Summary:
The novel is set in the 2060's, at the intersection of
three next-gen economies. Gamers have long-since taken their ten-figure
synthetic economy to Nassau to form the self-governing Multiplayer Nation. A
film star has used her pop-culture capital to turn the California archipelago
into Cata-Hemi, a confrontationalist Red Cross with billion-dollar pockets and
no apologies for shooting. Genetics research has split from the tightly
chaperoned mainstream into high-profile dissident labs--one merging
computational biology with questionably ethical parenting to produce Hannah: the
story's violently hyper-abled protagonist.
It's
she who opens the text, evading a bomb by breaking into a bank vault, and her
consequent trauma threatens to spin the novel into a grainy dystopia: a network
of increasingly provincial communities, aggressively protecting their interests,
with wealth enough to wreck their judgment. Hannah, though, becomes a bridge
figure. Girlfriend to the film star, daughter and experiment of the
geneticists, art object to M Nation gamers, fetished pin-up of the US Army--she
drives the novel's arc upward. Power accumulates in her through attraction, as
she designs and repeatedly steps into theatrical tableaus of rising violence,
getting hit by a list of generally fatal artilleries, but doing so prettily, and
liking it.
She also must resolve her inner
life, a intricate process that requires cooperative intelligence, making
Veil a novel of ideas--one not satisfied with the model of Good Will
Hunting, a text offering a prodigy who has little smart to say. In
Veil, articulate expression is the base of characters' relationships, and
when they do take on (or take down) the Golden Rule, evangelic rationalism, the
Declaration of Independence, or enlightenment humanism, they do so clearly, or
not at all--because smart ideas worded obscurely is a sign of selfish
thinking.
It's also a novel with neat
sentences. There's a familiar complaint that readers' aesthetics have been
clipped to sound-bites, making ideas tough to sell, and the novel behind the
times. But texts can thrill both immediately and accumulatively if sentences
are inclined toward money lines and a story is built upon
them.
As for feedback, I'm trying to build the
text on thrilling lines--whether that thrill be philosophic, stylistic, ironic,
alliterative, emotional, descriptive . . . any of the thousand thrills a
sentence can provide. Typically, you'll get *one* of these "money lines" per
chapter, if that; for this text, the goal is three or four per
paragraph.
When you swing that often for the
fence, you're bound to whiff. You'll see I'm trying for something special
nearly every sentence, and I could use definite help identifying the hits from
the misses.
I'd also love commentary on the
general level. What do you feel needs more development? Are sections needing
reorganization or deletion? I've written mostly in isolation, so this would be
the first chance for the text to have (critical) readers.
Thanks in
advance!
Jessie
Chapters:
