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I Am No One
A mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is 'no one', as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is 'no one', as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published July 5, 2016
74 people are currently reading
3524 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Flanery
20 books78 followersPatrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 324 reviews
January 2, 2017
We live in a world of surveillance. Our online buying habits are tracked generating recommendations for future purchases. It is no surprise that Jeremy O'Keefe, our narrator, feels that he is no one when,in fact, he is someone being observed and scrutinized.
Jeremy is a college history professor who has returned to New York after a decade teaching at Oxford. He is middle-aged, divorced, and is trying to reconnect with his successful daughter Meredith. He has difficulty readjusting to the complexities of life and feels isolated.
Jeremy questions his memory and sanity as boxes anonymously delivered to his apartment contain all his online activity and phone records during his ten year stay in England. Is he under surveillance for associating with an Egyptian student whose parents have ties to an ousted government? Will he be held accountable for a crime?
Patrick Flanery paints an unsettling account of Big Brother watching the movements of our protagonist. Things aren't always what they seem. This is an excellent, eye opening book.
Jeremy is a college history professor who has returned to New York after a decade teaching at Oxford. He is middle-aged, divorced, and is trying to reconnect with his successful daughter Meredith. He has difficulty readjusting to the complexities of life and feels isolated.
Jeremy questions his memory and sanity as boxes anonymously delivered to his apartment contain all his online activity and phone records during his ten year stay in England. Is he under surveillance for associating with an Egyptian student whose parents have ties to an ousted government? Will he be held accountable for a crime?
Patrick Flanery paints an unsettling account of Big Brother watching the movements of our protagonist. Things aren't always what they seem. This is an excellent, eye opening book.
July 19, 2021
An extraordinarily satisfying literary thriller. There's a skillful layering on of suspense with every page. Themes include the surveillance state, terrorism, divorce, careerism and how the human mind is stressed under such pressures toward the pathological. I admire how deftly Flanery sets the story amid our current geopolitical farrago.
There's no question that this novel could not have come into being in its present form without the models provided by John le Carré and Graham Greene. Yet Flanery's tone is so assured that he "makes it new"—as Ezra Pound once exhorted his circle to do—and isn't that a big part of what art is all about?
Jeremy O'Keefe is a liberal, a former expat academic, returning to his beloved New York after ten years at Oxford only to find himself emotionally unmoored, out of touch with old friends and the city ineffably changed. A divorce had earlier led to his exile, but now he's back and his self-esteem is at an all-time low. A historian of 20th century German history at NYU—where he also teaches film—Jeremy experiences a failure of memory; one particular incident with limited ramifications. Later, when he happens to mention the matter to his daughter and wealthy son-in-law both, out of what appears to be an abundance of caution, ask him to see a neurologist.
Then a strange young man appears, staring Jeremy out of countenance from the street, whenever he looks from a window. Moving on as soon as he sees him, as if Jeremy's appearance serves to confirm some previously agreed upon sign. Is Jeremy losing his mind? It's a good question. Oh, he's paranoid alright, recalling old slights and arguments as he narrates his recent past. He doesn't trust strangers. He has some of the symptoms of clinical paranoia.
As things get stranger, the tone at times becomes a shrill, almost Edgar Allan Poe-like rant, such as we remember from the second half of The Tell-Tale Heart. This during Jeremy's more panicked states, as when some unknown person sends him a 5,000+ page hardcopy detailing his lifelong internet browsing history, including emails, everything. It's not long before he suspects this unknown person may be himself. A possibility he considers a number of times. He then goes on to profile for the reader his many presumptive enemies. I'll leave it there.
One might call I Am No One a "voice novel," the term Martin Amis applied to his own Money, though the book under review is neither satire nor comedy. The tone is, in fact, rather grave and virtually humorless. Simply in terms of modulation portions of it reminded me of Philip Roth's masterwork, American Pastoral. Jeremy struggles to understand what he's going through—the invasion of his privacy fairly unhinges him—and writing this document is his way of figuring it out. So there's a bit of a Last Testament feel to it as well. Strange I thought of Money, which it now occurs to me is also subtitled A Suicide Note.
There's no question that this novel could not have come into being in its present form without the models provided by John le Carré and Graham Greene. Yet Flanery's tone is so assured that he "makes it new"—as Ezra Pound once exhorted his circle to do—and isn't that a big part of what art is all about?
Jeremy O'Keefe is a liberal, a former expat academic, returning to his beloved New York after ten years at Oxford only to find himself emotionally unmoored, out of touch with old friends and the city ineffably changed. A divorce had earlier led to his exile, but now he's back and his self-esteem is at an all-time low. A historian of 20th century German history at NYU—where he also teaches film—Jeremy experiences a failure of memory; one particular incident with limited ramifications. Later, when he happens to mention the matter to his daughter and wealthy son-in-law both, out of what appears to be an abundance of caution, ask him to see a neurologist.
Then a strange young man appears, staring Jeremy out of countenance from the street, whenever he looks from a window. Moving on as soon as he sees him, as if Jeremy's appearance serves to confirm some previously agreed upon sign. Is Jeremy losing his mind? It's a good question. Oh, he's paranoid alright, recalling old slights and arguments as he narrates his recent past. He doesn't trust strangers. He has some of the symptoms of clinical paranoia.
As things get stranger, the tone at times becomes a shrill, almost Edgar Allan Poe-like rant, such as we remember from the second half of The Tell-Tale Heart. This during Jeremy's more panicked states, as when some unknown person sends him a 5,000+ page hardcopy detailing his lifelong internet browsing history, including emails, everything. It's not long before he suspects this unknown person may be himself. A possibility he considers a number of times. He then goes on to profile for the reader his many presumptive enemies. I'll leave it there.
One might call I Am No One a "voice novel," the term Martin Amis applied to his own Money, though the book under review is neither satire nor comedy. The tone is, in fact, rather grave and virtually humorless. Simply in terms of modulation portions of it reminded me of Philip Roth's masterwork, American Pastoral. Jeremy struggles to understand what he's going through—the invasion of his privacy fairly unhinges him—and writing this document is his way of figuring it out. So there's a bit of a Last Testament feel to it as well. Strange I thought of Money, which it now occurs to me is also subtitled A Suicide Note.
April 11, 2016
A naive perspective on the surveillance-state, written in the voice of a pompous, self-righteous, elite white liberal East-Coast male. I am only giving this 2 stars because Flanery does present some very important questions, and does also make a case for privacy (not a compelling one, to be sure, but still he brings it up, which is something, today).
First, the writing: the voice of our protagonist is so stereotypical liberal privileged professor (no offense meant: I love academia, and I'm as liberal as they come). But, as a liberal academic (lover), I am especially appalled and repelled by vituperative, petulant, self-rationalizing, naive, artless acts of beating readers over the head with political pronouncements-especially when espoused be fellow liberals: we can do better. Basically, this book has the same tone as a Michael Moore film- the same vibe of an endless liberal rant, but even worse, because our protagonist spends at least 66.6% of the novel navel-gazing and feeling sorry for himself.
[example: I am paraphrasing because this was an ARC - the protagonist begins the story by blaming his colleagues at Columbia for not awarding him tenure, and wines about being demoted to a "lowly" fellow/lecturer at Oxford, in one of the lesser colleges, with dumber students.. Um, yeah. Sorry, but I don't feel the swells of empathy rising within for this poor guy's terrible situation.]
While I may have agreed with much of Flanery's politics, I cringed the entire time at the presentation, and if I'm half skimming because I'm embarrassed, I can't imagine this book reaching out those "across the aisle."
Except, for, perhaps, the topic itself, which seems to appeal to subgroups of all persuasions in American politics - from libertarians to the most liberal democrat: privacy, and the ways in which a democratic society balances these concerns with those of national security. The premise of this novel is that we can be "no one", and still find ourselves caught in the web of surveillance and suspicion. This undoubtedly occurs, and I can only imagine, is a horrific situation. Still, that's not our professor's story.
For, in fact, the now-lowly professor engages in a series of extremely naive and idiotic acts and makes compoundingly ridiculously reckless decisions that clearly land him in the situation he is in, under surveillance by the state. He is, in fact, not "every wo/man", he is, rather, a highly "street-stupid", blindly romantic, self-obsessed man who is unable to see anything outside his own bubble, and who is unable grow and learn from his absurd mistakes and transgressions. Certainly, if I was heading up Some Agency, I'd have this guy under surveillance, based on his paper trail - no question.
Some examples:
So, by choosing the example he did for the character's background story, Flanery in effect cancels out his primary question and concern: can just about anyone turn up under surveillance by the state? If so, what is our recourse?
My last point of contention with I Am No One is my personal stance on the issue, which I would rate as "balanced". I have no illusion of privacy, so I was consummately annoyed at our professor's naivete. I grew up on stolen phone calls with my father - he called when he could travel, hundreds of miles away from his new home in Maryland. Of course, the Securitate was listening in, just as they were blatantly opening our mail (at one point they stopped bothering about taping back already opened envelopes). Now that I've been living in the US over 2/3 of my lifetime, I haven't lost my cynical, but, also, I think, realistic view that there is no such thing as privacy. There's Amazon, who knew about my upcoming wedding before some of my relatives did (it pestered me to establish a wedding registry), there's my credit card records and a list of all my transactions somewhere - enough for AMEX to provide me with a full nutritional plan and counselling, I'm sure; there's my emails, sitting on google's servers.... it's all out there, and the only thing I can do is be sensible about my choices. It seems both evident and not unreasonable that some privacy is what we trade everyday we make a decision to consume or communicate in a way that is not face-to-face, or in cash. Even if the big bad government weren't watching us, somebody is, most likely with our permission.
Anyway, these observations are perhaps just self-indulgence, and besides the point- I didn't like this book because it didn't thoughtfully consider the question of privacy and security balance, not because I don't agree with the author's perspective.
* I received an ARC from the publisher and Reading Room in exchange for an honest review.
