The Dimensions of a Cave: A Novel

by Greg Jackson

Overview

A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.

When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.

As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce—who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier—keep emerging.

Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374298494
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	77,390
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Greg Jackson is the author of the story collection Prodigals, for which he was included in the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and received the Bard Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, Vice, Conjunctions, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian, among other places. The Dimensions of a Cave is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

08/21/2023

Jackson’s inspired debut novel (after the collection Prodigals) recasts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Plato’s allegory of the cave for the information age. After journalist Quentin Jones’s investigative piece about the U.S. government’s virtual reality interrogation program is spiked by his editor, he gets wind of a more ambitious iteration in which pacified citizens would play out their lives in “bespoke realities.” The idea of this technology, he tells his group of reporter buddies in a frame narrative that mirrors Conrad’s novella, has radically altered his perception of their profession and the nature of reality. Never sure whether he is following leads or being led into a trap, Quentin tracks down the program’s architects and learns that Bruce, one of their mentees, has entered, and perhaps lost himself in, this experimental simulation. The book’s characters, including government bureaucrats, warlords, and bohemian artists, tend to expound at length, their voices nearly indistinguishable but their tales florid and spellbinding—Bruce, the novel’s Kurtz, delivers a “horrific litany” of ancient torture techniques and modern-day genocides. Within the serpentine plot of journalistic tradecraft and government skullduggery, epigrammatic reflections abound: “Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form,” offers a computer scientist. It adds up to a timely and clear-eyed interrogation of the fictions that shield people from society’s blinding truths. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Jackson’s inspired debut novel recasts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Plato’s allegory of the cave for the information age . . . The book’s characters, including government bureaucrats, warlords, and bohemian artists, tend to expound at length, their voices nearly indistinguishable but their tales florid and spellbinding . . . [The Dimensions of a Cave is] a timely and clear-eyed interrogation of the fictions that shield people from society’s blinding truths.” —Publishers Weekly

“Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave is, sentence to sentence, a linguistic marvel, a genre-bending tale with moral and philosophical stakes as profound as they come.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

“Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treatise with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

“Greg Jackson’s prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

“The Dimensions of a Cave tells a very contemporary story about surveillance capitalism, virtual reality, and twenty-first-century forever war, but it will still be read a century from now for the news it brings about the timeless riddle of the human self. That sounds like dust-jacket hyperbole, I know, but this book seems as likely to last as anything I’ve read in years. It’s increasingly rare these days to find a novelist with Greg Jackson’s world-swallowing ambition, and rarer still for one to make good on that ambition as gloriously as Jackson does here.” —Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Greg Jackson’s first novel, after his terrific story collection, Prodigals, is an ambitious and challenging work about the lies that men and journalism and government tell about each other and themselves. If Bob Woodward were to find himself in a twenty-first-century Pynchon novel, this might well be the result.” —Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country

From the Publisher

2023-07-26
Amid the convergence of dream, memory, and virtual reality, an investigative reporter suspects he's being played.

If this debut novel had a soundtrack, its theme song could be Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and this would be the key line: “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” A veteran journalist, Quentin Jones definitely knows something is happening—something involving emergent technology, the erosion of privacy, and the amoral exercise of power by both government and private enterprise. A piece involving some of this had been spiked by his newspaper, even though it was well sourced, because of pressures from above. Whether causal or coincidental, his romantic relationship had crumbled as well, while he was on leave from the paper. Undaunted, he plunged deeper into his investigation that nobody wanted him to report, and he discovered that he had barely scratched the surface. He unearthed a corruptive and corrosive hellhole, with a heart of darkness that is way darker than anything Conrad could conjure. Is humanity really this relentlessly inhuman? Or is this some sort of elaborate video game? The book's framework is a further source of mystification, as Jones isn’t narrating his story directly but rather telling it to a group of reunited journalists, friends from j-school, and this group must be wondering if their friend has lost his mind—not to mention wondering how he manages to recall page after page of dialogue that is often more like soliloquy. The backstory becomes foregrounded, focusing on a former protégé of Jones’, an embedded journalist gone rogue, now feared dead. Somewhere in this vortex where past meets present, perhaps some answers lie.

There is a shuddering power to this relentlessly grim narration.

Kirkus Reviews