I Am No One

Starred review from May 30, 2016
Flanery’s (Absolution) third novel is a brilliant commentary on pervasive government intrusion into the private lives of citizens. Middle-aged American college professor Jeremy O’Keefe has returned to the U.S. after teaching at Oxford for 10 years and gaining dual U.S.-British citizenship. His life, however, is unsettled. Once back in New York City, teaching at NYU, he feels like a stranger in his own country, with an uncomfortable sense of cultural dislocation and loneliness. Then mysterious boxes arrive at his apartment, and his tenuous grip is truly shaken. The boxes contain his whole digital life for the past 10 years—Internet data, phone records, and photos. Clearly, he has been under surveillance for years, but he has no idea why. Jeremy’s paranoia spikes when he also realizes he is being shadowed by Michael Ramsey, who claims to be a former student. Jeremy thinks back to his years at Oxford, trying to figure out what might have triggered such detailed surveillance, and why someone would want him to know he was being watched. Potential reasons include his strained relationship with another Oxford professor, as well as his illicit romance with Fadia, an Egyptian graduate student with dangerous political connections. This is an excellent portrayal of a good man manipulated by others, without ever understanding why.

May 1, 2016
A university professor worries about lost privacy and past sins after receiving cartons filled with years of personal data in this blend of psychological and political suspense. When Jeremy O'Keefe failed to get tenure at Columbia, he took a post at Oxford University shortly after the 9/11 attacks, even acquiring British citizenship in the course of more than 10 years in the U.K. As the novel opens with Jeremy's first-person narration, he has recently returned to the U.S. to teach at New York University, his chief area of interest being 20th-century German history, with a specialization in the Stasi and its informants. Then his seemingly comfortable, unremarkable life is overturned in the course of a few weeks. He receives from an anonymous sender four boxes containing a breadth of personal data--URLs, phone traffic, photos-- that suggests something only a government agency could organize. Jeremy also repeatedly encounters a man who knows his wealthy son-in-law and behaves oddly enough to make Jeremy suspicious of him. As he searches his memory for possible causes and culprits, Jeremy revisits his years in England and wonders about incidents when he might have offended someone. There was also an unsavory colleague who compelled him to help a woman gain acceptance to Oxford. Could the woman's Egyptian background include terrorist ties? The question of why Jeremy has fallen under Big Brother's unblinking gaze--or even if he has--is left ambiguous, but Flanery (Fallen Land, 2013, etc.) makes his protagonist's flaws common enough to let him serve as Everyman at a time when innocence might be irrelevant in a world that "assumes guilt by algorithmic association." Less judicious is the writer's decision to have Jeremy withhold from the narrative for a while vital information that is clearly ever present in his memory because doing so is useful to Flanery as novelist. This is a worthy addition to the growing shelf on the erosion of personal privacy in the service of public security.

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June 1, 2016

Shortly after his return to his native New York, having spent the previous ten years teaching at Oxford University, a series of bizarre occurrences leads professor Jeremy O'Keefe to believe he is being watched. Boxes containing printouts of his Internet browsing history are delivered to his apartment, and a mysterious and sinister young man named Michael Ramsey keeps turning up in unexpected places. Is Jeremy paranoid, or insane? Or is there something in his past that has led to him being under suspicion, and therefore in need of being watched? The tension builds slowly, leaving readers guessing about what Jeremy may or may not be hiding. Acquaintances continually comment on the "Britishness" of Jeremy's speech, and this is carried throughout the first-person narration, consisting of long, Jamesian sentences, and a formality of tone. The growing realization that Jeremy is not telling the whole story and is somewhat delusional about himself and the consequences of his actions recalls the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, particularly When We Were Orphans. VERDICT In the end, this is a cautionary tale of the costs of a society giving up privacy for the sake of security. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016
This third novel by the author of Absolution (2012) and Fallen Land (2013) is good, old-fashioned fiction on very modern, postEdward Snowden themes. Jeremy O'Keefe is an American academic (NYU) recently returned after more than a decade in England. He falls comfortably back into the routines of a typical New Yorker (e.g., he eats virtually nothing besides Asian takeout), but there is a problem: he seems to be forgetting things. After missing an appointment that he had rescheduled, he agrees, at his grown daughter's urging, to have his memory examined. While awaiting results, he receives at his apartment logs of his own phone calls that he has no recollection of having kept. Is he being followed, and is everything connected to a former student of his at Oxford, with whom he had an affair and a child, and who has a brother who could be a spy? The precision of the book's style makes the unraveling of O'Keefe's world all the more frightening, more Kafkaesque. O'Keefe himself is quite an ordinary man, but that's the whole point, isn't it?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)