Far From The Garden

A claustrophobic story of motherhood in a near-future dystopia, Hum follows an eventful week in the life of May Webb and her young family. Sparing on plot but rich in texture, the novel portrays a world whose details are strange and new, with outlines ripped from our own reality. Indeed, to prove a point, author Helen Phillips lists her factual references in a series of endnotes that would not look out of place in a scholarly article.

Hum opens with May having some lucrative face-altering surgery performed by a “hum” — the name given to the human-like robots who populate May’s world. While not particularly human in appearance, they are creepily human in their behavior and the novel deeply and unerringly mines this uncanny valley of affect.

The surgery is supposed to make May unreadable by the ubiquitous AI camera surveillance and it serves as a surprisingly effective plot device—introducing us to hums and to May in quick time. The trusted yet feared hum cuts micro-changes into May’s face—then upsells treatments that it can charge and order immediately, like an Amazon-owned C3PO.

May is out of work and has agreed to this surgery as an economic measure, despite the alienation and dysphoria it is likely to cause. The changes from the surgery are supposed to be slight, but both she and her family immediately become painfully aware of them. Rarely has a novelist so clearly inscribed a character with their own alienated labor and physical dysphoria.

Professionally, May had helped refine AI communication, but once the network reached a certain level it no longer needed human input and May, along with all but one of her colleagues, lost their jobs. Both she (and the reader) can see the bitter irony in this, but also it also helps us understand the world’s preoccupation with the hums. In more, but different, irony, May’s husband Jem supplements the family income with varied and underpaid gig work which becomes, as the week unfolds, more centered on killing mice for rich people.

Throughout the novel, May continually engages in retail therapy. She seeks to escape the constant unpleasant hum of daily life and each interaction she has (almost exclusively with AIs) ends with an opportunity to buy something to alleviate her, or her family’s precarious middle-class life. It’s half a step away from our life in 2024 America, and entirely relatable.

Using the lump of money she receives for her partially defacement, May buys her family an overnight trip to the Botanical Gardens. She grew up in the forest until it burned down and her family moved to some inadequate subdevelopment. She remembers the sights and smells of the green and wants to return to that Eden, however temporarily, and wants to share that experience with her family.

A vacation in the illusion of nature that is the walled garden is also a chance for the family to escape their “wooms” and “bunnies.” Bunnies are wrist-based surveillance and entertainment devices for children. They are constantly soothing for kids and over-protective parents. Taking them off is traumatic for both and yet, just like the hums, they are creepy in a way that we all-too-clearly recognize.

Wooms are immersive, individual, ad-driven internet experiencing devices. They drive a wedge between human relationships like an extreme version of locking ourselves in our rooms with a laptop. On top of these devices, of course, the adults all have phones that are addictive tethers to work, photographs (memory), surveillance and so-called “social media.”

Along with the dystopian technology from half a step in the future, May has to contend with the same mundane nightmares as any mother: that she can’t protect her children; that someone or something is going to take her children away from her; that she can’t provide for her children; and that her children don’t love her. She is extremely human and, indeed, this depth of feeling is exactly what is missing from the hums.

Events at the Botanical Garden throw May even more off kilter and the novel plunges into the abyss of the uncanny valley. Phillips’ short stories are often Kafkaesque or dreamlike and Hum shares that nightmarish sense of events but without letting go of a vertiginous realism. Reading the novel feels like being in May’s bubble of thought, seeing through a fisheye lens and gasping for breath.

Readers have widely anticipated Hum after Phillips’ series of acclaimed books including her last novel The Need (2019),  a New York Times Notable Book long-listed for the National Book Award. It doesn’t disappoint.   Because of May’s extreme and constant insecurity, reading the novel can be an unpleasant experience — like being on an anxiety roller coaster. But because of Phillips’ incisive symbolism and sure-footed plotting, the reader emerges delighted, educated and not a little worried for the future.