Wrong Way

Wrong Way, by Joanne McNeil, looks at tech innovations and social class through one woman’s work experiences. It’s more about an overall idea than a character or a relationship or a decision, which makes for a thoughtful read but not exactly a story.

First, I just loved the sections about Teresa’s years temping and drifting, both because it’s realistic and detailed, and because it sets up our protagonist to be accepting of the upcoming tech world zaniness. Teresa has had a series of temp jobs and dead-end jobs, and once a promising job, if she’d had the right connections, but now she’s low on choices and opportunities when she answers a vague Craig’s List posting (who among us has not?) and gets a vague contract job at a position at a vague tech start-up, AllOver. It’s all reasonable and relatable for anyone in the gig economy, which sets the stage for a realistic near-future commentary.

Her actual work will be driving a “self-driving” car — it’s all couched in tech startup terms, naturally, and Teresa is told it’s just a stop-gap while the real self-driving are rolled out. I couldn’t quite picture the driver’s nest where Teresa spends her work shifts, but that’s ok, the point is that she’s lowered into an awkward position to secretly drive passengers who think they’ve called a self-driving ride. There’s a lot about the invisible work in tech startups, but as Teresa tells herself over and over, it’s a good job. She likes to drive.

He glances at his notes with a look of practiced solemnity. “Today’s training is held in a sacred place that is traditional Sakimauchheen Ing and Algonquin soil,” he says, quick and mumbly, sure to have mispronounced it. All of AllOver’s meetings and public events begin with a land acknowledgment but Philip has got this one wrong. He had failed to refresh the TribalLandz app on his phone and announced the origin of the suburbs of Philadelphia, which was the last place that he had hosted a training session. Otherwise, he would have said it was Wampanoag territory.

Like in Rob Hart’s The Passengers, a dystopian thriller I absolutely loved, Wrong Way looks at potential dark sides in a future with self-driving cars. But while The Passengers used a tense, fast-paced thriller to describe this creepy dark side, Wrong Way is more of a meander through the life of an anonymous cog in the machine.

This was mostly effective for me. I’m commuting by train 2 or 3 days a week these days, so I particularly enjoyed Teresa’s commuter rail train rides. It’s a particularly good setting for her daydreaming and reminiscing, even if you’re not literally reading the book on the Boston commuter train. She notices the trends in commuters getting on at different stops or on different schedules, and thinks about her life while heading home.

But Wrong Way also drags in few a places, whether it stops being a novel about Teresa’s experiences with work, class, and tech start-ups, and starts just focusing on the terrible future path. Don’t get me wrong, I can see this path too. Impressive tech innovations often run on a gig work and shift work underclass. Ok! I get it! Work is alienating! But isn’t this a novel? Are we going to meet some interesting characters or see some choices? Is anything gonna happen?

The startup campus has catered breakfasts, wings named for Turing and Lovelace, and a shuttle from South Station. This works both because it captures a generic tech-company ambiance, and also because it makes a contrast between Teresa’s previous jobs. When you’ve been waitressing or ringing up purchases, you’re particularly susceptible to the free meals and employee perks of tech. Not like, health insurance or those benefits, of course, since Teresa is a contractor and her job will be eliminated just as soon as the actual self-driving cars start self-driving.

The tech journo writing is solid. There’s a long period where it’s not entirely clear what AllOver does or what the job is, and it’s just full of the buzzwordy vagueness. Every time AllOver communicated with Teresa, it made me feel like AllOver hired a contract writer for rewrites that were more joyful, more of a lifestyle brand, more about meaningful change, etc etc, and even if you have not been that contract writer, the company feels like it could be any tech startup.

Wrong Way‘s AllOver reminded me of The Warehouse‘s Cloud, another giant tech conglomerate. The beginning of The Warehouse explains that no one is forced to work for Cloud (the “Zon stand in), but there simply aren’t any other jobs going. It’s the same for Teresa in Wrong Way. No one is forcing her to run a self-driving car scam, but it’ll provide a way out of her mother’s house and into a tiny basement apartment, giving her a small amount of independence and personal life.  What else is she gonna do? Keep looking for temp assignments forever? AllOver also has the required inspirational founder, with all the associated cult of personality and buzzwordy speeches. The writing really shines here, I’m pretty sure I went to that TED Talk. Several times.

The final pages were… weird.  (I’ve been confused by a book’s ending before, and my spoiler-rific posts about the ending of The Paper Palace and the end of The Woman in The Library  made me feel better because I connected with other readers who had questions and confusion, too.) I reread it a few times, so I don’t think I missed some key piece of information, and I still don’t know whether Theresa was meant to be alive or dead, and whether she was revealed as a driver or not, and if she was, did that bring down AllOver or did she somehow take the blame? I know some readers like an ambiguous ending, especially in specfic, but those felt like very major questions to leave open. The lack of a solid story conclusion really highlighted that it was a book about an idea, and not a narrative with a story arc.