First, the writing: the voice of our protagonist is so stereotypical liberal privileged professor (no offense meant: I love academia, and I'm as liberal as they come). But, as a liberal academic (lover), I am especially appalled and repelled by vituperative, petulant, self-rationalizing, naive, artless acts of beating readers over the head with political pronouncements-especially when espoused be fellow liberals: we can do better. Basically, this book has the same tone as a Michael Moore film- the same vibe of an endless liberal rant, but even worse, because our protagonist spends at least 66.6% of the novel navel-gazing and feeling sorry for himself.
[example: I am paraphrasing because this was an ARC - the protagonist begins the story by blaming his colleagues at Columbia for not awarding him tenure, and wines about being demoted to a "lowly" fellow/lecturer at Oxford, in one of the lesser colleges, with dumber students.. Um, yeah. Sorry, but I don't feel the swells of empathy rising within for this poor guy's terrible situation.]
While I may have agreed with much of Flanery's politics, I cringed the entire time at the presentation, and if I'm half skimming because I'm embarrassed, I can't imagine this book reaching out those "across the aisle."
Except, for, perhaps, the topic itself, which seems to appeal to subgroups of all persuasions in American politics - from libertarians to the most liberal democrat: privacy, and the ways in which a democratic society balances these concerns with those of national security. The premise of this novel is that we can be "no one", and still find ourselves caught in the web of surveillance and suspicion. This undoubtedly occurs, and I can only imagine, is a horrific situation. Still, that's not our professor's story.
For, in fact, the now-lowly professor engages in a series of extremely naive and idiotic acts and makes compoundingly ridiculously reckless decisions that clearly land him in the situation he is in, under surveillance by the state. He is, in fact, not "every wo/man", he is, rather, a highly "street-stupid", blindly romantic, self-obsessed man who is unable to see anything outside his own bubble, and who is unable grow and learn from his absurd mistakes and transgressions. Certainly, if I was heading up Some Agency, I'd have this guy under surveillance, based on his paper trail - no question.
Some examples:
So, by choosing the example he did for the character's background story, Flanery in effect cancels out his primary question and concern: can just about anyone turn up under surveillance by the state? If so, what is our recourse?
My last point of contention with I Am No One is my personal stance on the issue, which I would rate as "balanced". I have no illusion of privacy, so I was consummately annoyed at our professor's naivete. I grew up on stolen phone calls with my father - he called when he could travel, hundreds of miles away from his new home in Maryland. Of course, the Securitate was listening in, just as they were blatantly opening our mail (at one point they stopped bothering about taping back already opened envelopes). Now that I've been living in the US over 2/3 of my lifetime, I haven't lost my cynical, but, also, I think, realistic view that there is no such thing as privacy. There's Amazon, who knew about my upcoming wedding before some of my relatives did (it pestered me to establish a wedding registry), there's my credit card records and a list of all my transactions somewhere - enough for AMEX to provide me with a full nutritional plan and counselling, I'm sure; there's my emails, sitting on google's servers.... it's all out there, and the only thing I can do is be sensible about my choices. It seems both evident and not unreasonable that some privacy is what we trade everyday we make a decision to consume or communicate in a way that is not face-to-face, or in cash. Even if the big bad government weren't watching us, somebody is, most likely with our permission.
Anyway, these observations are perhaps just self-indulgence, and besides the point- I didn't like this book because it didn't thoughtfully consider the question of privacy and security balance, not because I don't agree with the author's perspective.
* I received an ARC from the publisher and Reading Room in exchange for an honest review.
July 29, 2016
Find all my reviews on my blog: https://thesuspenseisthrillingme.com
Date Read: 07/24/16
Pub Day: 07/05/2016
3 STARS
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O’Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it’s as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy’s life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is ‘no one’, as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.
Patrick Flanery is a new author for me; I actually don’t have many acquaintances who have read his books and only found it through the Blogging For Books website. After reading the description, it sounded right up my alley and I requested it immediately. A 3 star review is the hardest to write in my opinion, because while I enjoyed the book, there were some issues I had with it. It’s not a glowing review, but it’s not a negative one either. I just felt the need to clarify as I’ve received many messages recently regarding my 3 star reviews.
Jeremy was a tricky character for me; I didn’t particularly like him as a person, but I did feel sorry for him and sympathetic to his plight. His character was written in an extremely believable voice; you can clearly relate that he is an academic who has experience residing outside the United States. This degree of precision was a huge pro to me, as I questioned everything going on while simultaneously feeling completely at ease with the narrator, as he appeared 100% reliable and trustworthy, or as much as one can while slowly losing his mind. His thoughts would sometimes go into these run on sentences and jumbled phrases that were compulsive but not confusing. I never once felt lost along the story as a reader.
I think my only negative feelings toward this book stem from the fact that, for a novel of suspense, it lacked the pacing and grip that I’ve come to expect from a thriller. After I reached the half way mark, it did seem to speed up a bit, and the ending, while not especially memorable, was satisfactory. Overall I enjoyed the read, it just wasn’t anything to write home about. I would like to mention that the cover is WAY more gorgeous in person than in pictures. The little specks are colored glitter that glisten in the light; truly remarkable against the otherwise bleak art.
I’ve read many reviews debating whether the author’s research and take on surveillance -state is accurate; I really can’t add anything as I know very little about it myself outside of fiction. My conclusion is that I felt he did a fine job writing a fictional novel regarding the subject and that we should keep in mind that it is just that, fiction. This book was not intended to educate its readers on the accuracy of big brother, it was solely meant to entertain the reader, which in my case I would count a success. I think those who like their suspense novels more character than action driven will enjoy this. An intelligent read that I am grateful to have received.
*Many thanks to Penguin Random House for my copy in exchange for an honest review. I’d like to note they sent an additional copy for a giveaway which I’m extremely grateful for as well!
Date Read: 07/24/16
Pub Day: 07/05/2016
3 STARS
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O’Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it’s as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy’s life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious that he might soon be faced with his own denaturalization. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is ‘no one’, as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.
Patrick Flanery is a new author for me; I actually don’t have many acquaintances who have read his books and only found it through the Blogging For Books website. After reading the description, it sounded right up my alley and I requested it immediately. A 3 star review is the hardest to write in my opinion, because while I enjoyed the book, there were some issues I had with it. It’s not a glowing review, but it’s not a negative one either. I just felt the need to clarify as I’ve received many messages recently regarding my 3 star reviews.
Jeremy was a tricky character for me; I didn’t particularly like him as a person, but I did feel sorry for him and sympathetic to his plight. His character was written in an extremely believable voice; you can clearly relate that he is an academic who has experience residing outside the United States. This degree of precision was a huge pro to me, as I questioned everything going on while simultaneously feeling completely at ease with the narrator, as he appeared 100% reliable and trustworthy, or as much as one can while slowly losing his mind. His thoughts would sometimes go into these run on sentences and jumbled phrases that were compulsive but not confusing. I never once felt lost along the story as a reader.
I think my only negative feelings toward this book stem from the fact that, for a novel of suspense, it lacked the pacing and grip that I’ve come to expect from a thriller. After I reached the half way mark, it did seem to speed up a bit, and the ending, while not especially memorable, was satisfactory. Overall I enjoyed the read, it just wasn’t anything to write home about. I would like to mention that the cover is WAY more gorgeous in person than in pictures. The little specks are colored glitter that glisten in the light; truly remarkable against the otherwise bleak art.
I’ve read many reviews debating whether the author’s research and take on surveillance -state is accurate; I really can’t add anything as I know very little about it myself outside of fiction. My conclusion is that I felt he did a fine job writing a fictional novel regarding the subject and that we should keep in mind that it is just that, fiction. This book was not intended to educate its readers on the accuracy of big brother, it was solely meant to entertain the reader, which in my case I would count a success. I think those who like their suspense novels more character than action driven will enjoy this. An intelligent read that I am grateful to have received.
*Many thanks to Penguin Random House for my copy in exchange for an honest review. I’d like to note they sent an additional copy for a giveaway which I’m extremely grateful for as well!
September 15, 2019
LINK UPDATED
The blurb of this book, coupled with the popular shelving of "Mystery" and "Thriller" on goodreads, suggested that this was going to be something of a high-drama thriller, with a certain hint of personal madness. Perhaps I went into this book with the wrong mindset, but I don't think that's the underlying problem with this book.
I knew from the first chapter, nay the first page, that this was not going to be an easy read, and though I tried to revisit this title on several occasions, and tried to push through to get to the meat of the story, I eventually had to throw in the towel. In browsing the reviews of people who did push through this story, I have been led to believe that there never was any meat to this story, nor a proper conclusion.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
The blurb of this book, coupled with the popular shelving of "Mystery" and "Thriller" on goodreads, suggested that this was going to be something of a high-drama thriller, with a certain hint of personal madness. Perhaps I went into this book with the wrong mindset, but I don't think that's the underlying problem with this book.
I knew from the first chapter, nay the first page, that this was not going to be an easy read, and though I tried to revisit this title on several occasions, and tried to push through to get to the meat of the story, I eventually had to throw in the towel. In browsing the reviews of people who did push through this story, I have been led to believe that there never was any meat to this story, nor a proper conclusion.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
May 5, 2016
I received a copy from Library Thing in exchange for an honest review.
I rarely write reviews for books I do not finish, probably because I rarely leave books unfinished, but I just cannot get through this novel, which is disappointing to say the least.
I was highly intrigued by the description that was given for this book. I thought perhaps it was a psychological thriller and it was going to contain numerous fun twists and turns, leaving you guessing 'til the end. Neel Mukherjee promised it would, "... get under your skin, leave you jittery and unsettled, and have you looking over your shoulder." Yet, all you get is long-winded inner monologues, random thoughts that become seven page essays, run-on sentences, and zero plot. Unsettled? Yes, but only by how tedious it was. And I looked over my shoulder... for a better book to read.
This novel had a lot of potential, as there were a few times it finally delivered a bit of what it promised, but then the narrator would bore me again with his mundane stories. I made it halfway through, but I have reached my limit and must desist.
I rarely write reviews for books I do not finish, probably because I rarely leave books unfinished, but I just cannot get through this novel, which is disappointing to say the least.
