What Kind of Paradise

“Every living thing on this planet including humans is a product of nature. Humans may believe they are in charge, but we shouldn’t be.”

This is the first piece of Saul’s complex philosophy that the author provides. Jane describes him as a modern Thoreau, and there is certainly an element of Thoreau’s character in Saul and his views on The Potential Benefits and Harms of Technology. He is anti-technology and, to a large extent, anti-society. He believes that humans are just one small piece of the larger world and that they are no more or less important than any other creature.

“It was impossible to win an argument against my father, though he liked me to try anyway.”

Saul is a complex, multi-faceted character. Jane admits that he has a brilliant mind, but he is also intractable and ego driven at times. He is sure that he is never wrong on any point; if others fail to see his way of thinking, it is because of their deficiencies, not his. Learning to differentiate her own views and values from her father’s will become a key part of The Search for Identity and Autonomy for Jane.

“I couldn’t help wondering who I would be with a mother of my own, how much easier my life might have been.”

Jane’s hunger for a mother figure is an important facet of her characterization. She has been entirely shaped by her father’s parenting, and she often wonders how her life might have been different if she had a mother. She feels pangs of sadness when she sees other mothers with their daughters and can never quite be satisfied with having just one parent.

“I’m going to finally write my manifesto and put it on the world wide web. And you’re going to help me do it.”

This marks a key turning point in the novel. Saul’s decision to pen a manifesto and post it online marks the end of Jane’s life as she knows it. Saul intends the manifesto as an accompaniment to the first bombing, and his use of Jane as an accomplice becomes the catalyst for her choice to leave Saul and strike out on her own. It also firmly contextualizes the novel within the early days of the internet: Formerly reserved for scientists and academics, the internet became, during the 1990s, a way for ordinary people to share information, speaking to the potential benefits and harms of technology.

“He studied the source code with curiosity, then clicked back to the Web. The familiarity of his fingers flying across the keyboard made me uneasy. It was as if my father had been taken over by a stranger I’d never met. One who clearly knew computers and clearly knew code.”

This moment adds depth and detail to Saul’s character. Although he has been presented through the lens of survival skills and isolationist ideology, it now becomes apparent that he has been hiding key facets of his past and personality. The mystery that this presents to Jane will become an important part of her choice to strike out on her own and look for answers about her parents’ past, which will in turn help Jane along her path toward the search for identity and autonomy.

“The more we continue to replace a life of value with a virtual life, the less satisfaction we derive from our existence, resulting in a world in which citizens are anesthetized by pharmaceuticals and entertainment.”

The corrupting influence of technology is at the core of Saul’s personal philosophy regarding the potential benefits and harms of technology. Although a brilliant computer scientist himself, he would rather live a solitary life off the grid than help the tech industry grow. He values “real” experiences over the pastimes of contemporary life and argues that people should return to a simpler way of life instead of unthinkingly marching forward out of a desire for “progress.”

“‘My girl.’ I had never heard him use that phrase before.”

As a young person, Jane craves her father’s approval. She has no other life with which to compare her own, so she does not realize that her father is not “normal.” Although brilliant, he can also be pedantic and manipulative, and he understands how much she wants to please him. He uses that emotion to elicit certain responses from her, a fact that she does not realize until much later in life when she confronts the pressures of familial relationships more explicitly.

“We must rise together and fight back against the march of technology, even if it requires violence, to eradicate the voices that are blindly leading us towards our own inevitable destruction.”

Jane spends her childhood almost entirely in the company of her father, and part of “growing up” for her becomes realizing that Saul is not a typical parent or person. The language of his manifesto, which calls for people to “rise” and “fight back” against the “inevitable destruction” that otherwise awaits society, reinforces Saul’s views of technology as an unmitigated evil. The manifesto’s language also hints at his intentions to take matters into his own hands via acts of domestic terrorism.

“So there it was. I wasn’t seventeen-year-old Jane Williams, daughter of Jennifer and Saul. I was eighteen-year-old Esme Nowak, daughter of Adam and Theresa. ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ I whispered.”

This is a pivotal moment for Jane/Esme in the search for identity and autonomy. She realizes that her father is not the man he said he was and that he has potentially gotten her into terrible trouble. It is the moment when she chooses autonomy over her relationship with Saul/Adam and strikes off on her own. Her discovery of her real name and age also reflects the important motif of names in the text.

“My father had spent the last decade teaching me that technology was the enemy. What if he’d gotten it all wrong and it was actually our liberator?”

After the bombing, Esme must quickly adapt to a new life, but she must also develop her own identity after years of being molded by her father. She must develop a unique world view apart from Saul’s and figure out which of his teachings were accurate and which might have been more suspect. In musing about whether technology might be a “liberator,” Esme becomes drawn to the opposite extreme: the idea that technology is a pure, uncomplicated social good.

“For the first time since I found my birth certificate, I realized I’d been robbed not just of my mother but also of a whole different life.”

Esme wrestles with the pressures of familial relationships and must come to terms with the fact that neither parent is who she would have wished for in a mother or father. Here, it dawns on her that if Adam hadn’t faked their deaths, she would have had the opportunity for a “normal” childhood. This moment becomes a key part of her break with her father and a step on her road to self-determination and autonomy.

“Lionel says you’re hiring anyone who knows HTML. I know HTML.”

