our current situation, it just felt like words. I'm not sure if that makes sense.

I read another review that said, and I whole-heartedly agree, the concept and the idea is amazing. The execution is meh. I think this book could have used some stronger editing. It feels unfinished and like a draft rather than the final cut.

[Ed Bernard · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a low intensity thriller-ish novel about a woman working as a hidden driver in a “driverless” car, for a company that seems a lot like Google or maybe Facebook. The company hides these drivers in an area of the car where the passengers can’t see them, supposedly to pave the way for consumer confidence when the real self-driving cars are ready. Most of the book consists of this protagonist stumbling through her life of uninspiring gig work — many chapters end with her declaring (to herself … she has almost no other people in her life) that the driving thing is a “good job.” She’s had some terrible ones, many of them, as she’s rarely employed for long at any one job, which she doesn’t love but is what’s available to her. This is, I guess, the point of the novel, though it is so meandering and internal that it never bothers to build any kind of momentum or, for that matter, even tell a real story. The bio says the author is a writer about tech, with a previous (non-fiction) book about the birth of the internet and how companies basically made it a poorer user experience as a means to generate income. Also an interesting idea and perhaps worthy of an entire book. However, this book isn’t really successful as a jeremiad (nowhere near enough passion) nor as a novel bland characters, no actual plot, no resolution, no arc … really none of the things that make fiction interesting. It’s not bad, exactly, just sort of pointless. It’s hard to even imagine who would find this book worthwhile, except to understand the point McNeil is making. And she writes well. But this book isn’t worth the time or trouble, at least not to me.

Grade: C-

[Logan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard about “Wrong Way” from a book review that I came across on Apple News and thought it sounded fun. The book is about a 48-year-old woman who still hasn’t found her forever career. When she takes a job at a trendy tech conglomerate that’s branching out into self-driving cars, she discovers that their miracle technology is far less glamorous than it’s being made out to be. It took a while to reveal that the woman is middle-aged, which made the first several chapters more confusing than they needed to be. We learn very little about the main character at first, except that she had worked a variety of jobs throughout her life; that she’s single; and that she moved back in with her mother. But it came as a shock to me that by 48, she hadn’t found one job that stuck. Or a romantic partner. The book was also not as comical as I expected. Maybe learning that the main character was that old made the events less “You live, you learn” and more “Why haven’t you learned yet?” The dialogue and so many of the situations strike me as things millennials would say and do. There’s also a character in his 50s, similarly bouncing between jobs, who lives with a roommate in a messy apartment. Again, he seems like he’s in a twentysomething’s living situation. I believe author Joanne McNeil is in her 40s, though, so I wonder if it’s just me assuming that these things are exclusively twentysomething experiences, when they’re actually not. Anyway, that all threw me off. I also couldn’t really figure out the book’s purpose. Maybe this woman being lost in life was the point? The initial premise was promising, but I didn’t connect with the characters or themes. You live, you learn!

4/10

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't 100% identify what was off about this book for me, but it ultimately didn't deliver on what (in my opinion) it promised. I expected social commentary on AI, massive, powerful companies, and the gig economy, and while I got some of that, this book never really achieved liftoff. I remember seeing that I was 25% done with the audiobook and feeling shocked because everything still felt so expository and continued to for the rest of the book.

I liked the flashbacks since they gave more insight into Teresa's character and how she arrived at this phase of her life, but I wish they had been better integrated into the plot of her present day. I can understand why the author would want to lay all the events out plainly and allow readers to have whatever reactions they had, but with the plot being so speculative, I think these mundane scenes could have grounded the book.

None of her interactions with other characters felt real or meaningful to me. For one thing, there were just too many side characters to keep track of, and most of them didn't have much impact on Teresa in a real way. Surprisingly, the reflection on her relationships with unnamed, unspecific former friends was more gripping than any specific interaction, particularly with her mom. I also enjoyed the scenes with her former partner, but they came so late in the story that I was lost about where he came from and when he was part of her life.

I'm not sure if I wish this book had been differently edited or just different, but there's a lot here that others may enjoy.