I was highly intrigued by the description that was given for this book. I thought perhaps it was a psychological thriller and it was going to contain numerous fun twists and turns, leaving you guessing 'til the end. Neel Mukherjee promised it would, "... get under your skin, leave you jittery and unsettled, and have you looking over your shoulder." Yet, all you get is long-winded inner monologues, random thoughts that become seven page essays, run-on sentences, and zero plot. Unsettled? Yes, but only by how tedious it was. And I looked over my shoulder... for a better book to read.
This novel had a lot of potential, as there were a few times it finally delivered a bit of what it promised, but then the narrator would bore me again with his mundane stories. I made it halfway through, but I have reached my limit and must desist.
February 4, 2016
Paranoia doesn't mean they're not out to get you...
Jeremy O'Keefe has returned to New York after spending a decade teaching at Oxford University. He's glad to be back, especially since it means he's able to spend time with his daughter, now grown and married. But a series of odd events begin to make him feel he's under some kind of surveillance, though he doesn't know by whom or why. Unless he's imagining it all...
Flanery has chosen a very different voice for the first-person narrator of this book, and he sustains it beautifully. Almost stream of consciousness at times, Jeremy uses long run-on sentences, full of digressions and asides, but so skilfully constructed they always make it back to where they began without losing the reader along the way. Jeremy is unreliable, not so much – or perhaps not only - because he is trying to mislead the reader, but because he doesn't really want to face up to his own weaknesses. But as he rambles on, frequently repeating himself and going over the same bits of his life again and again, each time the story he tells contains subtle changes, so that we gradually get to understand him better and, despite him, begin to be able to see between the gaps and put the true story together ourselves.
A feeling of unease develops from the beginning, when Jeremy waits for a student with whom he has arranged a meeting. She doesn't turn up, and Jeremy later finds an e-mail exchange he apparently had with her postponing the meeting – an exchange of which he has no memory. When he recounts this incident to his daughter, he is surprised at how ready she is to consider that the problem lies in Jeremy's own mental state. But paranoia does seem to be a feature of Jeremy's personality, as does fear. His academic focus is on post-war surveillance methods, particularly in East Germany, and he also runs courses on how surveillance and voyeurism are portrayed in films. Perhaps all this is feeding into how he's interpreting events. Certainly some of his suspicions about people seem little more than paranoia, but some of the odd things that happen (if we can trust his account of them) suggest there's more to it than that. The uncertainty is brilliantly done and creates an atmosphere of growing tension as the story slowly unfolds.
Patrick Flanery zoomed onto my must-read list with his first novel Absolution and consolidated his position as one of my favourites with Fallen Land, a book that I presumptuously declared should be a contender for the title of Great American Novel for the 2000s. So my expectations for this one were high – probably too high. And in truth it didn't quite meet those expectations. However, having given myself some time to mull it over before writing this review, I've concluded that it's primarily the comparison with his previous books that has left me a little disappointed with this one.
It's difficult to explain without spoilers why I felt a little let down by how the story played out, so I'll have to be pretty oblique here – sorry! There are two main questions in the book – is Jeremy under surveillance, and if so, why? When the answers become clear, it also becomes obvious that Jeremy must have known the answers all along, which makes a bit of a nonsense of all the passages where the reader watched him puzzle over it. As an intelligent man, whether paranoid or mentally stable or not, he could not have known what he knew and yet not have understood the implications. So when all became clear, I found that credibility nosedived. However...
… as I thought about it more, I realised that Flanery had done something that I think in retrospect is rather clever, though I'm not entirely sure whether it was intentional. (And, clever or not, intentional or not, it doesn't remove the basic credibility problem.) The whole book reads as if it's heading in the direction of criticism of our surveillance society – of those hard-won freedoms we have cheerfully and perhaps short-sightedly given up in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist episodes of the last couple of decades. This preconception of the 'message' of the book meant that, when it ended, my initial reaction was to say Flanery had failed to make his point. But when I thought more about it, I realised that he could have done that facile thing – given us the cliché of the blameless individual hounded by an over-powerful state – and we could all have tut-tutted merrily along in our liberal disapproval. But Flanery didn't – instead he gave us something that left the moral stance much less clear; something that made me realise how far my own opinions have shifted in response to the repeated horrors of recent years. That yes, I do want to shelter behind state security services and, yes, I am willing to give up things I would once have considered sacrosanct in return for security. And that left me ruminating...
So, in the end, the depiction of Jeremy's descent into paranoia and fear make it a tense read, and Flanery's excellent use of language and voice make it an enjoyable one. And, although I don't think this book works quite as well as his previous ones, it is still thought-provoking, raising important questions about security, surveillance and freedom in this new world we inhabit.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Atlantic Books.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Jeremy O'Keefe has returned to New York after spending a decade teaching at Oxford University. He's glad to be back, especially since it means he's able to spend time with his daughter, now grown and married. But a series of odd events begin to make him feel he's under some kind of surveillance, though he doesn't know by whom or why. Unless he's imagining it all...
Flanery has chosen a very different voice for the first-person narrator of this book, and he sustains it beautifully. Almost stream of consciousness at times, Jeremy uses long run-on sentences, full of digressions and asides, but so skilfully constructed they always make it back to where they began without losing the reader along the way. Jeremy is unreliable, not so much – or perhaps not only - because he is trying to mislead the reader, but because he doesn't really want to face up to his own weaknesses. But as he rambles on, frequently repeating himself and going over the same bits of his life again and again, each time the story he tells contains subtle changes, so that we gradually get to understand him better and, despite him, begin to be able to see between the gaps and put the true story together ourselves.
A feeling of unease develops from the beginning, when Jeremy waits for a student with whom he has arranged a meeting. She doesn't turn up, and Jeremy later finds an e-mail exchange he apparently had with her postponing the meeting – an exchange of which he has no memory. When he recounts this incident to his daughter, he is surprised at how ready she is to consider that the problem lies in Jeremy's own mental state. But paranoia does seem to be a feature of Jeremy's personality, as does fear. His academic focus is on post-war surveillance methods, particularly in East Germany, and he also runs courses on how surveillance and voyeurism are portrayed in films. Perhaps all this is feeding into how he's interpreting events. Certainly some of his suspicions about people seem little more than paranoia, but some of the odd things that happen (if we can trust his account of them) suggest there's more to it than that. The uncertainty is brilliantly done and creates an atmosphere of growing tension as the story slowly unfolds.
Patrick Flanery zoomed onto my must-read list with his first novel Absolution and consolidated his position as one of my favourites with Fallen Land, a book that I presumptuously declared should be a contender for the title of Great American Novel for the 2000s. So my expectations for this one were high – probably too high. And in truth it didn't quite meet those expectations. However, having given myself some time to mull it over before writing this review, I've concluded that it's primarily the comparison with his previous books that has left me a little disappointed with this one.
It's difficult to explain without spoilers why I felt a little let down by how the story played out, so I'll have to be pretty oblique here – sorry! There are two main questions in the book – is Jeremy under surveillance, and if so, why? When the answers become clear, it also becomes obvious that Jeremy must have known the answers all along, which makes a bit of a nonsense of all the passages where the reader watched him puzzle over it. As an intelligent man, whether paranoid or mentally stable or not, he could not have known what he knew and yet not have understood the implications. So when all became clear, I found that credibility nosedived. However...
… as I thought about it more, I realised that Flanery had done something that I think in retrospect is rather clever, though I'm not entirely sure whether it was intentional. (And, clever or not, intentional or not, it doesn't remove the basic credibility problem.) The whole book reads as if it's heading in the direction of criticism of our surveillance society – of those hard-won freedoms we have cheerfully and perhaps short-sightedly given up in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist episodes of the last couple of decades. This preconception of the 'message' of the book meant that, when it ended, my initial reaction was to say Flanery had failed to make his point. But when I thought more about it, I realised that he could have done that facile thing – given us the cliché of the blameless individual hounded by an over-powerful state – and we could all have tut-tutted merrily along in our liberal disapproval. But Flanery didn't – instead he gave us something that left the moral stance much less clear; something that made me realise how far my own opinions have shifted in response to the repeated horrors of recent years. That yes, I do want to shelter behind state security services and, yes, I am willing to give up things I would once have considered sacrosanct in return for security. And that left me ruminating...
So, in the end, the depiction of Jeremy's descent into paranoia and fear make it a tense read, and Flanery's excellent use of language and voice make it an enjoyable one. And, although I don't think this book works quite as well as his previous ones, it is still thought-provoking, raising important questions about security, surveillance and freedom in this new world we inhabit.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Atlantic Books.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
March 15, 2023
Book received in exchange for review.
This book is exhausting. If you’re into extremely long monologues, then maybe you’ll enjoy it. The main character’s thoughts account for roughly 90% of the book, with actual dialogue and movement in the remaining 10%. Do we really need a book that takes 1.5 pages to describe a character’s need to lock a bathroom door? He values privacy, we get it... Some sentences seem to go on for an eternity, divided only by occasional commas; paragraphs are multiple pages long. Once again, it’s exhausting to read. I found myself skimming quite often just to get to some actual substance. The book’s plot can be summed up in approximately four sentences. This book was a waste of time for me. I expected more.
This book is exhausting. If you’re into extremely long monologues, then maybe you’ll enjoy it. The main character’s thoughts account for roughly 90% of the book, with actual dialogue and movement in the remaining 10%. Do we really need a book that takes 1.5 pages to describe a character’s need to lock a bathroom door? He values privacy, we get it... Some sentences seem to go on for an eternity, divided only by occasional commas; paragraphs are multiple pages long. Once again, it’s exhausting to read. I found myself skimming quite often just to get to some actual substance. The book’s plot can be summed up in approximately four sentences. This book was a waste of time for me. I expected more.
January 30, 2019
I enjoyed the elegant voice in this novel. The voice is erudite, assured, educated, and possesses perfect diction and cadence...in short it sounds exactly like an American man whose career has been in academia, and who has returned to the US after a long time living in the U.K., which is exactly who the narrator is. I have to say how refreshing it was to read a book in this voice, after reading so many novels where the narrator is breathlessly speaking in present tense, or is a five year old child, or is some other approximation of a speaking person that has nothing to do with written diction. Having a narrator communicating at this level of diction felt like a clever choice to me, where the suspenseful and unpredictable elements of the story felt unusually charged with logic, and where I never knew whether to trust the story or not.
