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As one of the first few people to read and review UnWorld, I did not want to give a negative review. But unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book at all. Conceptually, I think there are a lot of interesting pieces--AI avatars that take on sentience, philosophical discussions about what it means to be human, a searing portrait of grief--but these pieces never coalesced into an interesting or coherent whole.

I read a lot of literary fiction, so I'm no stranger to stream of consciousness, unique narrative choices, or nonlinear plots. But the decision to tell this relatively short book from the point of view of 4 different narrators--something which has worked so well in other similar books--is its greatest downfall. The narrators are, in this order: Anna, a woman grieving the death by suicide of her teenage son, Alex; Cathy, an adjunct professor studying "uploads" (sentient AI copies of the humans they bond with); Aviva, Anna's emancipated upload who finds herself bonding to Cathy in a desperate bid to keep alive; and Sam, Alex's best friend. If it sounds like these narrators connect only tenuously, that is correct.

So much time is spent on various different intellectual tangents--from consciousness to addiction--that I felt the characters were more mouthpieces for philosophy than fully fledged people in their own rights. A book that wants to be character-driven must put its characters in the drivers' seat. And a book that's told in first person ought to have some distinction in character voices. In comp Candy House, for example, each character was developed so sharply that I understood both how they connected to the whole, and also felt for each in the brief time I spent with them. I did not engage with Anna's two parts of the book at all--and felt it really should go through an edit to get those awful two pages about her breasts out of there (women really do not think about our breasts nearly as much as male authors think we do). I felt abruptly thrust into Cathy's section of the book, but did enjoy my time with her for the most part. I thought Aviva's point of view was...fine, I guess? I felt Sam's point of view was strangely Euphoria-esque, but appreciated how it did paint a portrait of Alex, at least.

And that's the thing--I can see what this book is trying to do. I can see how Alex, and grief over him, is meant to tie everything together, how the internalized memory of Alex is meant to be a counterpoint to the externalized (and sentient) memory of Anna that is her upload, Aviva. I can see how AI, and ghosts, and grief, function together. How the dead and departed take on a life all their own, and how only memory keeps them alive. I can see the message about isolation that Greene's trying to put in there--how a lonely teenager can find solace in that which is not real, and crave that reality more than reality itself (the titular UnWorld).

But I think this book spends so much time being artsy and deliberately obtuse for any of this to come through coherently. The above analysis is a result of me, with notes upon notes, trying to make sense of things. There is very little sense of time or place. It could take place in a white room. The characters could be anybody, but not in a "it could be you" sense; more in a "not developed" sense. And so--I do not get the message that this book is going for, and I don't feel it in my bones like I want to.

All this being said--literary fiction is notoriously decisive. Half of my favorite literary novels sit at a cool 3.5 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I love artsy-fartsy think pieces that are universally hated. I hate Pulitzer Prize winners that are universally loved. That's both the beauty and the curse of the genre. But my rule to combat that is this: I will only rate below 3 stars if the book is problematic, poorly crafted, or otherwise offensive to my standards of writing and/or humanity. And this book, for all its flaws, is none of those things. It just…not at all a flavor of LitFic that I connected with, and did not come together in a way that felt satisfying to this particular reader.

I was gifted this e-ARC by NetGalley, Knopf, and Jayson Greene in exchange for my honest review.