[Deej · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy.
Rating rounded up from 3.5.
This book won't be for everybody, but I really enjoyed it. As someone who's critical of "self-driving" cars, fintech startups and how they lie about their technologies, this was great. The fictional fintech company AllOver that our protagonist, Teresa, begins working for is like Tesla and Theranos merged into one. Teresa is 48 and recently had to move back in with her mother in a suburb of Boston after being let go from yet another job. She loves to drive and responds to a Craigslist posting asking for drivers. She loves to drive and thinks this is the perfect job for her, maybe one that she can finally stay employed at. She comes to find out the company is deceiving the public. AllOver touts driverless cars for people to use on-demand like Uber, without having to be reminded that a gig worker is likely driving them to the airport in order to feed their families. But the secret is that the cars aren't driverless at all. The drivers are simply hidden in a "nest" so their upper-middle-class passengers don't have to interact with them at all and the company's stock price soars. A terrible reminder that people are disposable to these Silicon Valley billionaires and they will do anything to profit, including putting their employees' lives at risk.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD x FSG Originals for the ARC of this title.

I really liked Joanne McNeil's first book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, and the pivot from that (non-fiction) study of our current web and how it's changed to this (fiction) take on the gig economy and what it means to be a part of it seemed like a leap from the outset, but really worked once I got into the book. As a person in the greater (T-accessible) part of Boston, I could deeply visualize the places in this book (and loved the slight shade of the people living "10 minutes outside" Boston that actually have 45-70 minute commutes). There's a real sense of character study here, and my only complaint is that the book feels like it abruptly stops when it feels like there are a few more plotlines to resolve (or at least push slightly further - there's a real sense of life in a pending space throughout the book, so when it just stops it's a bit of a shock).

[Stephen Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joanne McNeil’s WRONG WAY explores the lived reality of her protagonist Teresa as she takes a contract position at AllOver, the “driverless” car company. The book is filled with rich descriptions and sinister vibes as Teresa and other middle-aged workers are drawn to what appears to be a “good” job.

I was particularly impressed at how the author nails the corporate lingo and immerses the reader in the economic experience of the protagonist. I followed closely as we learned about the many jobs that Teresa has had over the past 48 years—and why the contract position at AllOver seems so attractive. Some of the dialogue was a bit more formal, elevated than normal speech, but it seemed fitting given the political and philosophical bent of this novel.

Since I’ve finished the book, I’ve been thinking more about the Boston tech sector. I’m also remembering a particularly eerie scene where Teresa is trying to engage with an unhelpful corporate automaton to report a harassment issue. Kudos to the author for making the psychological aspects of the book so vivid and, at times, disturbing.

[Debbie Urbanski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrong Way—intentionally slow-paced and meditative—offers corporate greed as a taking-off point before doing a deep dive into the human cost of tech, challenging the stories we all tell ourselves about our technology and our purchase history to justify our current lifestyles.

This book feels, to me, like it lies at the border of speculative fiction (maybe realistic fantasy? low-tech sci-fi? realistic surrealism?) even though there’s nothing fantastical about it. The idea behind Wrong Way is that the world needs self-driving cars now (for supposedly environmental reasons though also presumably to increase a corporation’s profit)—only the tech isn't there, so actual humans are squeezed into a hidden space on top of cars to do the driving.

The set-up for wacky dark humor is definitely present, and a lot of writers probably would have pressed hard in that direction. But McNeil instead chooses a more somber route, following the quiet repetitive life of Teresa, one of the drivers (or “seers”). She is a character lacking in agency, more of an observer/participant than a decider, which most of us are anyway. Several times I was reminded of Alice McDermott's Someone, a book that treated its ordinary main character with such empathy and care that it produced a shift in my world view.

If you are looking for an entertaining romp of a novel filled with techno action and intrigue, ending somewhere heavy with hope—this isn't that book. Wrong Way feels more unique than that. This was one of my favorite reads in a long time.

I wrote a bit more about this book on my Substack...

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because of the theme and because I like to ponder dystopian topics. This book had potential to be very interesting, but suffered from copious description of mundane and boring jobs that were tedious to read, coupled with severe lack of plot regarding the current job and life story. Despite all of that description, I was unable to visualize critical parts such as the “nest” and how driving the CR would actually work. The narrator/main character seemed quite naïve and passive, which was perhaps part of the point of the book but again made the reading a difficult slog due to her lack of agency. I also am unfamiliar with the Boston area, so the heavy use of local references did nothing for me. I persisted through it waiting for something to happen, but abandoned it in the second to last chapter. If something ended up happening, I could not be bothered at that point to find out what it was. All that being said, the author writes well enough and with the addition of interesting plot may in future pull off a good book.