June 14, 2016
When No One Becomes Someone
Jeremy O'Keefe is indeed a middle-aged professor, an historian specializing in East Germany in the Stasi era. He has just returned to a well-paid job at NYU after teaching for more than a decade at Oxford. In most respects, this is a homecoming: he used to teach at Columbia; he is still on speaking terms with his ex-wife, and he has a much-loved daughter Meredith, now running her own art gallery and married to a media Wunderkind; his mother lives a little way up the Hudson. But he has largely lost touch with his old friends, and feels himself in a kind of limbo between the British and American cultures. In the first chapter, he goes to a cafe to meet a graduate student, but she doesn't turn up. After a rather strange conversation with a young man who joshes him about his missed date, he returns home to find an eMail on his computer from the student agreeing to his suggestion that they postpone their appointment. But he has no memory of making such a suggestion at all.
The novel will take a long time to develop. Jeremy is not an academic for nothing, and takes his time laying everything out. All the time I was reading, I caught echoes of an older generation of writers, both British and American, that I could not quite place: Auster perhaps, DeLillo, even Bellow, or across the pond McEwan, Murdoch, or possibly Angus Wilson. Many readers may be turned off by his tendency to look at everything upside and down before moving on, but I was entranced by his intelligence and frame of reference. Besides, the escalation in his story happens in very small stages: the sense that he is being watched and followed, mysterious boxes delivered to his apartment building containing computer printouts that he at first cannot understand, further encounters with the young man from the cafe. Before long, he begins to wonder if he is hallucinating or becoming paranoid; he also begins to look for explanations in his past, during those years in Oxford:
That weekend in Rhinebeck I was thinking in the mode of the campus melodrama, a middle-aged professor targeted for vengeance by a student scorned. That, I now see, was the wrong genre entirely.I was lucky, I think, to order this book (from the Amazon Vine program) on the author's name alone, and to start reading it without looking at the back-cover blurb. For one of the most intriguing things about it was simply not knowing what genre it would turn out to be. The quotation comes from more than halfway through the book, and even there the answer is far from clear. I will try not to reveal it.
What, though, is the right one?
Jeremy O'Keefe is indeed a middle-aged professor, an historian specializing in East Germany in the Stasi era. He has just returned to a well-paid job at NYU after teaching for more than a decade at Oxford. In most respects, this is a homecoming: he used to teach at Columbia; he is still on speaking terms with his ex-wife, and he has a much-loved daughter Meredith, now running her own art gallery and married to a media Wunderkind; his mother lives a little way up the Hudson. But he has largely lost touch with his old friends, and feels himself in a kind of limbo between the British and American cultures. In the first chapter, he goes to a cafe to meet a graduate student, but she doesn't turn up. After a rather strange conversation with a young man who joshes him about his missed date, he returns home to find an eMail on his computer from the student agreeing to his suggestion that they postpone their appointment. But he has no memory of making such a suggestion at all.
The novel will take a long time to develop. Jeremy is not an academic for nothing, and takes his time laying everything out. All the time I was reading, I caught echoes of an older generation of writers, both British and American, that I could not quite place: Auster perhaps, DeLillo, even Bellow, or across the pond McEwan, Murdoch, or possibly Angus Wilson. Many readers may be turned off by his tendency to look at everything upside and down before moving on, but I was entranced by his intelligence and frame of reference. Besides, the escalation in his story happens in very small stages: the sense that he is being watched and followed, mysterious boxes delivered to his apartment building containing computer printouts that he at first cannot understand, further encounters with the young man from the cafe. Before long, he begins to wonder if he is hallucinating or becoming paranoid; he also begins to look for explanations in his past, during those years in Oxford:
My own story, I know, is not only about a state of paranoia at last proved warranted. In the accordion-squeeze recollection of my past, the distant events coming closer during the moments in which I examine them only to recede as the expansive air of inattention pushes them further away again, I sense that in the end the more universal experience of romance and separation may yet prove my innocence.I am giving this four stars because I did so enjoy Professor O'Keefe's voice and comments on a wide variety of topics; I am an academic myself, after all, with experience both sides of the pond. I enjoyed the fact that the novel accelerated from the midpoint on, as revelations from Oxford are intercut with events in upstate New York, building an increasing potential for disaster. But I have to admit that my four stars might be anybody else's three: the author tends to hammer too hard at his theme; he steers a little close to melodrama; he has less success finding the voice of his more sinister characters; and he cannot prevent Jeremy O'Keefe from seeming weaker as you find out more about him.
"But I'm no one."Patrick Flanery's novel is about the gradual revelation of what those choices were, and I really enjoyed its slow but steady build-up. Perhaps the ending came a little too easily after such momentum, but it will not stop me looking forward to whatever Flanery will do next.
"We're all no one until we do something to turn ourselves into someone and you, Dad, have made choices that do just that."
December 26, 2016
Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQvur...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...
A truly impressive tale of paranoia in the computer age that will make you think back to the darkest ages of your browsing history. Filled with interesting reflections on the British/American cultural divide and with insight from the world of the academia, it shines most notably for its first person narrator, and for his Lovecraftian search for understanding.
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...
A truly impressive tale of paranoia in the computer age that will make you think back to the darkest ages of your browsing history. Filled with interesting reflections on the British/American cultural divide and with insight from the world of the academia, it shines most notably for its first person narrator, and for his Lovecraftian search for understanding.
June 14, 2016
American professor of Twentieth Century History and German Film, Doctor Jeremy O’Keefe, is newly returned to New York City from England after a decade teaching at Oxford. Although he now has dual citizenship, he becomes inwardly livid when he is mistaken for British. It becomes clear early on that Jeremy struggles with his dual citizenship status, whether here or abroad.
On top of this ongoing identity crisis, Jeremy is now receiving packages that confirm digital surveillance of every website or link he visited in the last decade. To make matters worse, he catches frequent glimpses of a man that appears to be following him. From the first chapter onwards, the novel conveys a tense atmosphere of surveillance and paranoia.
Jeremy narrates the story from a largely interior perspective, but it is balanced by crisp dialogue and flashes back to the past, both here and abroad, juxtaposed with the present time. Since returning to the states, Jeremy has a comfortable position now at NYU, but suffers from a mild depression and pervasive loneliness; his social life is limited to visits with his grown daughter, Meredith, who lives in Manhattan with her wealthy entrepreneurial husband, Peter. Jeremy’s marriage broke up years ago, but he still feels guilty about leaving for Oxford right after the 9/11 attacks, although it was arranged beforehand, due to his disappointment at not getting tenure at Columbia.
Ironically, Doctor O’Keefe’s specialties in political thought and theory included the coerced East German informants for the Stasi after WW II, as well as other forms of surveillance. He has a better understanding of surveillance than the average American, but his disturbance of losing his personal privacy is familiar to the reader. People are now aware of the tactics of the NSA, and the fact that the government (or private agencies) is using this technology to spy on private citizens.
Flanery’s assured and mature prose lured me deeper into the world of isolation, paranoia, and fear of surveillance. Much like Gene Hackman in Coppola’s film THE CONVERSATION, which Jeremy teaches in his film class, the protagonist suffers from a growing panic and loss of control. Jeremy fears he may have broken the law unwittingly, to cause this spying, but why would the entity that is spying on him also send him all the information that they have dug up? And who is monitoring his phone, and calling his mother to annihilate Jeremy’s character?
The fear and tension was palpable throughout the narration. Jeremy reveals his romantic entanglements in Oxford, particularly one doctoral student that became his lover, who has some murky ties in her family. But, was it her? Her family? A colleague? Everywhere Jeremy turns is like an accusation or invasion.
This book is for the keen enthusiast of surveillance topics, and what it means to individuals and societies. It is certainly a theme-related novel more than a character-driven one, as only Jeremy is fully dimensional here. It is written as a journal or diary of Jeremy’s travails and feelings of persecution. The tension is often understated, with only occasional splashes of action. Some of these themes were introduced in Flanery's last novel, FALLEN LAND, but FL also had more fully developed characters. The finale is not wholly unexpected—it is thoughtful rather than urgent or sensational. However, the suspenseful atmospherics and noirish quality kept me engaged and satisfied.
“I am not a criminal and still I demand privacy. I demand the right to be left alone, to be forgotten, to be a nonentity.”
On top of this ongoing identity crisis, Jeremy is now receiving packages that confirm digital surveillance of every website or link he visited in the last decade. To make matters worse, he catches frequent glimpses of a man that appears to be following him. From the first chapter onwards, the novel conveys a tense atmosphere of surveillance and paranoia.
Jeremy narrates the story from a largely interior perspective, but it is balanced by crisp dialogue and flashes back to the past, both here and abroad, juxtaposed with the present time. Since returning to the states, Jeremy has a comfortable position now at NYU, but suffers from a mild depression and pervasive loneliness; his social life is limited to visits with his grown daughter, Meredith, who lives in Manhattan with her wealthy entrepreneurial husband, Peter. Jeremy’s marriage broke up years ago, but he still feels guilty about leaving for Oxford right after the 9/11 attacks, although it was arranged beforehand, due to his disappointment at not getting tenure at Columbia.
Ironically, Doctor O’Keefe’s specialties in political thought and theory included the coerced East German informants for the Stasi after WW II, as well as other forms of surveillance. He has a better understanding of surveillance than the average American, but his disturbance of losing his personal privacy is familiar to the reader. People are now aware of the tactics of the NSA, and the fact that the government (or private agencies) is using this technology to spy on private citizens.
Flanery’s assured and mature prose lured me deeper into the world of isolation, paranoia, and fear of surveillance. Much like Gene Hackman in Coppola’s film THE CONVERSATION, which Jeremy teaches in his film class, the protagonist suffers from a growing panic and loss of control. Jeremy fears he may have broken the law unwittingly, to cause this spying, but why would the entity that is spying on him also send him all the information that they have dug up? And who is monitoring his phone, and calling his mother to annihilate Jeremy’s character?
