Best Books of 2023, The New Yorker
Top 20 Best Books of 2023, Esquire
Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year
Best Tech Books of 2023, Los Angeles Times
An Esquire Book Club Pick
“[Wrong Way] gave me a pleasant sense that I was witnessing a literary sneak attack on the very idea of 'the future' as commonly constructed in fiction.”
—Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker
"What makes us human, Wrong Way suggests, is our ability to feel hurt, to ache, to long. But the desires for stability and for a story that makes sense are ones that, ultimately, not everyone gets to fulfill. Technological development has a human cost. Reading McNeil’s novel, one might wonder if it’s too late to imagine the future otherwise."
—Bekah Waalkes, The Atlantic
"A tense and remorseful piece of working-class surrealism (barely), as if Magnus Mills The Scheme For Full Employment had been written by Anita Brookner. Because of McNeil's acute writing about tech and media this debut novel has been, understandably, treated almost as if it were nonfiction. I sensed parallels to Theranos and other outrages of our time, sure. But the novel is also an irreducible container for intimate strangeness and sorrow. That's what's I love about novels."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel, on Instagram
"Drop everything and find a copy of Wrong Way. This remarkable book is many things : a deep history of America through the lens of marginal employment, a social history of isolation, and an economic palimpsest of the architecture of New England mill towns. Wrong Way is the first novel by Joanne McNeil, who has a fine ear for American usages and a sneaky sense of humor evident from the first pages... It’s an engaging and provocative work, the best book I’ve read this year."
—Henry Wessells, Endless Bookshelf
“McNeil’s book offers a visceral, bitingly satirical look at what it means when we serve technology at the expense of our own bodies.”
—Carolina Miranda, Los Angeles Times
"[Wrong Way] skillfully blends a beautiful literary style — focused on characterization, inner life, human relations — with a sci-fi story set in an alternative present / very near future."
—This Machine Kills podcast
“Longtime tech writer Joanne McNeil’s satirical and sentimental debut novel, Wrong Way, flips the org chart for the gig worker’s view….Although the dystopian features of McNeil’s plot might invite comparisons to blunt-force technoskeptical commentaries like 2013’s The Circle by Dave Eggers, Wrong Way lands a little more squarely in the literary tradition.”
—Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times
"[A] smart debut novel...By creating a predicament for her protagonist that could soon resemble ones we'll face, McNeil creates a compelling examination of work and our relationship to it."
—Jillian Law, Booklist
"A strange, surprising, and sinister kaleidoscope of a novel. Joanne McNeil, with a dazzling wit and eye for detail, guides us through a capitalist gig-economy world both relatable and startlingly visionary. Wrong Way stands out sparklingly from the crowd of current novels. I found myself describing it, recommending it, to a person on the subway I barely knew. I really love this book.”
—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin
"With her signature mix of intelligent, tender, and engaging prose, Joanne McNeil has written a brilliant novel in Wrong Way, which interrogates the promises of the tech utopia through the lives of the invisible labor behind the hype."
—Zito Madu, author of The Minotaur at Calla Lanza
“A Ballardian tale of pristine corporate campuses and aspirational product marketing, Wrong Way reveals to us the very human cost of the AI future we’ve already been sold and makes us question how many lies and absurdities we’re willing to accept in order to try to feel like we belong here. Subtle and beautiful, Joanne McNeil’s masterful debut is a powerful example of what the contemporary novel can and should be in our endlessly perplexing times.”
—Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail
“No one understands the dark side of the gifts offered by billionaire tech gurus better than Joanne McNeil. With Wrong Way, our most prescient tech critic has turned to fiction, giving us a glimpse of a near future defined less by wondrous new gadgets and genius AI than by with the pretense of innovation slapped on ever more alienating work done by people who remain, despite everything, human. In prose at times dreamy and lacerating, McNeil shows us what’s coming, and how easily we might wind up accepting it.”
—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back
"Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated."
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
"[A] sharply observed, extremely well-written novel."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A warm beating heart drives this smart and timely tale."
—Publishers Weekly
2023-07-26
A woman with a long history of temporary employment finds her latest gig as a driver of a new, supposedly driverless vehicle.
“This could be a good job,” Teresa thinks aboard the shuttle bus taking her and 50 fellow trainees from Boston’s South Station to the gleaming suburban headquarters of AllOver, an “experience company” that claims to “shape the digital economy to fit neighborhood-centric needs.” She’s had plenty of jobs to compare it with; McNeil’s debut novel opens with Teresa swimming laps at a local Y while she recalls the many jobs she’s had and lost for one reason or another over several decades. At 48, living at home with her mother because she can’t afford her own place, all she hopes for is a decent paycheck. She is bemused but doesn’t really care that she will be hidden inside a “working prototype” that AllOver is promoting and putting on the road as an actual self-driving car. This seems like a possible setup for a thriller exposing a sinister corporation with some evil plan, but the insufferably woke AllOver never appears to be more than just another profit-centered business pretending to care about customers and employees. McNeil, author of a well-regarded critical history of the Internet (Lurking: How a Person Became a User, 2020), focuses here on America’s disorienting transition from an industrial to a service economy and its consequences for working people. Teresa is her case study, and the major flaw in this sharply observed, extremely well-written novel is that we are more than halfway through it before readers learn why this obviously intelligent woman is so passive and has such minimal expectations. When we do, it supplements McNeil’s powerful portrait of an unequal economy with a biting example of class privilege as an instrument of upward employment mobility. Unfortunately, the novel has been permeated for so long with Teresa’s alienated, apathetic personality that it never develops narrative momentum, and a dramatic final event leads to a painfully ironic last line rather than closure.
Strong, stinging social observation that doesn’t entirely work as fiction.
