Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

Overview

Two people search for connection in a world of fractured identities and aliases, global finance, big data, intelligence bureaucracies, algorithmic logic, and terror.

Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Alexandra, a high-powered job in image management for whole countries cannot prepare her for her missing brother’s sudden reappearance.

In a culture of limitless surveillance, Jeremy and Alexandra will go to great lengths to protect what is closest to them. Spanning decades and continents, their saga brings them into contact with a down-and-out online journalist, shadowy security professionals, and jockeying technology experts, each of whom has a different understanding of whether information really protects us, and how we might build a world worth trusting in our paranoid age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641291125
Publisher:	Soho Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	651 KB

About the Author

Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2015, and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, BOMB, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, New World Writing, Narrative, Scoundrel Time, Guernica, Bookforum, Electric Literature, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her column Body Language appeared in Catapult. She attended the MFA program at the City College of New York and the PhD program in communications at Columbia University.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
 
He’d found a small way to resolve the future. The year he believed that, though in fact the belief would not last the year, was 2005. It was a various year, one he trusted those who euphemistically might be called his cohort and then didn’t, where he quit assuming a fake résumé and an ardor for details could occlude misfortune’s gaze. He decided to keep stories to the rooms where they’d happened, but he also aspired to sensible collations of evidence, although—or in particular because—it was a time of perfect aberration. It was when he met Alexandra Chen.
     In his mind, there was a procedure to calm successions. It began with the call center. There, you could rely on emergencies. And so, the night before the year torqued, Jeremy Jordan turned on his headset. A red light in a grid lit. He asked how could he help, not in the manner of hopelessness.
     My life’s action is gravity, callers said their own ways. Help me catch what’s falling; what’s falling is me.
     His training was follow the slope of a suffering mind before it inflicts itself on the body, but listen too for what fills the air one cannot see. A source quivers energy off it, persuades the air around it to shake. Sound huddles waves into intimacy. That is the way of a voice or explosion, telephones. He could hear that somewhere in London a woman lay silverware in drawers, knives slapping knives, matching.
     Signals: they were everywhere if you knew how to heed them.
     There was some static, a rustle, the woman there and yet closer, in his ear at the center and her house, kilometers reduced as she recalled her husband slamming a door hard enough a mirror shattered. He slammed it so hard, she said, the image of his departure rained down in shards. From the caller’s unseen room, he heard reflections, noise returning. The word—it’s thrown and it strikes off the surface, arrives in homecoming a little different. Sometimes the waves ripple out. Other times, they die. It is water where the word travels clear. No-man’s-land.
     Sometimes, she said, she wished it were too late for her.
     He dispatched a mobile crisis unit. He aspired to totem comfort. He told her, “You are not alone,” meaning only any more than anyone else.
     Jeremy’s head was heavy with the hour of night, and still to come was his putative real job at the fund, but he would remain on the line until the team arrived for her. And though his voice was reasonable, though his collar was crisp, this was talisman in action, superstitious math: offer safety so what life exacted from him would not be Alexandra.
     He listened to the stranger survive. He said, “Stay with me.”
 
 
CHAPTER 1
 
Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn’t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.
     She had on a flat gray suit and spoke in her client voice, contained and reassuring. The front of a room did not come naturally to her, but she’d practiced how to land her eyes on a small audience and let her voice settle. She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country.
     She’d done it in Uganda and Sweden, had successes enunciating small former Soviet states still in spinout from the Cold War. Her clients wanted investors from abroad or tourists, to unravage images, firm up legitimacy. Proper trade deals. That’s where they’d arrived in history. There’s the Lisbon Strategy on one hand, and then globalization means chunks of cartography
are left behind. They did not want to be left behind.
     The board room had no windows. There was the woman at the head of the table who had called the firm first. There was a man with pink hands like overstuffed sandwiches. These were individuals with government posts, commercial interests, ties to the embassy. They had clean-cropped haircuts and trim shirts, professionally empty faces. But her brother had taught her poker, had taught her, “In bets, you find out who the dreamers are at the table.” And she was in the business of dreamers. She was in the business of casting bets on national narratives, then waiting for them to gain ballast.
     “And can it all happen by the game?” someone leaning over the oblong of the conference table said.
     She was at the whim of FIFA.
     When she’d practiced her pitch with Jeremy, he’d said he’d trust her with a country. He’d trust her with anything. But her firm, Orbet, had been called late to Germany. There was only a year until the World Cup, a blip of a lead-up. Already the business security firm Orbet often worked with, Tyle, had dug up evidence of meetings between Blair’s and Schröder’s people beyond the public-private partnerships.
     “Germany does not have the problem of an Estonia,” she said. “Vast demographics couldn’t picture Estonia. They couldn’t point to it on the map. Germany has an image, and German culture can be globally competitive. Yet, there is delicacy to it. What is a German brand of soft power, one that travels, invites? Rather than a German nationalism.”
     “You’re referring to the Anschluss and the Sudetenland,” the man said bitterly.
     “Or emotion.”
     She was a student of the image. The way at a certain angle a nation caught light. She believed in second chances, third, and so on. You pieced together the tropes, then turned them. Yet she did not yet know how to tell Jeremy that the account would mean a year away.
     “In public opinion polling, what we see is the intellectual history, the art is submerged beneath an identity of engineering and Volkswagen, beer gardens, efficiency. It’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s an issue of foregrounding. This is the country of Goethe and Einstein. Herzog.”
     “Miss Chen,” someone making a show of his watch said. “We know whose country this is.”
     They were untucking their phones from the insides of their jackets. Typing. Slapping them shut. Someone’s whisper cut into her riff. The woman at the head of the table cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Miss Chen,” she said, already standing. “But we’ll need to end this meeting. There is a matter at the Foreign Ministry.”
     Alexandra collected her things. She folded the computer and turned off the projector. She’d never persisted with a man, and still, if the Germans offered a contract, she thought she and Jeremy could once a month have weekends together in the aura if Alsatian Riesling and something like holiday, that perhaps it would defend them from the ordinary rhythm of fracture. She shook the hand of the woman from the Foreign Ministry.
     “Please,” the woman said, extending an arm toward the door, walking her to the exit faster.
     Alexandra moved into the hallway, and out the window there was a weather that could be described as early. It wasn’t rain or shine, just a sense of open time beating down.
     By the elevator, she looked at her phone.
     As fast as news, she forgot how to walk. Her legs could only stand in the manner of sprinting. There was a door registered only after the rush through, stairs above and behind and below and ahead. Something cold untied in her stomach. Bombs were exploding across London.