The fear and tension was palpable throughout the narration. Jeremy reveals his romantic entanglements in Oxford, particularly one doctoral student that became his lover, who has some murky ties in her family. But, was it her? Her family? A colleague? Everywhere Jeremy turns is like an accusation or invasion.
This book is for the keen enthusiast of surveillance topics, and what it means to individuals and societies. It is certainly a theme-related novel more than a character-driven one, as only Jeremy is fully dimensional here. It is written as a journal or diary of Jeremy’s travails and feelings of persecution. The tension is often understated, with only occasional splashes of action. Some of these themes were introduced in Flanery's last novel, FALLEN LAND, but FL also had more fully developed characters. The finale is not wholly unexpected—it is thoughtful rather than urgent or sensational. However, the suspenseful atmospherics and noirish quality kept me engaged and satisfied.
“I am not a criminal and still I demand privacy. I demand the right to be left alone, to be forgotten, to be a nonentity.”
September 9, 2016
If I could give I AM NO ONE more stars, I would. A marvel of a literary thriller about our modern surveillance era.
I do not use the word 'literary' lightly. If one is expecting car chases and rock-'em-sock'-'em action, one will be highly disappointed. No, this is a psychological book full of quiet terrors, surrounded by incidents so mundane that the average person can't help but identify. This is of course the point. Your life? Mine? Opened up and spread across the cold metal dissection table? What would one find, if one looked closely enough? In this world of six-degrees-of-separation, who can say they have not met someone at a party, sat next to someone on a bus, bought cheese from someone, had their hair styled by someone, even perhaps been friendly to, even perhaps loved, a person with whom the shadowy offices of global surveillance would take exception. A file would be started. I shouldn't be at all surprised if there's one on me.
Consider the irony if one had dedicated one's life to the research of East Germany's Stasi as has Jeremy, our narrator. It's that sort of a puzzle-book.
The narrator's first person voice is perfect (I'm quite baffled by reviews here that say otherwise) -- in part because it has exactly the right tone for an academic who's spent a long time in Britain, but also because Jeremy is someone a tad bland, and deeply flawed. He's prone to long moments of introspection, passages I adored for their thoughtfulness and Jamesian interiority. It's a risky choice in a world where readers are accustomed to narrators more prone to action, and written with a high 'likability factor' in order to please their publishing house's sales team. I applaud Flanery for making it.
There is a great review in the Guardian of this book, which in part reads: "One of the pleasures of reading Flanery is the tussle between ways of understanding the shapes of stories and language. He mixes, to quote an interview he gave, “expressionism, symbolism, surrealism” into what he calls “critical realism” – he writes realist novels which show their awareness that realism is a self-conscious form like others. Reviewers have described his novels as thrillers, which is never quite right – but there are parts of the story that stand out as thrilling, next to other parts that are meditative, and others that are psychologically baffling. Readers are constantly seeking to work out what sort of writing they are reading. For instance, many of the chapters end with the kind of statement – 'As you will see, I had things to find out … ' – that suggests the construction of a thriller and doesn’t quite fit with what has gone on before."
Approach this book not as a thriller, although as the Guardian says, there are certainly thrilling moments, but as a compelling psychological exploration of privacy and what the imposed lack of it, might mean to a life. Any life. Even yours.
I received this book from Blogging for Books in return for an honest review.
I do not use the word 'literary' lightly. If one is expecting car chases and rock-'em-sock'-'em action, one will be highly disappointed. No, this is a psychological book full of quiet terrors, surrounded by incidents so mundane that the average person can't help but identify. This is of course the point. Your life? Mine? Opened up and spread across the cold metal dissection table? What would one find, if one looked closely enough? In this world of six-degrees-of-separation, who can say they have not met someone at a party, sat next to someone on a bus, bought cheese from someone, had their hair styled by someone, even perhaps been friendly to, even perhaps loved, a person with whom the shadowy offices of global surveillance would take exception. A file would be started. I shouldn't be at all surprised if there's one on me.
Consider the irony if one had dedicated one's life to the research of East Germany's Stasi as has Jeremy, our narrator. It's that sort of a puzzle-book.
The narrator's first person voice is perfect (I'm quite baffled by reviews here that say otherwise) -- in part because it has exactly the right tone for an academic who's spent a long time in Britain, but also because Jeremy is someone a tad bland, and deeply flawed. He's prone to long moments of introspection, passages I adored for their thoughtfulness and Jamesian interiority. It's a risky choice in a world where readers are accustomed to narrators more prone to action, and written with a high 'likability factor' in order to please their publishing house's sales team. I applaud Flanery for making it.
There is a great review in the Guardian of this book, which in part reads: "One of the pleasures of reading Flanery is the tussle between ways of understanding the shapes of stories and language. He mixes, to quote an interview he gave, “expressionism, symbolism, surrealism” into what he calls “critical realism” – he writes realist novels which show their awareness that realism is a self-conscious form like others. Reviewers have described his novels as thrillers, which is never quite right – but there are parts of the story that stand out as thrilling, next to other parts that are meditative, and others that are psychologically baffling. Readers are constantly seeking to work out what sort of writing they are reading. For instance, many of the chapters end with the kind of statement – 'As you will see, I had things to find out … ' – that suggests the construction of a thriller and doesn’t quite fit with what has gone on before."
Approach this book not as a thriller, although as the Guardian says, there are certainly thrilling moments, but as a compelling psychological exploration of privacy and what the imposed lack of it, might mean to a life. Any life. Even yours.
I received this book from Blogging for Books in return for an honest review.
July 12, 2016
I believe we are gradually becoming a surveillance state. I believe our privacy is increasingly compromised and it’s becoming more and more difficult to be “free” in these unsettled times.
In short, I buy into the premise behind I Am No One, which is this: “To be human is to be watched, to be part of society, because we are social animals, but we do not expect that observation by community or government will extend into our private adult lives.”
However, when I read or review a book, what is uppermost in my mind is whether the book sublimates the theme and transports me into the world of fiction. Do I want to eagerly read further? In short, does the book work?
There is no doubt that Patrick Flanery is a fine writer. I loved his book Absolution and also Fallen Land (although a little less so). In Fallen Land, a giant multinational security and defense company has “evolved” to want to manage every aspect of a person’s life. Flanery is obviously concerned about an America with increasing corporate power and decreasing individual liberties. In I Am No One, he takes the theme to the limit.
Jeremy O’Keefe, a New York academic who had spent a decade teaching in Oxford, receives boxes containing links to all of his online activity. He feels like he’s being followed. He wonders if he is starting to lose his mind. As he begins to search his memory about what would make him a target, he wonders, “Was that ethnical charge sheet enough, \I wondered, to imperil my privacy, even perhaps my liberty?” He is amazed at the slippery slope that can quickly turn a person’s life into a nightmare in this digital age.
But my problems with the book are two-fold. First, we become lost in Jeremy O’Keefe’s every thought. He is meticulous in recounting every bit of minutiae and following every thought thread, in a dispassionate and yes, academic, manner. That undoubtedly works for many readers, but not for me. I wanted a greater sense of emotional connection (put another way, I wanted to FEEL the anxiety). Second, at times, I felt that Patrick Flanery had twinned with his characters, so that I wasn’t quite sure whose voice I was following – the author’s or the character’s. the only comparison I can make is to the book Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, where he indulged in advancing some pet causes at the expense of a propulsive narrative. (At one point, in a page-long, controlled run-on sentence, Jeremy rants, “What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground…etc.” Character or author?)
Still, I was glad to read the book for the sheer power of Patrick Flanery’s prose, which is indisputably strong, and it’s an important reminder about how rapidly we can fall into the rabbit hole. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
In short, I buy into the premise behind I Am No One, which is this: “To be human is to be watched, to be part of society, because we are social animals, but we do not expect that observation by community or government will extend into our private adult lives.”
However, when I read or review a book, what is uppermost in my mind is whether the book sublimates the theme and transports me into the world of fiction. Do I want to eagerly read further? In short, does the book work?
There is no doubt that Patrick Flanery is a fine writer. I loved his book Absolution and also Fallen Land (although a little less so). In Fallen Land, a giant multinational security and defense company has “evolved” to want to manage every aspect of a person’s life. Flanery is obviously concerned about an America with increasing corporate power and decreasing individual liberties. In I Am No One, he takes the theme to the limit.
Jeremy O’Keefe, a New York academic who had spent a decade teaching in Oxford, receives boxes containing links to all of his online activity. He feels like he’s being followed. He wonders if he is starting to lose his mind. As he begins to search his memory about what would make him a target, he wonders, “Was that ethnical charge sheet enough, \I wondered, to imperil my privacy, even perhaps my liberty?” He is amazed at the slippery slope that can quickly turn a person’s life into a nightmare in this digital age.
But my problems with the book are two-fold. First, we become lost in Jeremy O’Keefe’s every thought. He is meticulous in recounting every bit of minutiae and following every thought thread, in a dispassionate and yes, academic, manner. That undoubtedly works for many readers, but not for me. I wanted a greater sense of emotional connection (put another way, I wanted to FEEL the anxiety). Second, at times, I felt that Patrick Flanery had twinned with his characters, so that I wasn’t quite sure whose voice I was following – the author’s or the character’s. the only comparison I can make is to the book Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, where he indulged in advancing some pet causes at the expense of a propulsive narrative. (At one point, in a page-long, controlled run-on sentence, Jeremy rants, “What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground…etc.” Character or author?)
Still, I was glad to read the book for the sheer power of Patrick Flanery’s prose, which is indisputably strong, and it’s an important reminder about how rapidly we can fall into the rabbit hole. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
April 25, 2016
I received an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.
Wow, this book was incredibly disappointing. It had an intriguing premise. Professor Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York City after a decade at Oxford University in England. One day he starts receiving mysterious packages containing records of his phone calls, online activities, etc. He is being watched, but why? Does it have something to do with his time at Oxford, and what does it all mean?
What promised to be an engrossing mystery was, instead, boring and unsatisfying. Hardly anything happens in the first half of the book, just a lot of internal conversations that Jeremy has with himself, a lot of ruminating on a lot of stuff, a LOT of long flashbacks. It was unbelievably tedious. Even a simple conversation between Jeremy and another person takes pages and pages because Jeremy will flash back in the middle of the conversation, and author Patrick Flanery will go on and on with the flashback before bringing the reader back to the present. Also, Jeremy is a pompous, elitist ass, and his ruminations made me want to smack him upside the head.
