62 pages • 2-hour read
What Kind of Paradise
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and emotional abuse.
The Pressures of Familial Relationships
Throughout the novel, Jane/Esme must gradually confront and reconcile herself with the complicated personalities and legacies of both her mother and father. While Saul/Adam and Tess seem very different in terms of their values and parenting styles, they each seek to create Jane/Esme in their own image. Through Jane/Esme’s dynamics with both parents, the novel explores the pressures of familial relationships.
Saul/Adam does his best to teach Jane/Esme the lessons he thinks will help her the most: He makes sure that she has survival skills, learns science and mathematics, and is well versed in both analytic and continental philosophy. In his estimation, he is a better father than his own father and a more loving parent than his wife ever would have been. Despite his confidence, he utterly fails his daughter. When he pens the “Luddite Manifesto” and goes on a domestic terrorism spree, Jane/Esme finally breaks from him, and it is only then that she can see the gulf between what kind of father she deserved and the one she has. She fully understands that he was wrong to isolate them when she becomes part of the tech community in San Francisco. She recalls Saul/Adam telling her, “Companionship is a crutch. Learning to be alone is the most important life skill of all” (87). This does not dovetail with her own experiences: It is only through companionship that she has been able to find happiness and self-determination, and she realizes that her father was wrong.
Jane/Esme has similar struggles with her mother. She grows up with an idealized version of who her mother was, the result of her father having fabricated the mother for Jane whom he himself would have preferred. Jane is told that her mother was a loving kindergarten teacher. When Jane meets her mother, she realizes how far from the truth this version of Tess is. She reflects, “The quintessential mother with her apron strings and apples pies and fathomless virtue is just a construct that no real woman could possibly live up to” (273). Initially, she is thrilled that her mother is a genius tech mogul, looking for a parental figure whose views on society and technology reflect her own burgeoning interests. However, she is also looking for love and acceptance. Her mother is not loving. She is emotionally distant, agitated when in Jane/Esme’s presence, and not particularly interested in having a daughter. Here, too, Jane/Esme is disappointed in the parent she has, especially when she compares them to the parent she would have liked to have. She realizes that “neither version of her [i]s the mother that [she]’d been searching for” and feels even more adrift (349). She realizes that her mother, like her father, only wanted a daughter who would be exactly as Tess desired.
At the end of the novel, Jane/Esme rejects both parents. Her mother does not wish to have a relationship with her, and she cuts off contact with her father upon his incarceration. She chooses to become a graphic designer in part because she loves it and in part because it is not the path that either parent would have chosen for her. She moves to a cabin in Marin County but remains connected to society. She parents from a place of love and does not repeat her own parents’ mistakes. She adopts neither Tess’s aggressive pro-technology stance nor her father’s extremism. Through rejecting her parents, she frees herself from the pressures that once dominated her life and identity.
The Potential Benefits and Harms of Technology
What Kind of Paradise wrestles with technology through the experiences and beliefs of its cast of characters. While some, like Saul/Adam, ultimately reject technology, others like Tess and Lionel embrace it enthusiastically. As the novel unfolds, the narrative examines the potential benefits and harms of technology.
Saul/Adam’s character embodies the “con” side in the debate about technology’s potential to help or harm society. His objections to unchecked technological progress are complex and varied. Part of a team of researchers who develop a precursor to today’s internet, he left his position initially because much of the research became geared toward US government and defense contracts. In his mind, the power of the internet lies in its ability to democratize information sharing. He hopes for a future in which anyone can post, share, and search information because he hopes that it will remove some of the government’s power over society. That the very body he hoped to disempower wrested control of the technology was, to him, irreconcilable with his project’s original goals, and he quit.
His objections to technological advancement and the rise of the internet, however, run deeper. He values philosophy, abstract reasoning, and critical thinking but also hands-on skills and survivalism. He patterns himself after philosophers like Thoreau, men who saw utility in the pairing of philosophical inquiry and real-life skills. Saul/Adam argues that technology anesthetizes people and makes them unaware of the real truths of who they are as individuals and what society should look like. He tells Jane/Esme, “The world today has lost its mind and it can all be traced to the rise of technology. The consequence of an ever-forward march of ‘progress’ has been a society whose citizens are greatly suffering and aren’t even aware of it” (80). To him, the more society focuses on unthinking progress, the further it gets from the core of what made it good in the first place. He views technology as an “addiction” that causes individuals to “lose all perspective on what’s important” (16).
Tess embodies the “pro” position. A brilliant but isolated individual with a troubled family history, Tess views humanity as inherently flawed. Long used to people like her parents who valued relationships and tradition over intelligence and innovation, Tess hopes to propel society forward through technology that can overcome some of humanity’s shortcomings. For Tess, computers and artificial intelligence represent the power of society to improve itself and reach new heights. Unlike her husband, she has no qualms about fame and financial success. She respects the technology she is developing and is happy to sell it to the highest bidder. Additionally, the more money she makes, the better equipped she is to propel the tech industry forward.
Jane/Esme ultimately comes to embrace a “middle path.” She believes that there is merit to her father’s argument that technology skews perspective and brings people further away from the core of who they are and from the natural world with which society should live in harmony. She chooses to raise her daughter in a cabin on a large acreage in Marin County rather than in San Francisco. Nevertheless, she also disagrees with her father’s wholesale rejection of technology. She remains connected to the outside world, her daughter attends a traditional school, and she makes daily use of technology in her job of graphic design. Jane/Esme’s choice argues that it is possible to embrace technology’s advances without fully orienting one’s life away from humanity and human nature.
The Search for Identity and Autonomy
Jane/Esme begins the novel defined by her father’s personal philosophy and orientation toward society. She is isolated and alone. Through breaking free from her father, she learns the importance of connection and community, clarifies her own personal philosophy, and begins to chart her own course through life. Jane/Esme’s arc is thus centered upon the search for identity and autonomy.
Initially, Jane/Esme agrees with everything that Saul/Adam believes and craves his attention and approval. She parrots snippets of his ideology and does not fully understand everything she’s missed out on as a result of her off-the-grid upbringing. There is, however, something in her that yearns for a different life. She is consumed by the few memories of her mother she does have, and from her interactions with Lina and Heidi, it is also apparent that she craves friendship and community. As Saul/Adam begins to teeter on the precipice of extremism, Jane/Esme also begins to critique some of his ideas. When she gains access to the internet, she finally realizes that she wants a different future for herself than the one her father planned.
Jane/Esme’s first step toward autonomy is a literal one: She leaves the cabin, her father, and their old life behind. She makes her way to San Francisco because Lionel, her sole outside contact, is there. However, the progress she makes while in San Francisco is the result of her own emotional growth. She and Lionel develop a meaningful bond, and she comes to realize that her father’s lessons on the importance of solitude were too strict. She also realizes that communication and relationships help an individual clarify their position in society and their individual identity. She observes, “You need lots of people around you if you’re ever going to find your true self” (347), believing that her father would not have been led so far down an extremist path if he’d had more healthy relationships. Jane/Esme’s revised personal philosophy is particularly evident in her choice to turn her father into the authorities. Although she loves him and agrees with some of his anti-technology ideology, she realizes that it is unethical of her to allow him to continue killing innocent people.
Jane/Esme also shows autonomy and growth when she decides to reject her mother. She spent her entire life wanting a loving mother, and when she realizes that even though she has found Tess, Tess will never be the mother she needs, Jane lets her go. At the end of the novel, she is truly her own person and has charted her own course. Jane/Esme has “grown up” and learned what the “essential truth” at the core of her identity is (349).
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