A Drone Flies in Brooklyn: On Adam Wilson's "Sensation Machines"
Adam Wilson | Sensation Machines | Soho Press | 2020 | 384 Pages
“There’s a long version and a short version of how I lost all my money,” says Michael Mixner, the male protagonist in Adam Wilson’s Sensation Machines, 44 pages into the author’s latest novel. “The long version is boring, and involves balance sheets and credit swaps, the broken dream of Detroit’s renaissance.” It’s a summation of financial loss, he says, of greed, of a miscarriage. “The short version is simple,” Michael says. “I bet on America.”
Mixner’s highs and lows are a fundamental drive of Wilson’s take on unrestrained capitalism in a riotous American future. In a quick-paced 370 pages, Wilson creates a world of passive over-technification—think Starbucks robot “tele-baristas” and ubiquitous Amazon drone deliveries—seen through the lens of the crumbling marriage of Brooklynites Michael and Wendy Mixner. In the background of Wilson’s American economy is the Augmented Reality game Shamerican Sykosis, a ubiquitous “cross between Monopoly, SimEarth and Pokémon Go” that has led—via its own cryptocurrency, Sykodollars—to the economic downfall of many. A contemporary Metropolis told in the dense witticisms of a mid-career Sam Lipsyte, Sensation Machines takes us through the neurotic musings of the Mixners and abruptly veers into what appears to be a political assassination at a Great Gatsby-themed party in downtown Manhattan. It’s all told in Wilson’s expert shift from first-person to third, from an embodied view of marriage woes to, in latter chapters, a bird’s eye whodunit. Picture Mrs. Dalloway not if she was shopping to attend a birthday party, but preparing herself to attend a coke-fueled fest of investors subsidized by a shady social media behemoth called Nøøse.
But before any guns are drawn, or lights killed, we have Michael. A New York outsider “raised off an exit ramp in East Coast exurbia,” Michael seems to be at the cusp of a midlife crisis: he’s haunted by flashbacks of his stillborn daughter Nina, yet filled with the hope that his book-length project glorifying Eminem’s fixture in the American rap canon will lead to an escape from his banking career (and his enormous debt). Then, one day, he attends a protest spearheaded by #Occupy—not, he notes, 2011’s “Bonnaroo facsimile with its compost bins and People’s Library”—as a public cry for Universal Basic Income. The protestors’ needs are clear: Twenty-three thousand dollars a year for everyone, bankrolled by taxes on the wealthy and carbon emissions. As he walks amongst the crowd, Michael meditates on the exhilaration of what he’s witnessing: “I saw adjunct professors with bulging triceps because their only job perk was gym access. MTA maintenance workers wearing tool belts filled with possible weaponry; mail carriers raring to go postal.” Playing our George Babbitt, Michael has a soft light bulb ding: “It was amazing how many industries automation had so quickly thrown in disrepair.” Then, Jay Devor, Michael’s arch nemesis and #Occupy’s founder, comes into the picture.
While Michael ponders Devor’s connection to the UBI bill, Wendy, his wife, leads her own narrative. Seemingly not as traumatized by Nina’s stillbirth as her husband, she’s wrestling with her own indecisions: whether to leave a sexually stunted Michael, to commandeer their dwindling finances, to repair her father Stuart’s grasp on reality (augmented by Shamerican Sykosis). She’s also connected to the future of UBI. As a marketing whiz for Communitiv.ly (known for her ad copy for an Indian McDonald’s: “Eat, Pray, Loving it!”), Wendy is tasked with aiding a new client: a cocky, verbose lobbyist named Lucas, with framing the UBI bill in a negative light. Again, like everywhere in Wilson’s America, politics are very personal: if the UBI bill passes, Wendy will lose more than half of her income to the feds. She knows Michael will be out of a job. But still: homelessness would plummet. Artists wouldn’t starve. “Women would not be forced into sex work.” For her, the so-called system is tied to her flailing banker-cum-writer husband. Wendy can’t help but disparage him: “I believed in that system despite Michael’s failure to exploit it.”
After Michael’s voyeuristic attempt to revitalize sex with Wendy—done while lecturing on Eminem—we come to the close of Wilson’s first act. Michael attends Devor’s #Occupy party in a “broho-chic” Manhattan hotel suite with “a cadre of finance types in various stages of undress and inebriation.” Devor’s Great Gatsby homage, with and without obvious irony, is filled with markers of death to the American dream. It’s pure Wilsonian satire: worthy of both serious oh my gods and moments of head-back laughter. After Notorious B.I.G. sings, the lights go out. An #Occupy protest barges in. Michael’s banker friend of 30 years, Ricardo Cortes, is murdered.
For the remainder of Wilson’s book, his second since his slacker novel debut Flatscreen in 2012, we’re treated to the whodunit of Ricky’s murder. Was it one of the #Occupy protestors, drunk on Shamerican AR heaven? Was it one of the partygoers, part of the cadre of financial types? Was it Lucas, Wendy’s big-ego’d client dead set on affecting the status quo? Or, could it have been Ricky’s doorman, a Black man named Donnell who soon finds himself caught in a hyper-politicized scandal, backed by by-the-book racism and Wilson’s take on media narratives? The third-person shift, scarcely used in previous works, including his short fiction in 2014’s What’s Important is Feeling, allows the author to switch quickly among all the players, highlighting how each of them are affected by the seemingly random murder of—and it has to be clear—a wealthy New York investor type.
The result, it must be said, is a more mature book. In a way, Wilson forgoes the collegiate joke-making found in his short fiction, and moves into a territory of New Yorker family novels long-occupied by social novelists like Gary Shteyngart and Saul Bellow. Especially when detailing Michael’s relationship with his sister, or his ceaseless guilt after burying Nina, or Wendy’s weird way of comprehending her ailing father, Wilson handles each chapter of the book’s second and third acts with a degree of care and empathy that makes Sensation Machines something more—more than, say, Aldous Huxley typing out a futurist dramedy for Seth Rogen or Adam McKay.
It’s what produces lines like, when a frenzied Michael poses as Wendy in an online chat, Wilson’s meditation on marriage: “Love,” he says, “isn’t finding an extension of yourself, but a person so nuanced in her difference that everything she says feels thrillingly fresh.” Like usual, he expands politically: “relationships should be like modern democracies,” he writes, “two-party systems in which the parties agree on rules of conduct and basic tenets of society, but whose fundamental dissents on particular issues keep checks and balances in place.” In the book’s final third such a tone comes to a head—a tone that conveys the ultimate axiom in Wilson’s America: that every transaction involves both sides of the same coin. Laughter and pain.
As a forever devotee of Wilson’s humorous fiction, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Yes, the chapters are machine-gun quick, and Wilson sometimes takes excessive space hammering home the book’s underlying politics. Yet, by the time our Detective Quinn is informed of Ricky’s true killer, we’ve arrived at what could be the book’s—or one of the book’s—satisfying theses: that despite the UBI-crazy Super PACs, or the socially-responsible retweets, or the Marxist tones of “Fuck The Police” and white privilege associations, marriage is hard. Marriage is hard, and losing your best friend to a bullet might be even harder.
And both might just be tied to the almighty pursuit of the dollar. “If there’s one thing Wendy will learn over the long years in marketing that lie ahead of her,” Wilson writes in the novel’s flashback intermezzo, “it’s that all action is transaction, and that nothing—not sex, not romance, not marriage—can be completely extricated from capital exchange.” Cynical, yes. But, as Wilson might say, that’s the two-party system talking.