The plot finally seems to pick up a little -- and I mean just a little -- after the halfway mark, but just when it seems something interesting might happen, it stalls again. This stopping and starting continues all the way until the end of the book. And the ending itself cannot be described as anything but unsatisfying. Nothing was resolved, no questions were answered. It just ends. With nothing. *groan*
Wow, this book was incredibly disappointing. It had an intriguing premise. Professor Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York City after a decade at Oxford University in England. One day he starts receiving mysterious packages containing records of his phone calls, online activities, etc. He is being watched, but why? Does it have something to do with his time at Oxford, and what does it all mean?
What promised to be an engrossing mystery was, instead, boring and unsatisfying. Hardly anything happens in the first half of the book, just a lot of internal conversations that Jeremy has with himself, a lot of ruminating on a lot of stuff, a LOT of long flashbacks. It was unbelievably tedious. Even a simple conversation between Jeremy and another person takes pages and pages because Jeremy will flash back in the middle of the conversation, and author Patrick Flanery will go on and on with the flashback before bringing the reader back to the present. Also, Jeremy is a pompous, elitist ass, and his ruminations made me want to smack him upside the head.
The plot finally seems to pick up a little -- and I mean just a little -- after the halfway mark, but just when it seems something interesting might happen, it stalls again. This stopping and starting continues all the way until the end of the book. And the ending itself cannot be described as anything but unsatisfying. Nothing was resolved, no questions were answered. It just ends. With nothing. *groan*
April 6, 2016
I read this because the reviews were so impressive but still with low expectations because I have found that the few recent novels I've read on the subject of the internet and the invasion of privacy have all been disappointing. And I'm afraid I was right to be sceptical. For me, this novel starts slowly and very low key and then remains that way to the end. There are two problems. Firstly, the character of the narrator, Jeremy O'Keefe, a history professor specialising in surveillance (e.g. The Stasi in East Germany) which is way too neat a coincidence.
It's true that Flanery has created a character perfectly in keeping with his title - he is a 'no one' - but it's a difficult trick to pull off, having a boring pedantic main character. Early in the book, he spends three pages debating with various people whether he has an English or an American accent!
The other problem is the plot. This is a novel about a man who fears he is being watched - that his whole life is under constant surveillance and yet there is never any sense of menace or build up of tension. I can see that that is Patrick Flanery's point - that, in the current climate, this sort of invasion of privacy can happen to any of us, however innocent or ordinary we may be. But is doesn't make for a very interesting novel.
It's true that Flanery has created a character perfectly in keeping with his title - he is a 'no one' - but it's a difficult trick to pull off, having a boring pedantic main character. Early in the book, he spends three pages debating with various people whether he has an English or an American accent!
The other problem is the plot. This is a novel about a man who fears he is being watched - that his whole life is under constant surveillance and yet there is never any sense of menace or build up of tension. I can see that that is Patrick Flanery's point - that, in the current climate, this sort of invasion of privacy can happen to any of us, however innocent or ordinary we may be. But is doesn't make for a very interesting novel.
April 11, 2016
Poor. Went on and on about nothing.
June 14, 2017
Jeremy O’Keefe is a professor who, once his marriage fell apart, accepted a job overseas at Oxford. However, once his life there falls apart, he finds himself back in New York. What happened in Oxford is slowly (and I do mean slowly) revealed as well as the hidden purpose for his return to the states. As he struggles to find his stride back in New York, questions of his mental state arise as he seems, to his family, to become paranoid. Is he going crazy or is the man on the sidewalk who stares up at his window every night actually stalking him?
The summary sets up the novel to be a psychological thriller when it really is just a pompous old man's rhetoric on the fall of privacy. As for the ending, there does not appear to be one. It seemed like the author had considered continued but even he had bored himself so exhaustively with this writing that he could not go on any longer. That might be harsh, but it might also be true.
It is very easy to forget that this is written in a documentary style. This makes Jeremy’s excessively detailed narrative frustrating because the said excessive detail does not appear to come around as necessary at any point. Two examples of this are: the argument of placing his accent and the repetition of useless information. Americans find his accent to be too British, Brits find his accent too American. This argument occurs far too many times to be funny or interesting, whichever the author was originally intending. Another example is the frequent description of Jeremy “staying in” for the night by turning on the radio for news and eating Vietnamese take-out. This is not only described once, but several times but nothing comes of it-he just really likes Vietnamese cuisine.
Additionally irritating is the general theme of loneliness that looms throughout the book. This theme is irritating because it is displayed in a tone of conceit despite feeling victimized. There is not much content worth reading in the first half of the book, aside from the timeline of his venture to and from England.
In conclusion, I felt that the novel was long-winded, anticlimatic, and redundant. I would not recommend this book unless you enjoy getting stuck next to the rambling stranger on the plane, the subway, or relative at a family function who really just enjoy hearing themselves talk.
For those who may be sensitive: I did not read any foul language, sexually suggestive scenarios, nor direct violence. However, it should also be noted, that I did skim over some parts of the book that were particularly verbose.
Please note: a physical copy of this book was provided via LibraryThing.
The summary sets up the novel to be a psychological thriller when it really is just a pompous old man's rhetoric on the fall of privacy. As for the ending, there does not appear to be one. It seemed like the author had considered continued but even he had bored himself so exhaustively with this writing that he could not go on any longer. That might be harsh, but it might also be true.
It is very easy to forget that this is written in a documentary style. This makes Jeremy’s excessively detailed narrative frustrating because the said excessive detail does not appear to come around as necessary at any point. Two examples of this are: the argument of placing his accent and the repetition of useless information. Americans find his accent to be too British, Brits find his accent too American. This argument occurs far too many times to be funny or interesting, whichever the author was originally intending. Another example is the frequent description of Jeremy “staying in” for the night by turning on the radio for news and eating Vietnamese take-out. This is not only described once, but several times but nothing comes of it-he just really likes Vietnamese cuisine.
Additionally irritating is the general theme of loneliness that looms throughout the book. This theme is irritating because it is displayed in a tone of conceit despite feeling victimized. There is not much content worth reading in the first half of the book, aside from the timeline of his venture to and from England.
In conclusion, I felt that the novel was long-winded, anticlimatic, and redundant. I would not recommend this book unless you enjoy getting stuck next to the rambling stranger on the plane, the subway, or relative at a family function who really just enjoy hearing themselves talk.
For those who may be sensitive: I did not read any foul language, sexually suggestive scenarios, nor direct violence. However, it should also be noted, that I did skim over some parts of the book that were particularly verbose.
Please note: a physical copy of this book was provided via LibraryThing.
March 4, 2016
Jeremy O'Keefe is either losing his mind, or somebody is manipulating even the smallest details of his life. His mind is a sharp one, having taught at Columbia, Oxford and now NYU, but certain events have him concerned about his own sanity and even his daughter recommends seeing a neurologist "just to be sure".
Patrick Flanery's new novel, I Am No One, is Dr. O'Keefe's own account of events, past, present and future, inspired after he misses a meeting with a student and finds in his own "sent mail" an email composed and sent in his name about which he has absolutely no memory. On top of that, strange packages begin arriving at his home in which it becomes clear that someone has been watching him closely for a very long time. What follows are his memories of the past, observations of the present and his theories about the future as he tries to make sense of these events.
Flanery walks a line between literary fiction and thriller in this novel, but never fully crosses the line into the latter. In fact, it may be more aptly described as a thought experiment. Through the character of Jeremy, we are asked to think about our expectations of privacy, and whether or not, among other things, a system set up for seemingly good reasons could harm the innocent. These are good things to think about, but they didn't feel particularly timely in this instance. And though it is set in the now, (there are multiple references to rebels in Syria for instance) the questions being asked have been thoroughly debated for the past 15 years.
The novel is well crafted, and at times is able to create tension and suspense, but its main problem is that Professor O'Keefe simply isn't a very interesting or likeable protagonist. Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily need a likeable character to guide me through a novel, but Jeremy is at times boring, and often a bit of a blowhard. In one scene he has a suspicious man at his front door asking to borrow a candle and instead of saying "no" and closing the door, he launches into a lecture on the fact that one does not technically borrow a candle as it is technically depleted with use.
There is enough to like here to make "I Am No One" worth a read. The questions it asks, though perhaps not particularly groundbreaking, do remain as yet unanswered and thus relevant, and so they remain topics worth pondering. I only wish Flanery had created a more relatable character to guide his readers through the process.
Patrick Flanery's new novel, I Am No One, is Dr. O'Keefe's own account of events, past, present and future, inspired after he misses a meeting with a student and finds in his own "sent mail" an email composed and sent in his name about which he has absolutely no memory. On top of that, strange packages begin arriving at his home in which it becomes clear that someone has been watching him closely for a very long time. What follows are his memories of the past, observations of the present and his theories about the future as he tries to make sense of these events.
Flanery walks a line between literary fiction and thriller in this novel, but never fully crosses the line into the latter. In fact, it may be more aptly described as a thought experiment. Through the character of Jeremy, we are asked to think about our expectations of privacy, and whether or not, among other things, a system set up for seemingly good reasons could harm the innocent. These are good things to think about, but they didn't feel particularly timely in this instance. And though it is set in the now, (there are multiple references to rebels in Syria for instance) the questions being asked have been thoroughly debated for the past 15 years.
The novel is well crafted, and at times is able to create tension and suspense, but its main problem is that Professor O'Keefe simply isn't a very interesting or likeable protagonist. Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily need a likeable character to guide me through a novel, but Jeremy is at times boring, and often a bit of a blowhard. In one scene he has a suspicious man at his front door asking to borrow a candle and instead of saying "no" and closing the door, he launches into a lecture on the fact that one does not technically borrow a candle as it is technically depleted with use.
There is enough to like here to make "I Am No One" worth a read. The questions it asks, though perhaps not particularly groundbreaking, do remain as yet unanswered and thus relevant, and so they remain topics worth pondering. I only wish Flanery had created a more relatable character to guide his readers through the process.
