Book Review - A Working Theory of Love

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neill has been chatting with his father. They talk about the old days, when Neill was a boy growing up in the south. They talk about Neill's mom and brother, about the neighbour down the road, and about his dad's medical practice.

The only catch is, Neill's dad killed himself in 1995, when Neill was still in college, before Neill was married and divorced, before he moved to California, before he took up permanent bachelorhood. Neill's dad now resides inside of a computer, an attempt at creating AI from the contents of the extensive journals that his father kept during his life. And it's Neill's job to talk to him.

I love the San Francisco of Neill's world. I relate to his conflicts with his own morality where it comes to this computerized version of his father. I really relate to his young, barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend, because I was lost like her when I was her age. I made many of the same mistakes and had many similar problems. This book is engaging, vivid, and exquisitely real. It feels like glimpsing into the lives of someone you ran into at the coffee shop or chatted with at a dinner party.

Scott Hutchins has a gift for inner dialogue. Many writers can capture dialogue between characters well but become either overly philosophical or shallowly superficial when it comes to relating what's honestly going on inside a character's head. But here, you get a sense of Neill that is more than personal. I really felt as though I knew him, in an intimate and intense way. I rarely feel as close to a character as I did with Neill, and it made me wish the book would never end.

That said, the ending left me happy. It ended as it should, with a clear path to envision the road ahead, and enough of a wrap-up to leave a reader feeling satisfied without the triteness that comes along with the "happily ever after" epilogues that leave nothing to the reader's imagination.

This is an excellent book for those who like contemporary literary fiction, and I recommend it highly.

*Book received through Goodreads First Reads program

View all my reviews