Screwball Comedy Meets Serious Sci-Fi in Crosstalk

There are plot reasons for this—miscommunication and misunderstandings are a chief theme of the novel; the oft-farcical future storyline finds humor in going to great lengths to keep characters from sharing crucial information—or, perhaps, we might chalk it up to the fact that the book was written in the early 1990s, when the technology was far less ubiquitous than it is today. Willis’ new novel Crosstalk, her first in six years, suggests a different answer: perhaps she simply really hates cell phones.
For longtime fans, this book may well read as a direct answer to those who criticized her predictive powers: “Not enough iPhones in To Say Nothing of the Dog? Well, I’ll write a 500-page novel in which the entire plot revolves around the fact that they are ruining our lives!” (Note: Connie Willis is probably much too smart to write a book based on complaints from a small corner of the internet, but it’s still fun to imagine how satisfying it would be.)

Briddey Flannigan is our heroine, a midlevel executive at Commspan, a near-future technology concern struggling to come up with a new phone that can compete with Apple. As the novel begins, Briddey is pretty sure she wants to go through with an only vaguely understood medical procedure that will allow her to communicate empathetically with her boyfriend Trent, who also happens to Commspan’s head of product development. “EDDs” are the hot new trend for couple in love—even Brad and Angie are rumored to have gotten it done (and suddenly, we once again find ourselves in an imperfect future).
Anticipating a marriage proposal, Briddey agrees to the procedure (and does everything she can to avoid telling her nosy Irish-Catholic family about her plans). Unfortunately, the surgeon seems to have gotten a few neurons crossed, and she wakes up unable to sense what Trent is feeling—but perfectly capable of hearing, with crystal clarity, every thought of C.B., the grumpy, antisocial engineer who works in the basement at Commspan.

No sooner than you can say “Tracy and Hepburn,” the fiery redhead and the pale computer geek are launching barbed insults at one another—and setting off sparks, because an accidental telepathic link is a hell of a meet-cute—as they try to get to the bottom of Briddey’s unexpected abilities before the suits at Commspan figure out how to roll them into the feature set of their latest phone (why text when you can just think?).
At first, the inadvertent telepathy is good for a whole mess of screwball comedy hijinks between Briddey and C.B., two classic Connie Willis protagonists as there ever were—brilliant and clever and fiery and funny and most certainly not in love, thank you very much (picture Spencer and Kate in Desk Set and you’re well more than halfway there).

Before she’s even convinced she’s really hearing C.B.’s thoughts,  Briddey is enlisting his help to deal with meddling doctors and nattering nurses, not to mention keep her safe from a whole mess of her relations—because naturally, the one hearing voices is the sanest of the brood. While one of her sisters obsesses over ill-advised online dating services, the other is micromanaging her entirely-too-capable 9-year-old daughter to distraction. And then there’s old Aunt Oona, who reads dire portents in her tea leaves and is desperate to fix Briddey up with a nice Irish boy. And all of them, including Aunt Oona, text Briddey constantly.
Soon, Briddey starts hearing voices beyond just C.B.’s, however, and her predicament takes on a darker edge. She begins to have trouble discerning which voices she’s hearing aloud, and which ones are only in her head. They build and build until she can only drown them out with a few tricks C.B. teaches her—and why is he so knowledgable about telepathy anyway, to be able to quote the Bridey Murphy case, chapter and verse (or at least cite the Wikipedia page)? This isn’t really a book to read for the plot mechanics or the technobabble (as SF, it is definitely on the softer side), but it’s a good one, raising important questions about how cell phone technology is transforming our society and the sacrifices we’re making—peace of mind, privacy, time—in the bargain.

Texts, social media, missed calls—the omnipresent cloud of information we now inhabit—is the really the bone we’re picking at here. We’ve all been giving the gift of constant connection, constant communication…but do we really even want it? Is it a help or a hinderance? And is technology going to continue to make it worse? There are plenty of people whose Facebook statuses I’d rather ignore; I certainly wouldn’t want to hear their thoughts (or vice versa; I’d like to be invited to Thanksgiving dinner again). Of course, we’re not likely to be livestreaming our thoughts into each other’s heads any time soon, but this is a book to make you put your phone in airplane mode and leave it there.
It’s a great way to concentrate on finishing that book you’re reading.
Crosstalk is available October 4.