Culpability (Review)

All families are now alike, Bruce Holsinger's new novel laments

Fictional stories that arrive on the heels of brand new technologies have a built-in appeal. How will the plot feature the technology? How will the characters respond? Will there be ethical dilemmas? Does the story depend on the technology or does the technology simply add an exciting element?

Remember the plot of the film Disclosure (1994) (based on Michael Crichton’s novel by the same name)? An executive in a company that made CD-ROM drives (OG tech) dialed a wrong number on his cell phone at a complicated moment and a crucial scene was recorded in a voice mail. Today, cell phones and voice mail are part of daily life, but in the early 1990s they offered a fresh new plot device, even if workplace rivalry and harassment are old stories.

Decades before even the land line, postal technology transformed fiction. In 1840, with the establishment of the penny post, any character of any social class could post a letter and expect swift, regular, official delivery. Suddenly letters were flying between real people and between fictional characters. Fifty years later, almost every crucial plot turn Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), for example, is initiated by the post office. A mail carriage impales Tess’s horse, which necessitates a visit to her cousin; she learns of the job at the dairy-farm by letter; the father of Tess’s future beloved, Angel Clare, learns of his son’s apostasy through a misdirected parcel (which results in Angel’s presence on the dairy farm); a letter from a customer about a “twang” in the butter leads to a moment of intimacy between Angel and Tess; and an “intelligent postman” gives Tess’s address to Angel. The pivotal moment in the novel involves a letter that is not actually posted, with a stamp. Tess slips her written confession under Angel’s door, where it goes unseen, unread.¹

The moral of Hardy’s Tess seems to be that she should have relied on the technology instead of putting her hands on the steering wheel and overriding the system.

The point is that stories that feature new technologies, like mail delivery or cell phones or autonomous vehicles, are a subgenre unto themselves. Sometimes the stories are about the tech but mostly they are still about human characteristics. Humans who decide they are more authentic than the technology or can escape the technology are part of the genre.

The best and most interesting work of fiction featuring an accident and a self-driving car appeared almost ten years ago: Dexter Palmer’s brilliant and unforgettable Version Control (2016). Version Control is a novel for the ages, a novel that will be read a generation from now, with its inspired grasp of what changes people (and what doesn’t change them at all); about the world, our expectations, our relationships. Palmer, like Bruce Holsinger, has a PhD in English literature, and understands the nature of humanity’s depths disturbingly well. Many of Palmer’s works are categorized as science fiction, a shelf where I would not expect to see Holsinger’s novels.

Holsinger’s Culpability is a social class novel for today, for the current moment more than for even a decade hence. Oprah Winfrey famously made it her July selection and, dutifully, I read it in July. It is smart, in an unanticipated way.

Culpability is the story of the privileged Shaw-Cassidy family, squarely in the 1% – two professional incomes, highly educated, can write a retainer check for $10K without batting an eye – that suddenly sees how it is both dependent on and beholden to the .01% for its lifestyle and its survival. New self-driving car technology plays a role in the novel of course, but as the occasion to reveal the dependence of the family on powers beyond them, by which I mean both the algorithm and the owners of the algorithm. Holsinger is a medievalist. He knows how it goes with the lord and his retainers.

Holsinger’s particular gift as a writer (and I enjoyed his earlier novels, particularly the Gifted School) is portraying the petty jealousies of this demographic, the laptop class, whose smugness bears some responsibility (culpability?) for the current political climate. It is certainly no accident that the narrator’s laptop, over which he is bent in the front passenger seat of the family’s self-driving vehicle while his handsome, 17-year-old lacrosse-star son is distracted in the driver’s seat, is featured prominently in discussions of the accident that the reader knows from all promotional materials will take place shortly after the novel opens. And while we learn that Culpability’s narrator, Noah Cassidy, has ascended to his current status from more pedestrian roots, and we are told repeatedly – it can seem like on almost every page – that embarrassment about these roots is the root of his relentless snarky jealousy (of his wife’s family, his wife, his wife’s colleagues, his wife’s consulting partners), we don’t like Noah, let alone expect him to change or grow, as a human might.

Here is where Holsinger’s Culpability offers a delightfully unexpected critique of new AI technology. As various high status reviews (NYT, WaPo) have noted, the novel isn’t really about AI or algorithms but about family dynamics and the curious whining father-narrator. Noah’s garrulous obliviousness grows as every “reveal” is apparent to the reader pages before Noah gets it. (Yes, yes, the air conditioners; yes, yes of course the sailboat, etc.). There must be a method to Holsinger’s madness, I thought. Finally, it came to me: Noah, whom the famous wealthy CEO vacation neighbor calls “Norman” (read: “normal man”), is the embodiment of an LLM who spouts repetitive, predictable things even while he cannot himself see, analyze, or predict anything himself. He is an algorithm more than a human. If, as the Oprah Instagram clips say, the point or theme of the novel is distributed culpability – everyone feels a little bit culpable for the deadly accident – we are all to blame because we are all implicated in the training data that has produced the LLMs taking over the world.

In such a world, every happy family and every unhappy family are alike – every handsome lacrosse star, every moody middle sister, every cheerful youngest sibling, every silver haired billionaire, every gorgeous silver haired billionaire’s daughter, every police detective, every ex-Mossad security chief, every night watchman distracted by a video game at a crucial moment.

What is plotting and foreshadowing in a world where an algorithm predicts everything, including human character? What is culpability? (These are familiar questions for any good American Calvinist.) Whole families are like an algorithm, Noah’s wife Lorelei Shaw says, famously and repeatedly. “Like an algorithm, a family is endlessly complex yet adaptable and resilient, parents and children working together as parts of an intricate, coordinated whole.” We are, accordingly, predestined to play particular family roles, and we play them.

Lorelei doesn’t mention social class, and this is the big unaddressed question. Will AI solidify or collapse such distinctions? Is Noah’s class ascendance a feature or a bug? Like a good academic, she decides to write a book, as that is the best way to have her say.

I half expected the novel to end with an echo of the end of Anna Karenina:

“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.” (Constance Garnett translation)

But instead, we get the spectre of new tech. “Dad, it’s just a drone,” the son, Charlie, says to Noah, as they watch a little neighbor boy flying a new gadget. And Noah has the last, internal, hackneyed word: “The drone rises above the trees, makes a few lazy spirals in the air, and hovers there, over the edge of the pond, the little boy fully in control, for now.” The next novel is planned already.

Holsinger’s primary achievement in Culpability is his creation of a new category of narrator, like a pro-model LLM: at once reliable and unreliable. Noah Cassidy is the ideal literary representative of our current moment: articulate, privileged, unaware, and utterly predictable. In this light, Culpability succeeds as both documentary realism and science fiction, capturing a moment when the line between human consciousness and machine learning has become so blurred that we can no longer tell whether we are driving the narrative or merely passengers in a story being written by forces beyond our comprehension. As an LLM might put it (following an em-dash): the question is not whether all family stories are alike (or not), but how many combinations the algorithm can produce and what, ultimately, will keep the reader interested.

1. My Princeton PhD dissertation was about how long-19^th century fiction and poetry were transformed by new technologies of government bureaucracy. Think of Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” (1798) appearing in the midst of the first British Census debate or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) engaging with global conversations about calendars, standard time and the universal day.