These minor plot points never quite connect. They are only resolved in summary, in the novel’s coda—this proves unsatisfying, yet intriguing ... What I most appreciate about Quotients is the same thing I find most difficult, and that is O’Neill’s syntactical and stylistic play. The language in this novel is all things all the time: challenging, playful, exciting, and opaque ... If O’Neill wanted to write a simple literary thriller, she would have. What she has given us with Quotients is a piece of art that eschews convention, one that forces us to take a fractured narrative and turn it inward ... This is a book for our paranoid age, the one where we keep our secrets pressed tight against our chests; the one where we have no secrets at all.

O’Neill’s...occasionally off-kilter sentences are metonymic experiences, creating an immersion in the confusing swirl of information which spies navigate with life-and-death consequences. This challenging, slow-burning, yet suspenseful tale is a frame for O’Neill’s powerful and chilling warning to consider the choices we are making. With an astounding grasp of the issues confronting our age, an assured depiction of a multitude of diverse characters, and a distinctive style all her own, she ranges from movingly sensual descriptions to sharp observations, from wordplay to gut punches. In sum, this is a poignant lament for our time’s lost generation, which may be all of us.

The novel’s plot unfolds elliptically ... O’Neill presents the different sides of her characters to the reader in dramatic ways ... In blending meditations on technology with a profound sense of alienation, O’Neill also recalls Don DeLillo’s short story 'Human Moments in World War III' ... What makes this novel click is the way O’Neill uses language to make familiar events turn into something strange and mysterious ... What O’Neill has done with Quotients involves finding a new way to write about modern technology, and how its changed people’s ability to perceive the world. It might not sound like science fiction at first, but once you’ve spent some time immersed in the novel’s particular metier, it’s hard to think of it as anything else.

From the outset, O’Neill’s use of form—complex, sometimes disjointed language and short chapters—replicates the increasingly fragmented world of the protagonists ... Employing both abstract and concrete data—real-world events that subtly inform us of the passage of time interspersed with espionage double-speak and psychological, business lingo—O’Neill charges readers to decide what information to retain and which character to believe. That’s a distinct risk, but one that pays off for those willing to commit to the intricate universe the author has created. Equally compelling is O’Neill’s mastery of language, as much at ease writing codespeak...as she is writing near haikus on love ... Beyond conspiratorial thrills, this is a book about intimacy and loyalties yearned for and lost ... these individuals—we—are often unable to see through our faulty human screens of fears, illusions, and hopes, especially burdened by an increasingly fractional and artificial society. In Quotients, O’Neill tackles this blindness, and the result is a distinct, unconventional narrative with no easy conclusions.

... a long, circuitous and often incredibly wordy meditation on love, life, parenthood, family, the lies we tell, technology, and the brutal machinations of global intelligence and terror ... The power of the domestic scenes made me impatient with the larger systemic critique in which the novel engages. This is a system critique on the level of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, or William Gibson ... While I was reading and desperately trying to keep track of the various plot lines, characters, hints of connections, I remained focused on just what all of it meant for the domestic life of Jeremy, Alexandra, and baby Han. Because ultimately, that’s what’s important–the love between partners, between parents and children ... Living in a city on lockdown, where we are encouraged to report our neighbors who may not be practicing 'safe social distancing' and where we are encouraged to self-isolate, to only connect through technology, makes O’Neill’s critique seem almost soft ... this is not an easy book to read. Of course, the constant shifts in language and narrative add to the atmosphere of unease.

References to real-world events, including the London terrorist bombings, help to track the timeline of the couple’s life together, offering tangible touchstones within the book’s gossamer language. Stirring similes...meld with lines that hitch the breath ... Probing the shifting nature of love and family in a time where nothing can be hidden, but when all have something to hide, Quotients is a novel that lingers in the consciousness long after the final page.

O’Neill’s narrative is tinged with commentary on the rise of digital and social media, which drives a wedge between screen-obsessed Alex and analog Jeremy ... O’Neill’s oblique, sometimes opaque prose wears on the reader, though it also offers flashes of insight on the characters’ frequent incomprehension of one another. This would-be techno thriller takes on a bit too much.