The Unknowns
July 2013
Gabriel Roth / Text Publishing
Eric Muller, a twenty-something computer geek who approaches life as if it is a programme to be repaired, its holes and inconsistencies to be worked through until it approaches a user-friendly state, has just become a dot.com millionaire. His hyper-consciousness is traced back to his early teenage self and a disastrous attempt to achieve a system of classification amongst his female classmates.
The Unknowns’s setting is San Francisco 2002 and unlike other post-September 11 novels, this one doesn’t deal with the event itself, instead employing the aftermath and its states of unreality to interrogate truth and subjectivity.
The title echoes a Donald Rumsfeld quote, but also references Eric’s absolutism and its reverberations for his newfound romance with Maya. Roth’s hero veers between being frail with vulnerabilities to verging on the detestable.
As a teenager, Eric is entertaining and his tormented ruminations endearing – `If Michelle Kessel humiliates you in the forest, does she make a sound?’ – but his internal dialogue when older can be exasperating in its narcissism. Whilst sometimes this is a deliberate device, at other times it’s evidently not.
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