In just a few short days, Esme’s life has changed completely. She has begun to develop new ideas, is more assertive, and knows that she must now survive on her own. In this scene, Lionel’s boss discovers her sleeping in the office. She has decided that she can no longer be passive, so she takes control of the situation. She changes the tone of the conversation when she asks for a job, and she ends up securing herself a position and a paycheck.

“For the first time in my life I was part of a collective ‘We.’”

Having lived the entirety of her life alone with her father, Esme finds work fulfilling in part because she gets to be in the company of so many other people. She realizes that she enjoys teamwork and that she feels more self-actualization putting her intellect to work in service of a common goal than she did reading alone in the cabin. She also feels a sense of accomplishment: She solved the crisis of being alone in a strange city with no money, no plan, and no prospects.

“But I was Esme Nowak, not Jane Williams, and Esme wanted to be part of everything in this new life; she didn’t want to have to think so hard all the time, to worry about what her father would say or the consequences of every action. After a life of having nothing and doing nothing, she wanted to have it all. She wanted to just say yes.”

Esme embraces the search for identity and autonomy. She must reject her father, sort through which of his teachings she still agrees with, and strike out on her own. The transition from “Jane” to “Esme” symbolizes this journey to her: When she decides to chart her own path forward, she stops using the name her father gave her when he faked their deaths and returns to her birth name, once more reinforcing the motif of names in the text.

“Online, the misfits are the cool kids.”

This novel charts the rise of the internet and paints a portrait of the first tech boom in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Many of its characters are self-avowed “misfits” who do not fit in anywhere else but whose unique skills and abilities help them to secure jobs in the burgeoning world of computer science. Lionel and the rest of Signal’s employees bond over their shared status as outcasts and form what is, for many of them, their first real community of like-minded individuals.

“The most important thing to know is this: Everything I did was for your sake.”

Esme’s father is a complex character and an unreliable narrator. As Jane, she might have believed that he genuinely felt he had her best interests at heart, but now that she knows more about his true identity, she realizes that he has always been motivated, at least in part, by his personal vendetta and his deteriorating mental state. Reassessing her father helps Esme cope with the pressures of familial relationships.

“In 1997 the internet was still a present-tense medium: Information was wide, but not deep, going back only a few years in history, as if nothing had existed before the world started to go online in the mid-90s.”

This novel details the early days of the internet, interrogating the potential benefits and harms of technology. Although the narrative ostensibly recounts 1990s-era conversations about the internet, it also speaks to concerns about technology that dominate present-day discourse, most notably about the risks and rewards of burgeoning artificial-intelligence technology.

“Don’t confuse what you read in books with real life.”

During the latter portions of the book, Esme continues to confront her changing views of her father’s philosophy. She asserts her independence in choosing to work for the kind of tech firm her father would have hated, but in many instances, she falls back on his teachings in order to explain the world around her. Here, she and Lionel debate the ethics of Esme refusing to turn her father in, even as he continues to target his former colleagues. Lionel urges Esme to act based on what she thinks is right rather than to over-intellectualize the situation using the tools taught to her by her father.

“Technology has already given us the capacity to grow exponentially beyond our mundane human capabilities, and it’s only going to get more astonishing from here.”

Esme’s mother has a markedly different set of beliefs about technology than her father, representing another angle on the potential benefits and harms of technology. While Adam sees technology as a distinct threat to both society and the individual, Tess sees technological growth as a distinct opportunity and as a net gain for humanity. Tess’s dismissal of human capabilities as “mundane” also reflects her characterization as someone who is uncomfortable with human emotions and vulnerabilities.

“What excites you most about computer technology is the purity of its mathematic logic. What excites them is the money to be made.”

Here, Adam recounts his time at Peninsula Research Institute. His views on the burgeoning internet reflect his own unique personal philosophy: He was driven by his intellect, by scientific research, and by the hope that his work would be put to use in the creation of a more egalitarian technology. He left Peninsula in part because his co-workers did not share his idealistic vision and instead viewed their work as a pathway to fame and monetary success.

“In the first few years, she expends only the most basic efforts on Esme and seems interested more in the abstract process of parenting than in her daughter herself. Rather than rocking the baby to sleep, she will read five sleep training books and present you with a multi-page analysis of the best methods for you to use.”

The pressures of familial relationships and the gulf between expectations and reality in families is one of this novel’s key thematic focal points. Esme must confront the facts of who her father really is when he bombs Microsoft, but she also must come to terms with the reality that the mother her father described is a fabrication. Her mother is not a loving kindergarten teacher but a cold and analytical scientist.

“In an instant you see where all this is going. Theresa plans to raise Esme now, not as a child but as a science project. Her cyborg. She sees Esme as a lump of clay that she can model into her vision of an ideal being, a person who is less human than computer.”

Esme ultimately rejects both of her parents because, although they are markedly different in their approach to parenting, she realizes that both Tess and Adam had similar goals: They wanted to raise a child in their own image. Adam wanted an isolationist philosopher, and Tess wanted a brilliant computer scientist. Neither parent took their child’s personality or desires into account when charting their path for her.

“What I wanted was for Theresa to soothe me with a fistful of mother platitudes: ‘You’re right. It’s not your fault. You were a child. You didn’t know any better.’ But she just stood there, staring blankly.”

Here, Esme realizes that her mother is not the kindly, empathetic woman she imagined but a cold, analytical scientist without real maternal instincts. This moment is partly what cements Esme’s resolution to strike out on her own without maintaining a relationship with either parent, continuing the search for identity and autonomy in her life. She realizes that neither her mother nor her father will ever put her first and that in order to be happy, she must chart her own course.