“Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”īuyer’s remorse is a recurring theme in Ian McEwan’s witty and humane new novel, “ Machines Like Me” (Nan A. “The future kept arriving,” Charlie ruminates. People have already soured on the latest innovations, among them “speaking fridges with a sense of smell” and driverless cars that cause multinational gridlock. The Beatles have reunited (to mixed reviews), Margaret Thatcher has just lost the Falkland Islands to Argentina, and Sir Alan Turing, now seventy, is the presiding spirit of a preemie Information Age. Man, woman, and android third wheel, the trio is Eden by way of Apple. Before long, Charlie and Miranda are considering parenthood and searching for a suitable nest. Kind, eager, and brilliant, Adam becomes the young couple’s “ultimate plaything”-and, once he takes over Charlie’s day trading, the household’s golden goose. A relationship forms after Charlie introduces Miranda to Adam and invites her to co-author the robot’s personality. The gamesome yet secretive daughter of a famous writer, she studies history, informed by a postmodern suspicion of “truth” that winks at coming narrative vexations. In much the same way that some singles adopt dogs, Charlie uses Adam to court his upstairs neighbor, Miranda, a graduate student ten years his junior.
Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother’s house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an “intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum.” The impulsive slacker is all too ready to exchange his birthright for a mess of wattage. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes.
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