... playfully fantastical — Crain frequently invokes Shakespearean romance — and, if not plot-driven, at least plot-friendly. Henry James is still the tutelary spirit; but it’s the James of The Princess Casamassima (alluded to on several occasions) and The Sacred Fount — the James interested in radical politics and unashamed of messing around with the supernatural. Overthrow, in other words, does what a second novel should do: It risks something ... good speculative fiction. The overarching conceit works well, even if the legal discussions of mind-reading slow things down. (Too much spitballing of legal defenses; too many peacocking press conferences) ... legitimately great psychological fiction. Crain excels at describing, with precision and economy, intimacy’s dance of knowledge, ignorance, and pretense ... It’s also a great gay novel, effortlessly moving between the arch and the serious ... Crain realistically and romantically does justice to our most real and romantic of powers.
... contemplative, foreboding ... There are a number of familiar ways a novel can address the subjects Overthrow, and Crain studiously avoids all of them. Nobody will confuse the novel for a thriller; on one of their first dates, Leif and Matthew pad through the Morgan Library, pondering the Gilded Age’s excesses. Though jails and the legal bureaucracy claim much of the stage, the mood rarely descends into Kafka-esque paranoia. And while it’s easy to imagine somebody like Tom Wolfe making a sweeping statement out of this material, stuffing his narrative with archetypes, Crain has declined to write the kind of social novel that’s thickened with detail about political movements and the institutions they tussle with ... Rather, Crain opts to tell this story at a more intimate level, with a degree of emotional acuity that recalls Henry James (whose work plays a modest but meaningful role in the story). At its strongest, Overthrow captures the depth of disconnection that the online world creates, and the dread and depression it sows ... Swapping human connection for an algorithm of convenience is a lousy bargain, Crain argues. His novel is a sensitive, provocative plea to recognize what gets lost in the exchange.
...perceptive (if overlong) ... Overthrow is a carefully unsentimental book, or at least an ambivalent one. Happiness and sadness are both always partial ... though the book is long and sometimes lagging, it is full of sentences of great sensitivity and precision ... Overthrow finds redemption at the place where 'telepathy' shades into empathy:
The novel treads a fine line: the characters must be skeptical, so that we can take them seriously; but they must believe in their abilities enough to set the plot in motion, and it’s important for the earnest tone and emotional investments of the book that their belief never seem ridiculous. The result is a plot that never convinces or even, really, coheres. But plot is very nearly incidental to this novel; all of its real conviction lies in style, which is, in an age suspicious of ornament, defiantly baroque, studded with gratuitous beauties ... my frustrations with Crain’s beautifully rendered novel finally feel irrelevant in light of...what Crain uncovers...as he painstakingly tracks the inner lives of his characters. But psychological acuity alone does not account for the novel’s effect on the reader, which depends more profoundly on the curious plangency of its style ... Viewed ungenerously, the unconvincing plot elements of cyberespionage and comic-book telepathy might seem a claim to fashionable relevance made on behalf of this decidedly unfashionable book. But, at its best, the novel makes a more difficult, more convincing claim, one I was grateful for in an age obsessed with subject matter: that, in the sharpening of our senses and accoutrement of our sensibilities, the more profound relevance of literature lies in form.
The narrative of Overthrow might itself be described as a competition of data versus poetry, information versus secrecy, knowing versus not knowing. For while Crain takes up the contemporary subjects of digital surveillance and technological terrorism, the novel itself sides with uncertainty and unknowing ... Crain’s prose sparkles most when it returns to scenes of private interiority, of personal anguish and emotional attunement. Even as the book conjures the dystopian potential of twenty-first-century techno-capitalism, its best scenes remain its more textured intimate moments. If the state seeks to conquer by force, then the kind of revolution Overthrow proposes—however cautiously—is one that rests in forms of unspoken, telepathic consent. It’s the kind of affective connection we might find, for instance, in a novel.
The book asks cogent philosophical and ethical questions about privacy and our right to—theoretically—public information, but drags at times under the weight of the story ... Crain...is at his best here, as he was in his first novel, when doing character work — Matthew’s feelings for Leif, Leif’s faith in his abilities, Julia’s delightfully self-involved crusade. The legal ramifications of the hack can be a bit of a slog and several characters act in ways that are difficult to understand or even justify. Crain offers compelling discussions about what to expect from the surveillance state in which we already live[.]
