A Working Theory of Love

"A Working Theory of Love" by Scott Hutchins is a laugh-out-loud novel about modern relationships, picked as a Top Ten novel of the season by Publishers "Weekly" alongside JK Rowling and Ian McEwan. "A brainy, bright, laughter-through-tears, can't-stop-reading-until-it's-over kind of novel. Fatherle [...]
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"A Working Theory of Love" by Scott Hutchins is a laugh-out-loud novel about modern relationships, picked as a Top Ten novel of the season by Publishers "Weekly" alongside JK Rowling and Ian McEwan. "A brainy, bright, laughter-through-tears, can't-stop-reading-until-it's-over kind of novel. Fatherless daughters, mother-smothered sons, appealing ex-wives, mouthy high school dropouts - damn, this book's got something for everyone!" (Gary Shteyngart, author of "Super Sad True Love Story"). Neill has got a lot to learn...Since his 'starter' marriage dissolved a couple of years ago, thirty-six year-old Neill Bassett has been learning how to be single again. Now he's learning the skills and routines that long-term bachelorhood requires - how to be less spontaneous, how not to feel too much, how to eat standing up. Since starting work at a Silicon Valley software company, meanwhile, Neill has been teaching a computer how to be human.

By 'conversing' every day with a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, his job is to help it seem more spontaneous, more emotionally convincing, more alive. The catch is that the AI programme is based on a real person, Neill's dead father. If he brings him back to life, he might end up learning more than he bargained for...

The other catch is that, despite his best efforts, a good thing has dropped into his life, unmerited and unanticipated, and thrown everything out of kilter. Her name is Rachel. For her sake, if not for his own, Neill might have to learn how to be a proper person after all... Set in contemporary San Francisco, where anything goes (and regularly does), this recklessly witty, formidably funny, outrageously honest novel captures the exquisite agony of the most important relationships of our twenty-first century lives - across the generations and between the sexes.

And also with computers that talk. Scott Hutchins teaches at Stanford University, California. His work has appeared in "StoryQuarterly", "The Rumpus", "The New York Times" and "Esquire". This is his first novel.