Search History by Eugene Lim

When you were dying of incurable disease, I cursed your life choices--not those that led to your dying but those that led you farther away. For instance: the choice to abide in time. I think I knew you best and so, now, am amazed how mysterious you were to me. What were you thinking? All those years and hours--what were you thinking? We were friends most of our lives, but, if I live long enough, that will cease to be true. It's impossible to conceive all those years without your weight in them, like papers without a stone to hold them down. They flutter across the field, scattered, gone, now trash.

Eavesdropping on a conversation between two women at a cafe, someone comes to a shocking realization: the dog the two women are discussing is the reincarnation of their dead friend, Frank Exit. They pursue the dog, which turns out to be a complicated robot designed by a mad genius, through a series of escalating espionage-style hijinks.

Is this the main narrative of Search History? It certainly seems to be, in a way, the fulcrum of the novel, which is a larger meditation on the nature of loss and grief in the artificial intelligence era. And yet this plot is by far the silliest and shallowest of the novel's many threads; a spit-shined simulacrum of a thriller, emptied of tension and intensity so that only the rote movements remain. The digressions--if they are really digressions--come to the forefront: conversations between friends, orbiting booth around Frank's death and attempts to build an AI that will write a prize-winning book, as well as lengthier reflections on death and Asian-American identity that are only tenuously connected to the "Shaggy Dog" story. Movie stills, paintings, and YouTube links are scattered through the pages.

It seems to me that at least part of what Lim is up to an interrogation of narratives, especially familiar narratives involving grief and loss, recovery and closure: an AI, perhaps, might be able to analyze a million books and spit out a story like this that provides a recognizable movement, a neat resolution, but it can never capture the true nature of grief, which is spiky, disorienting. An AI can say, here is a story, but can it ask, like Search History does, what is a story? One of the characters remarks that the AI will only work if they can feed it not just with books but with the stuff of life, suggesting they add to its library snippets of the real-life conversations, but whether the stuff of life is reproducible by these methods is never answered. The novel itself is a kind of AI, perhaps, a recombinant machine that brings together various genres, but I don't think you can say that it produces something resembling a whole. But then again, I think it's a novel that reminds us that the "wholeness" more traditional novels suggest is itself a falseness and a sham.

I used to work with Eugene, a middle- and high-school librarian. He's a really great librarian! It's gratifying to discover that he's an equally wonderful novelist: Search History is fresh, new, full of energy and pique; it constantly recycles itself and offers new and touching surprises. I really enjoyed it.