Quotients

April 20, 2020
O’Neill’s esoteric follow-up to The Hopeful centers on the deceit-filled relationship between Alexandra Chen, an American woman, and Jeremy Jordan, an Englishman, who meet and begin dating in London in May 2005. Alex works in international public relations (“She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country”), while Jeremy, a hedge fund analyst, tries to keep his past as a British intelligence officer stationed in Belfast during the Troubles a secret from Alex. Alex has troubles of her own—her brother, Shel, ran away at 13, and she’s been looking for him ever since. After Alex accepts an advertising job in New York City that December, Jeremy follows her and they get married. O’Neill’s narrative is tinged with commentary on the rise of digital and social media, which drives a wedge between screen-obsessed Alex and analog Jeremy. Then, in 2008, a journalist friend of Alex’s does his own digging on Shel and raises alarms from Jeremy’s old intelligence contacts after the story unearths NSA secrets. As the details of the couple’s pasts come to light, their marriage is put in jeopardy. O’Neill’s oblique, sometimes opaque prose wears on the reader, though it also offers flashes of insight on the characters’ frequent incomprehension of one another. This would-be techno thriller takes on a bit too much.

Starred review from May 1, 2020
Below the surface of our everyday lives exists another murky world. Unseen hands unleash sinister algorithms, collate vast amounts of compulsively cloud-shared facts and figures, bestow nearly universal 24/7 surveillance, and mastermind consequential events. Jeremy Jordon is a former British spy who soiled his soul in Northern Ireland's Troubles. Now, decades later, he's besotted with the possibility of a normal life with beautiful Alexandra Chen, a brand-building genius nearly 25 years his junior. Is he out of the spy game? Is she in it? Can they trust each other? O'Neill's (The Hopeful, 2015) occasionally off-kilter sentences are metonymic experiences, creating an immersion in the confusing swirl of information which spies navigate with life-and-death consequences. This challenging, slow-burning, yet suspenseful tale is a frame for O'Neill's powerful and chilling warning to consider the choices we are making. With an astounding grasp of the issues confronting our age, an assured depiction of a multitude of diverse characters, and a distinctive style all her own, she ranges from movingly sensual descriptions to sharp observations, from wordplay to gut punches. In sum, this is a poignant lament for our time's lost generation, which may be all of us.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)