PositiveFull StopIn his role as satirist, Wilson himself could be charged with...stereotyping...though by sticking close to his characters, he convincingly throws his voice. Thankfully, Wilson also eventually breaks from the alternating perspectives of Michael and Wendy to provide glimpses into the complicated lives of the other characters ... Despite the book’s current relevance, Sensation Machines could have also been published a decade ago, alongside post-Great Recession, New York novels like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, which engage in similar humorous yet sad searches for the heart of a thoroughly mediated world ... Wilson’s various gadgets are secondary to more lasting concerns of love, grief, inequality, and uncertainty. Wilson wants to believe that human connection, though refracted by capitalism, branding, crises, and augmented reality visors, has not been degraded, that it is not a thing of the nostalgic past or the utopian future but a constant possibility, if we can just stop playing characters in someone else’s game long enough to create it.