... an expansive bildungsroman of a gay American in Prague in 1990–1991 ... For the first two thirds of the book I found myself impatient with Crain’s gentle countenancing of these Brooklynites’ supposed clairvoyance, and aghast at the suggestion that homosexuality and extrasensory perception might somehow work together ... It comes as a great Hegelian relief when Crain finally reveals, at the top of the third act, that the password reading was all a joke and that the contractor’s server was rigged to entice a hack, with no need for telepathy ... These pathetic Brooklynites have had a dreadful lesson: the materialists were right all along. Politics, and love too, are matters of this world only, metaphysical poetry has no greater application than adorning a bicep, and God really is dead. That a reader might have feared otherwise has to do less with genre—Overthrow has no especial engagement with science fiction or other fantastical modes—than with the sensitivity and softness Crain brings to his characterizations and the weightlessness with which he sketches its New York setting ... Much of it comes to us in a style that isn’t so much recherché as agreeably unfashionable, with frequent third-person Jamesian reflections on what one character means to another in abstract terms. And all of it takes place in a peskily scrubbed New York, a city that defines Overthrow yet refuses to appear ... Like few other novels, and certainly more than you’d expect from its Jamesian flights, Overthrow pays exquisite care to personal technology, with precise descriptions of which characters have what kinds of phones at what moments. Crain is not exactly subtle about this ... Any successful resistance to this doleful new technological-authoritarian dispensation looks doubtful at best; it will certainly not pass through tarot cards and seventeenth-century poetry, and the humanist 'friction' that...I suspect, Crain would have me muster can offer barely more than temporary personal relief.
The plot is a little thin for novel’s length, but what holds it together is the thematic link between the literal surveillance of activist groups by the government and the interpersonal surveillance that the characters—and by extension all of us—do daily. Crain’s eye is especially attuned to the inner movements of the human heart and the way in which we all constantly size each other up and try to explain our actions ... reads more like a nineteenth-century social novel: Henry James at Occupy Wall Street ... Crain’s slow pace and intricate descriptions of the interactions of his group give the novel the space for these insights to bloom ... In a time when it’s said that social media algorithms can predict your decisions more accurately than your intimates, Caleb Crain might provide the sort of narrative we need. In the face of such encroachments, perhaps reasserting our irreducible humanity is the most radical thing we can do.
... the plot often feels secondary to Crain’s interest in friendship and group dynamics ... Despite the novel’s 21st-century concerns, Crain’s esthetic sensibility continues to feel more rooted in the 19th — even his name fits the bill ... His sentences have the unhurried, languid feel of early Henry James...Like James, Crain gestures elegantly at things instead of explaining them; he’s rarely ironic, or cutting. Few writers today are as meticulous on the line, or with their imagery ... But where in Necessary Errors those qualities felt like strengths, in Overthrow, they’re sometimes a detriment. There’s a lot to take in; so much so that halfway through this 400-ish-page book, its relentless accumulation of detail starts to feel like freight ... There are thriller-ish aspects to the digital-surveillance plot, but Crain never succumbs to them. I often wished he would. At times it feels as if he views momentum as somehow embarrassing: no sooner is it achieved than we go down another descriptive rabbit hole. (That the novel dabbles in some fairly dense web-based terminology doesn’t exactly broaden its appeal, either) ... A firmer editorial hand would have helped curb some of these flights of fancy. As it is, Overthrow is a novel easy to admire, but not always easy to enjoy.
... a fascinating depiction of the Occupy period, a moment that popularized a stronger critique of capitalism and led to even more overt forms of surveillance. As the characters’ friendships strain, Crain offers many wonderful turns of phrase that evocatively demonstrate how surveillance affects how all of us think, relate, and communicate. Crain also pertinently explores the legal and moral challenges of the digital age.
The pace thus far has been painfully slow, but that changes when the group hacks the computer of a government contractor. The State becomes interested and arrests ensue; the book turns into a quasi-thriller for a while, then slows down again. Crain’s writing is serviceable and competent but suffers from a surfeit of detail, much of it unnecessary and relevant to nothing. There is a lot going on here, which means there is a lot to explain; the story would have been much better were it 100 pages shorter ... Overly ambitious and interesting in concept but flawed in execution; the sum of the parts far exceeds the whole.
There’s a lot going on in this novel. Crain borrows elements from science fiction as his characters explore the use of occult weapons to disrupt capitalism ... These fantastical and topical elements are, though, subservient to what is essentially a realist novel about human longing and the need for connection. Crain’s worldbuilding is meticulously naturalistic. There is hardly a detail that goes unrecorded—a scent, a gesture, an architectural flourish….It’s not difficult to imagine that some readers will become immersed in the character-driven universe Crain creates. At the same time, it’s easy to wish that the story moved along at a faster pace ... Personal, political, and really long.
... ambitious if flawed ... Crain crafts elegant, effortless sentences, but the shifting perspectives and alliances of the novel feel less compelling than Matthew’s initial, skeptical point of view. Just as these characters’ optimism cannot be sustained amid the realities of capitalism and control, neither can the novel’s momentum be sustained after their arrests, culminating in a legal battle. This novel’s promising premise is ultimately overshadowed by its shortcomings.