June 21, 2016
Jeremy O’Keefe is a German history professor who is an expert on the Stasi and surveillance on the population. He’s lived in England for the last decade and has come home to take up a position at New York University. He renews his relationship with his daughter but suffers from loneliness. As he ponders his life and the decisions he’s made in the past, he begins to suspect that he is being spied upon. He begins to receive mysterious boxes containing voluminous records of everything he’s done online. Why would anyone care about a man who lives an ordinary life enough to put such surveillance on him? Is he paranoid? Is his memory impaired or could he be doing this to himself? Is his past catching up to him? Or is Jeremy an unreliable narrator?
This is an interesting look at privacy, freedom, memory and fear of terrorism. What I liked about it was that it’s not only a study on surveillance and how and why it could be done in today’s digital age but it’s also a deep character study on how that surveillance affects the one spied on, how it breaks down that person’s defenses, causing doubt about one’s own sanity to set in. The growing tension in this book is palpable. It gave me chills.
On the negative side, I’ve never been a fan of stream of consciousness writing and there are parts of this book that employ that technique, with very long sentences and paragraphs in a rambling manner, which tended to lose me. But not all of the book is written like that and it seemed that the author was using the technique in certain sections possibly to show the discord that was occurring in Jeremy’s mind.
By the end of this book, you’ll be changing all of your passwords and wondering about the logic of going online at all. And you’ll be thinking about this book for a long time to come. Recommended.
I was given this book by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
This is an interesting look at privacy, freedom, memory and fear of terrorism. What I liked about it was that it’s not only a study on surveillance and how and why it could be done in today’s digital age but it’s also a deep character study on how that surveillance affects the one spied on, how it breaks down that person’s defenses, causing doubt about one’s own sanity to set in. The growing tension in this book is palpable. It gave me chills.
On the negative side, I’ve never been a fan of stream of consciousness writing and there are parts of this book that employ that technique, with very long sentences and paragraphs in a rambling manner, which tended to lose me. But not all of the book is written like that and it seemed that the author was using the technique in certain sections possibly to show the discord that was occurring in Jeremy’s mind.
By the end of this book, you’ll be changing all of your passwords and wondering about the logic of going online at all. And you’ll be thinking about this book for a long time to come. Recommended.
I was given this book by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
November 8, 2017
Hmm, that was somewhat disappointing from Flanery. Tackling issues of super-surveillance and privacy in our current troubled times, this is far more straightforward than I expected. The 'no-one' of the title is a History professor at NYU who finds himself being watched. There's much kerfuffle over whether he's imagining it or losing his mind but, it turns out, he really knows quite well why he's attracted the attentions of the security services during his ten years at Oxford and most of the book is displacement and sleight-of-hand.
I would guess that we're supposed to feel indignation at the intrusion of faceless government agencies into this man's life to such an extent - but, honestly, my greatest crossness was with Jeremy's unsanctioned and reprehensible affair with a PhD student whom he is supervising. His abuse of an overloaded and sensitive relationship displaced, for me, any concerns about surveillance, government snooping, privacy and exposure.
I've loved Flanery's two previous books but this one was merely ok: there are potentially interesting issues raised but the way they played out seemed to me to be overly straightforward and lacking in the sophistication and nuance of thought that I expect from Flanery.
I would guess that we're supposed to feel indignation at the intrusion of faceless government agencies into this man's life to such an extent - but, honestly, my greatest crossness was with Jeremy's unsanctioned and reprehensible affair with a PhD student whom he is supervising. His abuse of an overloaded and sensitive relationship displaced, for me, any concerns about surveillance, government snooping, privacy and exposure.
I've loved Flanery's two previous books but this one was merely ok: there are potentially interesting issues raised but the way they played out seemed to me to be overly straightforward and lacking in the sophistication and nuance of thought that I expect from Flanery.
April 29, 2016
Paranoia and privilege in an age of surveillance and terrorism. Nothing much really happens in this literary tale of a college professor who believes his privacy to have been nullified by undetermined watchers. The story plays out with narcoleptic pacing, most of it as first person monologue, yet is somewhere strangely compelling and suspenseful in a creepy, malevolent sort of way. Very much from the school of "things are not as they seem" school of story telling. This might be an interesting book club choice, although it's likely that half of any group will hate it. Still, there's something there, more felt than seen, like the hairs on the back of your neck going up while walking through a dark park late at night.
April 30, 2016
Disappointingly dull, this is the story of a man who thinks he is being watched and followed. He says he does not know by whom, but can't resist sharing his thoughts endlessly with the reader as to who might be stalking him, and is surprised that a self-styled nobody could interest the security services of any country in anyway. However, if the author thinks that a professor from Princeton, who spends a decade teaching at Oxford University before returning to New York is 'no-one' he obviously hasn't met many truly ordinary people. In fact the protagonist has a very interesting life, but Flanery, whose previous novels I have enjoyed, has managed to make this a frustratingly futile experience. Remove the repetitive conjecture, the dream sequences as well as the oft-used word 'perhaps', and there is not a lot left. This supposedly unsettling novel makes more than one reference to Francis Ford Coppola's superb psychological surveillance thriller 'The Conversation', but invoking it only highlights the huge gap between the two. Maybe it is time to revisit Gene Hackman's superb performance as 'the best bugger on the west coast'!
May 4, 2016
This book thematically and stylistically made me think of Kafka's "The Trial". It was a little slow to start for me, but the last quarter of it was really captivating. Definitely makes you think about the meaning and importance of privacy, and how easily it can be compromised. I think this is a really important and applicable topic especially in the age of the internet where we're all so eager to divulge our private lives. This book was a great introduction to more reflection on this topic.
November 5, 2016
I abandoned this book after listening for three hours. I had to save myself from these monologues by one of the most pompous, boring men on earth. By the time I fled from this book I had not learned who or why anyone would be observing the life of this tedious man, but I pity anyone who had that job.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher however I wound up borrowing and listening to the audiobook from the library.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher however I wound up borrowing and listening to the audiobook from the library.
October 30, 2017
On October 26, 2001 the Patriot Act was signed into law. It was a watershed moment igniting doubts about our right to personal privacy. Fifteen years later, after the Snowden revelations, Section 702 of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and parallel advances in data mining and face recognition technologies, even the idea of personal privacy is receding into the realm of illusion.
Author Patrick Flanery's novel probes with subtle stealth one vision of this world through the eyes of his main character Jeremy O'Keefe. O'Keefe is not likeable. The first person narrative makes his reliability suspect. Ostensibly, the book is his journal documenting his interior thoughts regarding a successions of increasingly alarming events, should the question of his sanity arise. However, his narrative is less than candid. He glosses over two life-changing events — his divorce and his failure to obtain tenure at Columbia University — without explanation (is it intrusive that the reader wonders about that?). The two events occurred shortly before 9/11. Worried about a failed career, he seizes on the opportunity to teach at Oxford. Ten years later, he is even more eager to accept an unexpected offer at N.Y.U. which enables him to return to New York.
There are numerous contradictions in his narrative. He praises the collegiality and social life at Oxford. However, he experiences loneliness on his return to New York. Ten years as an expatriot and he had made no close friends. At the same time, he had allowed his stateside friendships to lapse. His desire for privacy is almost neurotic. In England he complained about being vulnerable to anyone who chose to knock on his door, unannounced. In New York he enjoys the security of the doorman, 24/7. Only later in the narrative does he reflect on this and attribute it to his childhood lack of privacy. His narrative is also shifty. At times it feels as if he is recording his thoughts at the end of the day, as the scenes are unfolding. Yet, he frequently inserts abrupt warnings: hints of unpleasant incidents, willful attempts at denial, indications that he has jumped to a future point and knows what these events mean.
A sense of displacement preoccupies O'Keefe. He complains with almost querulous frequency about being branded an “American” in England while being mistaken as English on his return to the states. Those feelings coalesce at a posh Thanksgiving gathering at his daughter's apartment. When he left New York Meredith was only 13. She is now 23, runs a successful art gallery, and is married to a magazine publisher whose family occupies the upper echelons of New York society. The New York he has returned to is not the New York he left. “...[T]here was only a thin and quite porous boundary between professional and private in her and Peter's world. They run their home as a site of commerce, as the staging ground for relationships and events that work on behalf of their professional pursuits. It was as alien a concept to me as if they did the opposite, allowing no one inside except other members of their respective families.” (p.112) Boundaries once understood if not formalized are now porous.
The plot moves forward gradually. O'Keefe is a professor of history and film studies. His area of expertise is the organization and techniques of the East German Stasi. A doctoral student he is advising is a no-show. He then discovers that he had sent her an email postponing the appointment to the following week. However, he claims to have no memory of sending this email. While waiting for the no-show student, he encounters a young man who engages him in a somewhat intrusive conversation. Later, he has the distinct feeling he is being followed and even sees a shadowy figure lurking on the street across from his apartment that evening. Then, he receives a series of mysterious packages and considers various explanations.
Consistent with his professional interests, some of his favorite films are Blow-Up (Antonini: 1966), The Conversation (Coppola: 1974), and Das Leben der Anderen (von Donnersmarck, 2006). They are all dark films about surveillance and myopic ignorance of context. Their mention lays a groundwork of paranoia. The reader is, like O'Keefe, left to wonder which of his speculations are unwarranted paranoia.
That feeling of disconnect is reinforced by some rambling passages. Sentences over a hundred words in length fill entire paragraphs. Here is one example: “What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those of us living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground, for the satellites we have launched into space and the aircraft, manned and unmanned, patrolling the air above the earth, gaze down upon us, producing finely detailed images of all our lives, watching us, or perhaps you could say we are merely watching ourselves, or at least the governments we allow to remain in power are watching us on our own behalf, as well as the corporations who do so only for their own behalf, even as they insist on the public service they claim to provide, and which we use, often for free, spending nothing to look at satellite images of our neighbors' own backyards and roof terraces of street views of their front windows and doors, trading this free access to all knowledge of the world for the recording by such corporations of the habits of our activity and making ourselves susceptible not only to the collecting of this data and its potential monetization, that is to say its sale to other entities collecting their own kinds of data about us, but also to be bombarded with advertising that, however much we may struggle against it, inserts its messages deep into our thoughts, influencing us one way or another, even though I insist I am not receptive to advertisements for fast food establishments where I haven't set foot since I was in my teens but nonetheless, and despite the fact that I no longer eat meat, I look at those burgers and have to struggle against the desire their images produce.” (p.120-121) Fortunately, such passages are inserted judiciously.
