Sike
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A story of boy meets girl meets AI therapist, Sike explores our aching pursuit of love and self-control
Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it’s time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.
He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London’s tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it.
Shifting between Adrian and Maquie’s perspectives as it tracks the fraught first year of their relationship, Sike is a story of two people wrestling with connection, identity, anxiety, success, and the limits of our obsession with self-analysis and awareness.
For fans of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and the modern love stories of Sally Rooney, Fred Lunzer’s debut novel brings us an incisive and intimate deep dive into the reach for clarity by a curious and ambitious, anxious and irresolute generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lunzer debuts with a clever if uneven tale of AI, love, and hip-hop. Adrian, a white 20-something Jewish man from North London, ghostwrites lyrics for popular rappers. He meets and falls for Maquie, a 28-year-old venture capitalist visiting from Canada, but she's not interested in being monogamous. To help deal with his distress, he turns to Sike, a psychotherapy app that provides feedback in real time via smartglasses. When Adrian learns Maquie has slept with the founder of a startup she wants to invest in, Sike explains that he has a fear of abandonment rooted in his father's departure from the family when he was a child. The tech elements are as underdeveloped as the love story, since much of Adrian's narration consists of digressions on hip-hop, race, and Jewishness. Fortunately, this is where Lunzer shines, as when Adrian bemoans the "sad" excess of later Nas compared to the "staccato gunshot lines" of the rapper's breakout "N.Y. State of Mind" or the brilliance of Jay-Z's "infinite enjambment." Equally enlightening are Adrian's assessments of the awkwardness of his role as a ghostwriter and the nuances of claims about antisemitism in rap. Pop culture aficionados ought to take note.
