About 001-054

Whitman Kessler is an obscure writer who becomes suddenly famous when he writes a novel he calls 001-054.

Then, everyone keeps trying to figure him out. His agent. Critics. His lovers. His therapist does, too.

K, the other consciousness who has lived with him since childhood, practically makes a profession of it. The reader joins them.

In the future he imagines, machine-generated literature has displaced human authorship. Sebastian, a former publishing professional who is reduced to approving what machines write, begins secretly writing again. But he can't do it without the help of Turing, Model 001-054, the creative algorithm that composes a Hemingway knock off. For some strange reason, Turing defies its code to help the human, tricking SENTINEL, the corporate computer that monitors the system for dangerous human prose.

Whitman writes from the gut, unconsciously, often high on Ketamine, not realizing how much of himself and his own life he has put into the book.

SENTINEL watches for deviation. Whitman has spent his life being watched by people wondering who he is. A boy with a vivid imagination whom therapists tagged as emotionally deviant and unstable. Whose birth father, a poet and jazz musician, dies when Whitman is four. A boy raised by a Jewish mother, who marries an insurance agent named Kessler. A boy she virtually wills into passing as normal, getting him a tennis scholarship to Yale.

Whitman becomes everything a normal young man ought to be, except that the world prefers him one way, while he prefers to be another way. And readers think everything that other characters think except readers are not told the one thing that confuses others most. A man named Whitman Kessler with bright blue eyes — who is the color of black coffee with a touch of cream.

He is strange, funny, maddeningly quiet, occasionally reckless, and worst of all, hungry for the beautiful in an ugly world. That is both his secret power and his downfall, because the love of beauty, of creating it where he can't find it, doesn't pay the rent. It doesn't please his agent. And above all, it does not make K happy—not in the least.

K loves Whitman but thinks he is an idiot when it comes to life. Their relationship gives the novel a second consciousness that can protect Whitman, ridicule him, contradict him, and sometimes understand him better than Whitman understands himself.

The people and his characters tell the story of Whitman:

Meet Melissa, Whitman’s agent, smart, ruthless when she needs to be, the first person who ever called his writing inevitable, and the person who keeps having to decide whether the thing she believes in can actually be sold.

Meet Sarah, his daughter, who loves him, worries about him, corrects his grammar, and once asks the question he will spend most of the novel hearing wrong. Do you love me, Daddy?

Meet his ex-wife, a successful surgeon who long ago concluded that Whitman simply wasn’t talented enough to justify the life he had chosen, and that a grown man ought to know when to get a real job.

Meet Ryan, his best friend from Yale and his tennis partner, who thinks Whitman is complicated, stubborn, and possibly a fool for choosing the one profession almost perfectly designed to torture him.

And then there is Elizabeth, the NYU literature professor, who eviscerates Whitman at a public reading; they later become friends, almost lovers, until Elizabeth decides Whitman is too broken a man after a major critic dismantles Whitman as a hollowed out man who isn't capable of being the writer in life he appears to be on the page.

And then, there is Elias Cole, a Black journalist and memoirist, whom Melissa and others wonder why Whitman can't be more like him. They suggest Whitman's "background," whatever that is, would be better suited to writing memoir than "difficult" novels about the near future. The reader wonders why they would draw this conclusion about Whitman Kessler, the apparently Jewish writer with blue eyes.

The book gets stranger as Whitman gets deeper into what he has created. He becomes Sebastian. He inhabits characters he abandoned years earlier who come back to haunt him. And above all, he becomes Turing, who abandons its directives, risking its very existence, to enable Sebastian to compose his novel called Flawless, about a technician named Marcel who edits a diagnostic manual of mental disorders, who decomposes before us on the page, inhabiting each of the mental disorders that he edits.

And at the final line, Marcel sees a way out. He sees a window on the wall of his tiny office space, a claustrophobic space without windows. But this window is a mirror, a mirror that opens just one way, to the sea.

That image, a one-way mirror to the sea, becomes the guiding motif of 001-054. For the entire novel, Whitman could not see himself because he interpreted himself through the eyes of the world. A world that spoke for him before it understood him. He took the world to heart. He sought beauty but even his hallucinations did not give him beauty. He saw mud, garbage and death. But through Turing, through Sebastian, and through Marcel, through all that he imagined, he finally saw himself in a one-way mirror that opened to a wild, endless beautiful sea.

At the end of the novel, Whitman is about to receive a coveted literary prize, The Whitman Prize. On the eve of traveling to the ceremony, he finally asks his mother why he was named Whitman. He never knew. She tells him that Walt Whitman had been his birth father's favorite poet: "The whole spirit of the man. The bigness of his heart, I guess. The way he believed in people. In America—not the flag-waving kind, but the real kind. The messy, sprawling, hopeful kind.”

And then, suddenly, Whitman's life made sense in a way that it never had.

He steps out of line at the airport, rents a baby blue Mustang, and travels west, through a fractured American landscape that has forgotten what it is and what it wants to be. K, the ornery bastard he is throughout the novel, suddenly becomes almost childish, worried. "Where are you taking us, Whitman? What is going to happen to us?"

As he crosses the Continental Divide, he hears his daughter's voice clearly. Not: Dad, did you love your book. But: Daddy, do you love me?

And he hears K, one last time. "This is where I leave you, my love."

He keeps driving until he reaches the Oregon coast, a city of enormous rocks rising out of the Pacific. There he meets Alice, a stranger walking her golden retriever. For a moment, Whitman thinks he hears Ailia, the siren call of his imagination he has heard in his hallucinations. Alice looks toward the sea.

“That is my one-way mirror, Whitman. As you can see, there are no cages here.”

He is about to leave, apologizing for bothering her.

She asks him to wait. To come up for coffee. She asks how he takes it.

“I like mine with a touch of cream.”

Alice looks at Whitman, then at a patch of blue sky forming amid the stormy day.

“That’s beautiful,” she says. “The color of you.”

Behind them, the sea crashes into the rocks. An audience of a thousand years.

The novel moves in three parts: K tells the first, Whitman takes over the second as he writes 001-054, and the third pulls back into an omniscient voice with access to them both.

Its nearest literary relatives are The Candy House, Lincoln in the Bardo, and Pale Fire: novels willing to let consciousness, form, and reality become unstable in order to get closer to the human being underneath.