O'Keefe is trained by his academic specialty to think of surveillance as motivated. This is the "Big Brother" variety: a totalitarian authority insuring adherence to the party line. He discerns that the new surveillance might be random, the kind that configures big data into patterns and that those patterns can suddenly look like “proofs” based on circumstantial or even eroneous data points. However, he is reluctant to believe that he might be caught up in an example of random surveillance. After all, he is “no one.”
NOTES:
The subject Flanery explores in his novel has been publicly debated at length. Here is one piece published in 2013 in THE GUARDIAN: https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...
Interview with the author:
http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyl...
Author Patrick Flanery's novel probes with subtle stealth one vision of this world through the eyes of his main character Jeremy O'Keefe. O'Keefe is not likeable. The first person narrative makes his reliability suspect. Ostensibly, the book is his journal documenting his interior thoughts regarding a successions of increasingly alarming events, should the question of his sanity arise. However, his narrative is less than candid. He glosses over two life-changing events — his divorce and his failure to obtain tenure at Columbia University — without explanation (is it intrusive that the reader wonders about that?). The two events occurred shortly before 9/11. Worried about a failed career, he seizes on the opportunity to teach at Oxford. Ten years later, he is even more eager to accept an unexpected offer at N.Y.U. which enables him to return to New York.
There are numerous contradictions in his narrative. He praises the collegiality and social life at Oxford. However, he experiences loneliness on his return to New York. Ten years as an expatriot and he had made no close friends. At the same time, he had allowed his stateside friendships to lapse. His desire for privacy is almost neurotic. In England he complained about being vulnerable to anyone who chose to knock on his door, unannounced. In New York he enjoys the security of the doorman, 24/7. Only later in the narrative does he reflect on this and attribute it to his childhood lack of privacy. His narrative is also shifty. At times it feels as if he is recording his thoughts at the end of the day, as the scenes are unfolding. Yet, he frequently inserts abrupt warnings: hints of unpleasant incidents, willful attempts at denial, indications that he has jumped to a future point and knows what these events mean.
A sense of displacement preoccupies O'Keefe. He complains with almost querulous frequency about being branded an “American” in England while being mistaken as English on his return to the states. Those feelings coalesce at a posh Thanksgiving gathering at his daughter's apartment. When he left New York Meredith was only 13. She is now 23, runs a successful art gallery, and is married to a magazine publisher whose family occupies the upper echelons of New York society. The New York he has returned to is not the New York he left. “...[T]here was only a thin and quite porous boundary between professional and private in her and Peter's world. They run their home as a site of commerce, as the staging ground for relationships and events that work on behalf of their professional pursuits. It was as alien a concept to me as if they did the opposite, allowing no one inside except other members of their respective families.” (p.112) Boundaries once understood if not formalized are now porous.
The plot moves forward gradually. O'Keefe is a professor of history and film studies. His area of expertise is the organization and techniques of the East German Stasi. A doctoral student he is advising is a no-show. He then discovers that he had sent her an email postponing the appointment to the following week. However, he claims to have no memory of sending this email. While waiting for the no-show student, he encounters a young man who engages him in a somewhat intrusive conversation. Later, he has the distinct feeling he is being followed and even sees a shadowy figure lurking on the street across from his apartment that evening. Then, he receives a series of mysterious packages and considers various explanations.
Consistent with his professional interests, some of his favorite films are Blow-Up (Antonini: 1966), The Conversation (Coppola: 1974), and Das Leben der Anderen (von Donnersmarck, 2006). They are all dark films about surveillance and myopic ignorance of context. Their mention lays a groundwork of paranoia. The reader is, like O'Keefe, left to wonder which of his speculations are unwarranted paranoia.
That feeling of disconnect is reinforced by some rambling passages. Sentences over a hundred words in length fill entire paragraphs. Here is one example: “What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those of us living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground, for the satellites we have launched into space and the aircraft, manned and unmanned, patrolling the air above the earth, gaze down upon us, producing finely detailed images of all our lives, watching us, or perhaps you could say we are merely watching ourselves, or at least the governments we allow to remain in power are watching us on our own behalf, as well as the corporations who do so only for their own behalf, even as they insist on the public service they claim to provide, and which we use, often for free, spending nothing to look at satellite images of our neighbors' own backyards and roof terraces of street views of their front windows and doors, trading this free access to all knowledge of the world for the recording by such corporations of the habits of our activity and making ourselves susceptible not only to the collecting of this data and its potential monetization, that is to say its sale to other entities collecting their own kinds of data about us, but also to be bombarded with advertising that, however much we may struggle against it, inserts its messages deep into our thoughts, influencing us one way or another, even though I insist I am not receptive to advertisements for fast food establishments where I haven't set foot since I was in my teens but nonetheless, and despite the fact that I no longer eat meat, I look at those burgers and have to struggle against the desire their images produce.” (p.120-121) Fortunately, such passages are inserted judiciously.
O'Keefe is trained by his academic specialty to think of surveillance as motivated. This is the "Big Brother" variety: a totalitarian authority insuring adherence to the party line. He discerns that the new surveillance might be random, the kind that configures big data into patterns and that those patterns can suddenly look like “proofs” based on circumstantial or even eroneous data points. However, he is reluctant to believe that he might be caught up in an example of random surveillance. After all, he is “no one.”
NOTES:
The subject Flanery explores in his novel has been publicly debated at length. Here is one piece published in 2013 in THE GUARDIAN: https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...
Interview with the author:
http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyl...
January 19, 2019
I read this for mystery book club at my library and we all hated it. This is book is so poorly written that I'm amazed it got published. There is a sentence on page 61 or 62 that was 128 words long. I have absolutely no idea how that got passed an editor, if it was even edited.
-Spoilers-
The worst part for me though was how the narrator kept telling us that he was paranoid when he clearly wasn't. The narrator suspects a man of stalking him. Not much later after he come to that conclusion his stalker shows up inexplicably at his house. Instead of freaking out about it the narrator goes with the stalker to a secondary location and then allows himself to be cornered in a dark basement.
On top of that 90% of everything we're told about the narrator's time at oxford is pointless. It doesn't add anything to the story and instead just makes him look like a jackass. Also, half of the people in my book group thought it was annoying every time the narrator complained about how old and feeble he was. These women are much older than the narrator and do so much more with their time than he does that they found him extremely aggravating.
Honestly, if I could give this book negative stars, I would.
-Spoilers-
The worst part for me though was how the narrator kept telling us that he was paranoid when he clearly wasn't. The narrator suspects a man of stalking him. Not much later after he come to that conclusion his stalker shows up inexplicably at his house. Instead of freaking out about it the narrator goes with the stalker to a secondary location and then allows himself to be cornered in a dark basement.
On top of that 90% of everything we're told about the narrator's time at oxford is pointless. It doesn't add anything to the story and instead just makes him look like a jackass. Also, half of the people in my book group thought it was annoying every time the narrator complained about how old and feeble he was. These women are much older than the narrator and do so much more with their time than he does that they found him extremely aggravating.
Honestly, if I could give this book negative stars, I would.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 26, 2016
This is a cleverly crafted novel of suspense about Jeremy O'Keefe, a professor with dual citizenship who spent ten years teaching at Oxford before returning to the United States to teach at NYU. Told in the first person, it is the story of his suspicions that he is under surveillance, a theory enforced by his receipt of several boxes containing the history of his on-line and phone transactions, in addition to photographs, from a mysterious source. Jeremy descends into an absorbing paranoia that has him doubting every interaction, and the reader is left to wonder if his paranoia is based on fact or if, indeed, his fears are rational. He is being treated as if he were someone worth scrutiny, which makes the title "I Am No One" especially disquieting. Flanery writes with an adept intelligence about the far-reaching and thought-provoking issues of surveillance and security in a complicated world where we all have the potential to be vulnerable. I am grateful to LibraryThing for the opportunity to review this book as an ARC.
October 20, 2016
I am No One, aka Paranoid Middle-Aged Professor, (Who Also Happens to Be White and Privileged, in an era of Surveillance and Terrorism). Sounds riveting, right? Ah, not so fast...
An American college professor spends a decade working in England and finally returns to NYC, but the city has changed, in the 9/11 aftermath. There is more suspicion and paranoia, fueled by the professor's own mental uncertainty. Are there people stalking him? Is he on the government's watch-list? Or is his mind just slipping?
Good premise. Lack-luster pacing. Tries for atmospheric dread. Fails. There must be a cautionary tale buried in here somewhere but did the author have to bore the reader to tears, as he delivers it for 350 pages? It may have worked better
as a short story or a novella.
An American college professor spends a decade working in England and finally returns to NYC, but the city has changed, in the 9/11 aftermath. There is more suspicion and paranoia, fueled by the professor's own mental uncertainty. Are there people stalking him? Is he on the government's watch-list? Or is his mind just slipping?
Good premise. Lack-luster pacing. Tries for atmospheric dread. Fails. There must be a cautionary tale buried in here somewhere but did the author have to bore the reader to tears, as he delivers it for 350 pages? It may have worked better
as a short story or a novella.
Read
June 14, 2016 What am I but an academic historian, a professor who may teach another fifteen or twenty years, perhaps influence a generation or two of other scholars, although now that future - all aspects of my future -- seem genuinely in doubt. Each word I put on paper I imagine may be the last I write in freedom.
Sorry folks, at page 80, I threw this book over board. Interesting premise, but the inner monologue and long paragraphs caused me to throw my hands up in exasperation.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced e-book galley in exchange for an honest review.
Sorry folks, at page 80, I threw this book over board. Interesting premise, but the inner monologue and long paragraphs caused me to throw my hands up in exasperation.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced e-book galley in exchange for an honest review.
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