Editorial Reviews

A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2020
A Big Other Most Anticipated Book of 2020
Tor.com Best Books of 2020
Lithub Best Books of 2020
A CrimeReads Best Espionage Novel of 2020
A 2020 Big Other Book Award Finalist

Praise for Quotients

"Stylish, impressive." 
—The New York Times

"Beyond conspiratorial thrills, this is a book about intimacy and loyalties yearned for and lost . . . [We] are often unable to see through our faulty human screens of fears, illusions, and hopes, especially burdened by an increasingly fractional and artificial society. In Quotients, O’Neill tackles this blindness, and the result is a distinct, unconventional narrative with no easy conclusions."
—Ploughshares

“Quotients describes the finance and surveillance industries with the obsessive questing of early DeLillo.”
—Commonweal

“This stunning, and deeply disquieting, literary techno-thriller—about a couple struggling to escape their past lives and make safe harbor of their relationship within the gathering storm of the mass surveillance age—will knock you on your ass. Cerebral and lyrical, epic in geopolitical scope and achingly intimate in portraiture, Quotients is a blazingly intelligent (not to mention terrifyingly timely) novel of ideas as well as a humane and heartbreaking love story.”
—Lithub

"If O’Neill wanted to write a simple literary thriller, she would have. What she has given us with Quotients is a piece of art that eschews convention, one that forces us to take a fractured narrative and turn it inward . . . This is a book for our paranoid age, the one where we keep our secrets pressed tight against our chests; the one where we have no secrets at all."
—The Chicago Review of Books

“Captivating . . . A fascinating study of inner lives run through a ringer of technology and stress, and O’Neill proves herself an immensely gifted novelist with a knack for closely-observed suspense.”
—CrimeReads

“A story about secrecy, intimacy, and hidden systems. O’Neill’s sentences are expertly crafted marvels of economy. Her prose almost feels redacted, as if someone has cut out just the right bits to keep you guessing and thinking and feeling.”
—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“Quotients is a stunning novel. O’Neill asks us to take a look at the nature of and the necessity for secrecy—in both our most intimate relationships and on the global scale—while reminding us of its inevitable demise in an age of eroding privacy. An entrancing, incendiary book—the ideas within these pages, and their implications, will haunt you for a good long while.”
—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy

“Quotients is a novel perfectly tuned to our times, and it contains more artistry and intelligence than our times perhaps deserve. Tracy O’Neill has constructed the moving story of a young couple trying to build their lives within a divided and constantly dividing world of big data, small faith, political gaming, and unquantifiable fear. A superb and enlivening exploration of paranoia and the search for intimacy.”
—Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

"A startling work of art: even as its sentences make precise, jujitsu moves on the reader, Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients keeps us keyed to intimacy, to love, to a family’s moving domestic world. With a plot that’s intricate but intimate, global and domestic, this novel pulls us deep into surveillance’s dark web, but, grounded in love, it offers us a way out: an awesome artistic feat."
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto

“Thoroughly engaging and savvy. Part thriller, part mystery, part alarming critique of the world we’re all living in without most people knowing it. Also, surprisingly, a love story rendered in galloping prose that takes you all over the map.”
—Fiona Maazel, author of A Little More Human

"This challenging, slow-burning, yet suspenseful tale is a frame for O’Neill’s powerful and chilling warning to consider the choices we are making. With an astounding grasp of the issues confronting our age, an assured depiction of a multitude of diverse characters, and a distinctive style all her own, she ranges from movingly sensual descriptions to sharp observations, from wordplay to gut punches. In sum, this is a poignant lament for our time’s lost generation, which may be all of us."
—Booklist, Starred Review

"Vital and current . . . It is important to remember that in this world of instant connectivity, perhaps we are the engineers of our own loneliness and isolation; perhaps we can listen to O’Neill and turn instead toward love."
—Brooklyn Rail

"Lingers in the consciousness long after the final page."
—Foreword

Praise for The Hopeful
 
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
Longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Debut Novel Prize
An Electric Literature Best Novel the Year
 
“Both a beautiful narrative and a political statement worth listening to.”
—Huffington Post
 
“Written with an original literary grace all her own.”
—The Rumpus
 
“The book soars . . . achieving a beauty of its own in the process.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A universal story about aspiration and imperfection . . . [exploring] ideas of heredity, ambition, maturity, failure, and, yes, hope.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher