Enigmas

~ The Unseen World, by Liz Moore ~

The first few pages of The Unseen World suggest a coming-of-age novel about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances. Ada is 13, living in Boston with her father, a dedicated intellectual who runs an artificial-intelligence lab. She was born via surrogacy, and her mother left the picture when she was born, so it has always been just the two of them. Her father, David Sibelius, is deeply engaged with his child, home-schooling her according to his own theories. Ada reads far beyond her years, has learned advanced mathematics, and the people she knows best are the members of her father’s lab, a decade or two older than herself. On the flip side, she has had no interactions with children of her own age: she watches them with fascination, unfamiliar with their interactions, their language, their clothing and behaviour. The novel could be the story of a girl living in the heart of modern culture yet dissociated from it, learning to navigate adolescence and adulthood.

[David] prided himself on caring more about almost everything than clothing. Food, yes; science, yes; Ada, yes; clothing, no. And he expected this of Ada also — that she would rank her wants in the same order as he ranked his own. The wants she did not tell him about (cable television, Nancy Drew books, a waterfall of bangs like Liston’s, a hair accessory called a banana clip) felt to Ada shameful and perverse, ignoble.

A new wrinkle appears: David Sibelius, so very scholarly and intelligent, is unusually forgetful that Thanksgiving. He poses his annual riddle to the new students in his lab, but can’t remember the solution that he has known for years.

This was a moment that became sealed forever in Ada’s memory, encased in glass, a display in the museum of David’s decline. She never forgot the brief silence that followed, during which everyone looked down at the floor and then up again, or the way that Giordi loudly cleared his throat. Or the way that David looked at her, almost in horror: the look of a pilot who has just discovered that the engines of his plane have failed.

David’s decline continues, and Ada adjusts bit by bit. Diana Liston, David’s second-in-command at the lab, who lives nearby with her three sons, helps as much as she can.

[Ada] knew he was gone as soon as she woke up; normally she could sense his presence in the house from the small noises he made, his constant movement, the vibration of the floor from a jittering leg. But that morning there was a foreign stillness to the house. […]

David does return 48 hours later, but with only vague explanations. It becomes clear that Ada cannot cope, and David cannot be left on his own, so he is moved to a facility nearby, while Ada moves in with Liston and her three sons. It turns out that David had never filled out any paperwork for his homeschooling of Ada, and the authorities decree that she must now go to school.

Thus begins Ada’s initiation into ‘normal’ life. Normal in quotes, in that Liston’s family is hardly the stuff of TV America. She is a brilliant scientist, a single parent, and her sons, ranging in age from 15 to 9, are largely left to fend for themselves. Despite her lack of interest in domestic skills like cooking, she is deeply engaged in the well-being of her sons, sets practical rules on their activities, and stays up late to make sure the 15-year-old gets home from curfew. I enjoyed this unusual portrayal of a scientist mother. Brilliance in novels and movies often goes hand-in-hand with callous detachment, but Liston is warm and caring, and her idiosyncratic household suffers no more than the usual problems of adolescent children.

Also appealing is the solidly diverse group of scientists: Giordi, Hayato, Frank, Joonseong, Edith and Charles-Robert, each with their own particular skills.

Ada is emerging into adolescence, and has a crush on William, Liston’s oldest son.

Was she pretty? She could not say, and it had never before occurred to her to wonder. She was brown-haired and round-faced, with serious dark circles under her eyes and the beginning of several pimples on her chin. She had a widow’s peak that David told her he had had, too, when he had any hair to speak of. Like David, too, she wore glasses, which she had never before minded, but which now seemed like an unfair handicap.

She fantasized often about what she would say, what she would do, the next time she was in the same room with William. [..] As she fell asleep, she thought about the great beauty of him, the way his sinews fit together in a neat, finished puzzle.

Ada’s goal in her new school is to remain entirely invisible. She eats lunch alone, or with a friend who is equally out of touch with the social dynamics of the high school and its cliques (they both read books through lunch, side by side). William Liston, however, is a star, both good-looking and cool: Ada, living in William’s house, is seen a source of information and a conduit into the Liston household for interested girls. The second son, Gregory, is the classic introverted nerd, and he and Ada very slowly and awkwardly become friends and allies.

Meanwhile, custody of Ada needs to be officially transferred to Liston, and Ada’s own house needs to be cleared out and eventually sold. Routine paperwork turns up the fact that Caltech, David’s ostensible alma mater, has no record of him, and that the Sibelius family had reported their son David missing decades earlier. Who, really, is the man who has fathered and brought up Ada?

The mystery of David runs parallel to Ada’s adolescent development, and is not finally solved until years later. And here’s where the novel begins to flag. Two decades later, Ada is a computer scientist in her own right, and her adolescent social issues are long past. Her own AI-related work relates to human-computer interactions, and seems somewhat dated and simply less interesting than the other threads of the story. There is also an encrypted disk left by David to Ada which presumably holds the keys to his own mysterious life, but it would take a more dedicated reader than I to solve the code independently. Some of the plot twists regarding David’s past seem a little arbitrary and forced.

The technology of each period is charmingly, affectionately described — the old Macintoshes and ELIXIR, the AI program that David created in his heydey, are almost characters in their own right, and very central to the story. ‘Nuff said, no spoilers.

A distinctly original, genre-bending novel.