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Summary
Summary
A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us.
After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice.
But soon, Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns: boxes containing records of his online activity are delivered to his apartment, a young man seems to be following him, and his elderly mother receives anonymous phone calls slandering her son. Why, he wonders, would anyone want to watch him so closely, and, even more upsetting, why would they alert him to the fact that he was being watched?
As Jeremy takes stock of the entanglements that marked his years abroad, he wonders if he has unwittingly committed a crime so serious as to make him an enemy of the state. Moving towards a shattering reassessment of what it means to be free in a time of ever more intrusive surveillance, Jeremy is forced to ask himself whether he is "no one," as he believes, or a traitor not just to his country but to everyone around him.
Author Notes
Patrick Flanery was born in California and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a B.F.A. in Film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he worked in the film industry before moving to the U.K., where he completed a doctorate in twentieth-century English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the novels Absolution , which was shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Fallen Land. He has written for The Washington Post , The Guardian , and The Times Literary Supplement , and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Reading.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 dataURLs, 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 gazeor even if he hasis 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This third novel by the author of Absolution (2012) and Fallen Land (2013) is good, old-fashioned fiction on very modern, post-Edward 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?--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"BORDERS CAN BE tricky places," the narrator of "I Am No One" tells us. He is Jeremy O'Keefe, a professor of history at New York University, and he knows something about in-betweenness. He has just returned from a decade at Oxford University, where his American accent continually marked him out as an outsider, and he now discovers that the sense of alienation he felt in England has followed him back across the Atlantic. In once-familiar parts of Manhattan he must now look at maps, and his students hear, following his years abroad, something newly British in his diction. "If you listen to my vowels," Jeremy protests, lost for a moment in a Beckettian comedy of not-belonging, forced to rely on the very voice that estranges him, "they're entirely American. It's just the phrasing and the emphases, maybe the vocabulary as well, that has drifted from origins." Patrick Flanery is a California-born novelist who lives in England. In his work to date he has proved himself to be a refreshingly astute observer of ideas of nationhood, exile, censorship and surveillance. His first novel, "Absolution," investigated the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa. His second, "Fallen Land," concerned a Midwestern family destroyed by an outsider's increasingly creepy intrusions into their home. In "I Am No One," the engine of the story is another unwanted arrival: a mysterious box that turns up one day at Jeremy's apartment. It bears no return address or postmark, leaving "no way of determining where it might have originated," and it contains reams of paper detailing Jeremy's online activities. Pretty soon a guy in a ski mask is lingering outside his window. "Who is this man who watches me?" Jeremy is left to think. "Who is the person who tracks my virtual life? Are they one and the same?" Questions of who and why power the plot and give Flanery occasion to slip into his protagonist's past in Oxford. Is a beautiful former student named Fadia the cause of all his present trouble? In the New York scenes, characters speak in blocks of rather wooden dialogue, perhaps suggesting something cold and automatic in the city he has returned to, but in the Oxford sections the writing becomes looser and more digressive, capturing Jeremy's rising paranoia and swaying perceptions, creating passages that read at times like an attractive crossbreed of "Brideshead Revisited" and Javier Marias's "All Souls." In these pages Flanery seems less concerned with making clear that Jeremy is an Everyman - "like anyone else, like you, coming to the end of this page" - and takes us instead into the lived specifics of his pedantic and privileged world. As mysterious packages continue to arrive, the reader starts to see that the novel itself is a form of surveillance, a recording of activity. Sentences like this one begin cropping up: "I remain convinced even now, as I write these pages, directed to my heirs. . . ." The novel-as-testimony has its own rich history, executed with great power in books like Antonio Tabucchi's "Pereira Declares," but in "I Am No One" it is less successful. The revelation that Jeremy is "one of the world's leading experts on surveillance" sits awkwardly with his inability to fact-check threatening strangers' stories, and as the plot begins to creak through various twists and turns, stage-managed either by the author or his unreliable narrator, Jeremy can sound more like a nervous novelist than a traumatized professor. "Fiction or documentary?" he thinks at one point. "Campus melodrama or spy thriller? In what genre am I trapped?" Flanery has incorporated some of the hallmarks of conventional thrillers into his text - chapters ending in one-sentence paragraphs such as "Now, as the evidence grows around me, that seems all but certain" - but at times he seems uneasy with his own desire to keep the reader turning the page. Entrapment is one of the themes at hand, prisons administered by the authorities and prisons created by "the data of memory," so there may be some authorial intention behind the lingering sense that "I Am No One" has been written from the outside in. Flanery is a writer capable of delicately layering elements of the surreal and absurd into his work, but in this novel the themes can seem rather thickly laid, prioritized over the characters and their sentences. "What kind of man was I to leave my young daughter in New York and move to Oxford at the very moment of the city's worst crisis in its history?" Jeremy thinks, referring to the attacks of Sept. 11, his story beginning to reach for state-of-the-nation scope. He claims to be "queasy with guilt" about his departure, but, as with so many moments of claimed unease in the novel, the feeling is not explored in any depth. The easy shortcuts of psychological realism are here - "A cry swelled in my throat"; "A sob tore out of my throat"; "I open my email and see a name that makes my heart flip" - but without an undertow of emotional nuance, these moments can fail to convince. The instances of more aloof, detached narration tend to carry the book's ideas forward with greater force, leaving us feeling we're wired to a cold security camera and its fascinating, unfinished footage of events. In "I Am No One" we find a writer standing on the border between the immediate and the allegorical, the personal and the political, the thriller and the novel of ideas, glancing in several directions at once. It raises the enticing question of where Flanery's bold imagination will choose to transport us to next. The reader starts to see that the novel itself is a form of surveillance. JONATHAN LEE is the author, most recently, of the novel "High Dive."
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.