Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

'I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there's nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can't excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn't know better. That's how Capaldi sees it, and there's a part of me that fears he's right.'

Klara is an Artificial Friend, model B2. She begins her life sitting in a shop, chatting with other AFs, hoping that the Manager will rotate her into the window where she will be seen by a boy or girl, chosen, purchased. For an AF, she is observant: from her vantage point in the store window, she notices much about the people who walk by, perceiving their attitudes and desires by their body language and physical appearance. She gets her wish one day when a girl named Josie appears with her mother to buy her and take her to their house in what seems to be the Hudson Valley.

The home Klara enters is one marked by turmoil. Josie, we learn, is very sick thanks to a botched gene editing operation. Her next door neighbor and boyfriend, Rick, is one of the few kids in this world who have not been "lifted" as Josie has, but both suffer the consequences of their parents' choices: Rick's future is drastically narrowed by a culture that denies opportunities to "unlifted" children, and Josie may ultimately die of the flaw introduced in her genes, as her older sister did. Josie's father, who lives back in the city, is what is called "post-employed," having been replaced in his job as an engineer by the exact kind of AI that Klara represents. Klara, then, represents both a problem and its would-be solution; technocapitalism has produced a system of increasing inequality and alienation, but so too has it provided the disaffected with a dubious kind of companionship.

In the store, it's explained to Klara that she gets her energy from the sun--that is, she's solar-powered. On cloudy days, she can sense herself becoming weaker, and she mistakenly generalizes this understanding to Josie, too. She begins to believe that, if only the Sun can be appeased, he will provide Josie with his "special nourishment," reenergizing her and bringing her back to health. It's in this way that Klara resembles Ishiguro's other narrators, all of whom live under misunderstandings they perpetuate at an unconscious level. Here it's one of the novel's greatest flaws. It's difficult to believe that Klara--whom we're asked to believe is especially perceptive, for an AF--sustains this childish misunderstanding for so long. When she runs off to a barn on the western end of the family property, where the sun sets every night, we recognize her pleading and bargaining as a form of prayer.

On a trip back to the city, Josie's mom reveals--spoiler! spoiler!--that a "portrait" she has commissioned of Josie is actually an animatronic facsimile, and she intends, if Josie were to die, to ask Klara to take her place inside this body. The implications of this request are deeply troubling. Personhood and personality--are these things that can be "learned" through observation? If observant Klara watches Josie close enough, will she really be able to "continue" her after her death? It seems obvious that the answer is no, but there's a critique here of artificial intelligence, and the possibilities for it of which we dream. It's foolish, Ishiguro suggests, to think that we can build machines to approximate ourselves. Yet, this reveals the novel's central flaw, I think: it makes this critique while narrating from the position of artificially intelligent Klara, whose credibility and sympathy make her so very human.