The Dimensions of a Cave

May 1, 2023

In this latest (following Prodigals) from Granta Best of Young American Novelists, investigative reporter Quentin Jones is stunned when his story on military interrogation practices in the Desert War is scotched. Investigating further, he discovers a cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation. With a 25,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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August 15, 2023
Amid the convergence of dream, memory, and virtual reality, an investigative reporter suspects he's being played. If this debut novel had a soundtrack, its theme song could be Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and this would be the key line: "You know something's happening but you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?" A veteran journalist, Quentin Jones definitely knows something is happening--something involving emergent technology, the erosion of privacy, and the amoral exercise of power by both government and private enterprise. A piece involving some of this had been spiked by his newspaper, even though it was well sourced, because of pressures from above. Whether causal or coincidental, his romantic relationship had crumbled as well, while he was on leave from the paper. Undaunted, he plunged deeper into his investigation that nobody wanted him to report, and he discovered that he had barely scratched the surface. He unearthed a corruptive and corrosive hellhole, with a heart of darkness that is way darker than anything Conrad could conjure. Is humanity really this relentlessly inhuman? Or is this some sort of elaborate video game? The book's framework is a further source of mystification, as Jones isn't narrating his story directly but rather telling it to a group of reunited journalists, friends from j-school, and this group must be wondering if their friend has lost his mind--not to mention wondering how he manages to recall page after page of dialogue that is often more like soliloquy. The backstory becomes foregrounded, focusing on a former prot�g� of Jones', an embedded journalist gone rogue, now feared dead. Somewhere in this vortex where past meets present, perhaps some answers lie. There is a shuddering power to this relentlessly grim narration.

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August 21, 2023
Jackson’s inspired debut novel (after the collection Prodigals) recasts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Plato’s allegory of the cave for the information age. After journalist Quentin Jones’s investigative piece about the U.S. government’s virtual reality interrogation program is spiked by his editor, he gets wind of a more ambitious iteration in which pacified citizens would play out their lives in “bespoke realities.” The idea of this technology, he tells his group of reporter buddies in a frame narrative that mirrors Conrad’s novella, has radically altered his perception of their profession and the nature of reality. Never sure whether he is following leads or being led into a trap, Quentin tracks down the program’s architects and learns that Bruce, one of their mentees, has entered, and perhaps lost himself in, this experimental simulation. The book’s characters, including government bureaucrats, warlords, and bohemian artists, tend to expound at length, their voices nearly indistinguishable but their tales florid and spellbinding—Bruce, the novel’s Kurtz, delivers a “horrific litany” of ancient torture techniques and modern-day genocides. Within the serpentine plot of journalistic tradecraft and government skullduggery, epigrammatic reflections abound: “Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form,” offers a computer scientist. It adds up to a timely and clear-eyed interrogation of the fictions that shield people from society’s blinding truths. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc.

September 1, 2023
Four veteran reporters, friends since grad school, gather for an overdue reunion only to find that one of them has changed in alarming ways. These are men who cover humanity's greatest atrocities, so it's understandable that their profession would one day take its toll. However, the tale Quentin Jones spins about the origin of his present condition can best be described as an investigative journalist's plummet down a rabbit hole of geologic proportions. When Bruce, his young prot�g�, goes missing in a war zone Quentin encouraged him to cover, Quentin pursues increasingly circuitous clues to determine if Bruce is still alive. His leads uncover government espionage programs with complex acronyms that employ advanced technologies to alter perceptions and exert extreme mind control, catapulting him into a "sphere of ambiguous and liminal existence, where outer and inner reality coincided." Following his acclaimed short-story collection, Prodigals (2016), Jackson's deeply philosophical, ideas-driven debut novel contemplates a multitude of contemporary and future scenarios in which everything is examined, yet nothing makes sense. Recommend to fans of Joseph Conrad and David Foster Wallace.

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