Quotients

In the wake of 9/11, distrust became a comfortable backdrop to the upbrings of we, the millennials and successive generations. Big Brother and Big Data, ubiquitous surveillance, foreign intelligence and invasion — the breadth of exposure fears is an ever-expanding chasm in the Information Age. In Quotients, O'Neill takes this modern-primal panic of being seen and flips it inward — how far will we go to protect being known fully?

At the center of this narrative is Jeremy, a former intelligence operative, and Alexandra, an image fixer for nations. Their marriage is the chess board O'Neill plays out the relatable relationship fears — Is she cheating on me? — layering it with murkier and weightier questions of assurance — Do my secrets make me unlovable? We see Jeremy and Alexandra flailing in the mental deep ends of their individual pools, an infuriating contrast to the shallow end they often choose to splash around with one another.

The blunt dialogue between the couple is entirely Gilmore Girl -esque, in that, its reflexive wit is quick and smart, almost too quick and smart to be believable exchanges, but instruments each use to forge and ward off intimacy. Ripples of distrust permeate their parenting and surrounding rings, Jeremy's ex-partner, Alexandra's schizophrenic brother and the journalist desperately and feverishly attempting to make sense of it all.

“Pregnant women yelling at their already born.”

No page is without guttural examples of O'Neill's rhetoric. She insists on extrapolating the casual, carefully taking it apart to repackage simple observations into beautifully-complicated narratives. Taken as a one-liner, the effect is stunning. Spanning the course of an entire book? Exhausting. Because by Quotient 's end, the story is less resolved as it is wrapped up in an exquisite linguistic bow.

That O'Neill wasn't out to write just another literary thriller is stunningly clear. However, Quotients is everything but.

In order to keep pace with its plot and characters (plus their code names and those code names' aliases), a reader must assume the lunacy illustrated. O'Neill created a meaty meditation for the current age, art made of our paranoia.