Publishers Weekly
06/10/2019
Crain’s ambitious if flawed novel (after Necessary Errors) portrays young utopians caught on the wrong side of a government security project. Amid the idealism and hubbub of New York City during the Occupy movement, Matthew, a lonely graduate student in his early 30s, meets the younger, beautiful Leif, a skater and poet who might just be telepathic. As Matthew and Leif’s relationship blossoms into romance, Matthew falls in with Leif’s group of friends and Occupy protesters: Elspeth, a fact-checker with her own empathic streak; Raleigh, a self-centered computer whiz; and Julia, a rich young woman delighted by the excitement of their movement. The group’s murky aims involve using their empathic and telepathic gifts to restructure society by trusting in feelings. As the group begins to realize what they want, they hack into a government contractor’s files and are arrested which tests the strength of their loyalties to one another. Crain crafts elegant, effortless sentences, but the shifting perspectives and alliances of the novel feel less compelling than Matthew’s initial, skeptical point of view. Just as these characters’ optimism cannot be sustained amid the realities of capitalism and control, neither can the novel’s momentum be sustained after their arrests, culminating in a legal battle. This novel’s promising premise is ultimately overshadowed by its shortcomings. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Overthrow:
“This book really does have it all: It’s a romance, a legal thriller, an honest-to-God page-turner and, miraculously, a novel of ideas about the tools we have for knowing one another — intuition and surveillance, poetry and the internet. Overthrow makes the previous decade’s vanished idealism feel almost close enough to touch. It’s the best American political novel of the 21st century.”
—Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post
"Crain skillfully evokes a recent past when the unprecedented access fostered by the internet still felt like a promise of liberation. . . . Overthrow is a nineteenth-century social novel for the twenty-first-century surveillance state. . . . Tender, psychologically precise prose. . . . Crain's novel reminds us that real sympathetic awareness . . . remains our best defense against its weaponized digital double.”
—Julian Lucas, The New York Times Book Review
"Beautifully rendered. . . . The novel is virtuosic in mining beauty and pathos from the texture of daily life. . . . Crain’s sentences themselves, with their jewelled words and carefully curated perceptions, constitute a kind of cri de coeur."
—Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker
"Crain’s Brooklynites recall the young revolutionaries of Albert Camus’s Les Justes, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, and also The Princess Casamassima. . . . Overthrow . . . reminded me less of Necessary Errors, and less still of James, than of another recent book about doomed, idealistic youth: Never Let Me Go."
—Jason Farago, The New York Review of Books
"Playfully fantastical. . . . Overthrow does what a second novel should do: It risks something. . . . Legitimately great psychological fiction. . . . It’s also a great gay novel. . . . In Overthrow, Crain realistically and romantically does justice to our most real and romantic of powers."
—Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
"[Overthrow] follows a group of bright young political idealists. . . . A love story. . . . Crain opts to tell this story at a more intimate level, with a degree of emotional acuity that recalls Henry James. . . . Overthrow captures the depth of disconnection that the online world creates, and the dread and depression it sows. . . . Swapping human connection for an algorithm of convenience is a lousy bargain, Crain argues. His novel is a sensitive, provocative plea to recognize what gets lost in the exchange.”
—Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
“Perceptive. . . . A carefully unsentimental book. . . . Full of sentences of great sensitivity and precision. . . . Overthrow finds redemption at the place where ‘telepathy’ shades into empathy.”
—Annalisa Quinn, NPR.org
“Overthrow follows a ground of young progressives who are determined to turn the tables on power through the use of telepathy. . . . While the machinations of resistance and control form the plot, the real theme of Overthrow is loyalty: Who do you protect? And how much of yourself will you give to ensure their safety? As with Necessary Errors, the sentences in Overthrow sting.”
—Christopher Bollen, Interview magazine
“Crain’s prose sparkles most when it returns to scenes of private interiority, of personal anguish and emotional attunement. Even as the book conjures the dystopian potential of twenty-first-century techno-capitalism, its best scenes remain its more textured intimate moments. If the state seeks to conquer by force, then the kind of revolution Overthrow proposes—however cautiously—is one that rests in forms of unspoken, telepathic consent. It’s the kind of affective connection we might find, for instance, in a novel.”
—Jane Hu, Bookforum
“It would be easy to miss the core seriousness of Crain’s novel—internet ‘security’ and its warriors—in the brilliant, relentless comedy of its execution. From its very title, which I hope was Crain’s, Overthrow is comedy of the highest order. . . . Crain is a true craftsman, but the writing mostly doesn’t care what you think of it and shows off shamelessly.”
—Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter
“In a time when it’s said that social media algorithms can predict your decisions more accurately than your intimates, Caleb Crain might provide the sort of narrative we need.”
—Lincoln Michel, Book Post
“A romance and a story of relationships set against the backdrop of the Occupy movement, exploring, power, idealism, technology, and the way we forge connections in the dystopian world we’ve created. . . . Sign me up.”
—Lydia Kiesling, The Millions “Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half of 2019 Book Preview”
"Caleb Crain's fiction is a complete pleasure: emotionally generous, stylish, and expansive, laced with the sly, bright humor of quiet observation. Through the prism of the 'Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings'—an idealistic collective of young friends, with shifting personal connections, perspectives, and commitments—Overthrow illuminates contemporary crises of politics and technology, helping make sense of pervasive surveillance and political optimism by turning the abstract intimate. A sturdy reminder of all the ways literature, too, can serve as a form of political optimism."
—Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley
"This astounding, moving novel brought back memories of Occupy Wall Street while transporting me to a parallel universe, one where emotional empathy and technological surveillance become mysteriously entangled. A small group of friends, who aim to cultivate a heightened state of sensitivity, must navigate a perilous legal system and face down sinister corporate interests, without betraying one another or their beliefs. Both poetic and gripping, realistic and other-worldly, Overthow engages heady themes—the limits of idealism, the nature of state power—in an incredibly gripping narrative that never loses heart or hope."
—Astra Taylor, director of What Is Democracy? and Examined Life
“What a brilliant, terrifying, and entertaining book Caleb Crain has written! It is part subtle novel of contemporary manners, part intellectual legal thriller, and part prophetic dystopia: Henry James meets Bonfire of the Vanities against the backdrop of the Occupy movement and the growing surveillance power of Leviathan. It's a novel to be read now and re-read years from now—a tour de force.”
—Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country
"No one can deny Henry James is still a significant force in fiction. . . . Caleb Crain's Jamesian story of New York in late 2011, the autumn of Occupy and its aftermath, is among the most cunning, most subtle examples I know. . . . Frequently witty. . . . Crain [has] the Master's touch."
—Nicholas Dames, Public Books
“Crain’s novel, like Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, is a fascinating depiction of the Occupy period, a moment that popularized a stronger critique of capitalism and led to even more overt forms of surveillance. As the characters’ friendships strain, Crain offers many wonderful turns of phrase that evocatively demonstrate how surveillance affects how all of us think, relate, and communicate. Crain also pertinently explores the legal and moral challenges of the digital age.”
—Booklist
Praise for Caleb Crain's Necessary Errors:
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Kansas City Star, Flavorwire, Policy Mic, Buzzfeed
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
"Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one's own youth."
—James Wood, The New Yorker
"Ferociously observed. . . . We're not through with narratives about the Getting of Wisdom, Americans Abroad, Coming of Age, Gay Coming of Age, New Lost Generations. Among such works, a new narrative will be measured against Caleb Crain's fine book, which will endure as a powerful entry in the great fictional exploration of the meanings of liberation."
—Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books
"Remarkable. . . . Necessary Errors seems exceptional among recent American novels in how smartly it turns over the economic metaphors in so much American thinking."
—David Haglund, The New York Times
"Crain nicely captures the feel of two societies perched on the edge of becoming vastly more open—gay culture and the former Eastern Bloc—but where he really shines is in capturing the subtle, omnipresent disorientation of the expat experience."
—Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine
“Despite the novel’s looming socio-political backdrop—the parting Iron Curtain and the Velvet Revolution—its story is mesmerizingly personal. . . . Like The Sun Also Rises, this book centers on the psychological events of each well-crafted character.”
—Lauren Christensen, VanityFair.com
"Evocative. . . . Necessary Errors so completely recaptures the smells and scenes and political conversations and above all the feelings of 1990-1991 Czechoslovakia that I began to actively worry that Mr. Crain was inserting new memories into my brain."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Crain wonderfully evokes the novel's setting in a few deft strokes. He's a master of the thumbnail character sketch. . . . Line by line, the book is chock-full of masterly word choices and images. . . . On almost every page the reader is rewarded with gems. Necessary Errors heralds the fiction debut of a writer with intelligence and an engaging prose style."
—The New York Times Book Review
"A new model for contemporary fiction. . . . It recalls the dreamy pacing of Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen."
—Jane Hu, Slate
"Caleb Crain's debut novel is at times reminiscent of Jane Austen. . . . [Necessary Errors] is a subtle and magnificent look at a kind of freedom that young, thinking Americans can't find by staying at home."
—Zeke Turner, Bookforum.com
"Crain's stately, wry, and generous first novel breaks the mold. . . . The adventures of American Jacob Putnam in Czechoslovakia right after the Iron Curtain's fall recall Henry James as much as they do Ben Lerner."
—The Millions
Kirkus Reviews
2019-05-27
Another narrative of revolution from the author of Necessary Errors (2013).
Matthew is a graduate student in English. His cohort has graduated while he's still fussing about with his dissertation. So, he's alone in New York and adrift when he says "Hi" to a cute boy on a skateboard. This cute boy is Leif—not a boy exactly, but younger than Matthew and committed to a worldview that Matthew struggles to take seriously. Leif is a barista and a poet, but his real work is with Occupy Wall Street. He serves food to protesters. He's also the charismatic leader of a "working group" devoted to using psychic power to infiltrate—and overthrow—the establishment. There's a lot going on in this novel. Crain borrows elements from science fiction as his characters explore the use of occult weapons to disrupt capitalism. Crain's characters find themselves involved in something like a thriller as government agencies become interested in their activism. The idea that Leif and his comrades can read minds becomes entangled with contemporary concerns about everyday privacy and the surveillance state. These fantastical and topical elements are, though, subservient to what is essentially a realist novel about human longing and the need for connection. Crain's worldbuilding is meticulously naturalistic. There is hardly a detail that goes unrecorded—a scent, a gesture, an architectural flourish….It's not difficult to imagine that some readers will become immersed in the character-driven universe Crain creates. At the same time, it's easy to wish that the story moved along at a faster pace.
Personal, political, and really long.
