5/12/2023 0 Comments Made for love by alissa nutting![]() ![]() The book begins, and races along, as an antic thriller, through a circus’s worth of set pieces (sex dolls, lawn flamingoes, motorized wheelchairs, bestiality with dolphins), but throughout and underneath this supersaturated masquerade Hazel tells the darkest, baldest, saddest truths. After 10 years as the captive, increasingly unwilling test subject in the development of her husband’s increasingly invasive technological innovations, Hazel runs away to hide in a trailer park for senior citizens. She’s a hostage to the all-too-recognizable work of imagining each moment packaged as the past, viewed from the future: thinking in broadcast. No thought or act can be hidden from him, forcing Hazel’s experience of the present into a brilliant pantomime of the curated self. Not only does he know where she is at all times each day he downloads the previous 24 hours of her life. Hazel’s husband, Byron Gogol - a tech impresario/overlord who mashes up Bill Gates’s pioneering genius, Steve Jobs’s visionary particularity and Jeff Bezos’ ruthless drive to subjugate all minds through objects - installed the chip in her head without her knowledge. Fast-forward through a dozen improvements on fast-forwarding technology into the future present, barely a generation later: It’s 2019 and 30-something Hazel, the protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s smart, riveting novel “Made for Love,” has a chip in her brain. ![]() In 1989, if you didn’t know where your girlfriend was, chances are you had to just go find her, with something analog like your legs. ![]()
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