A leisurely novel of day-in, day-out gig work in the greater Boston area. The most memorable passages aren’t about self-driving cars. Instead, they’re about Teresa’s ruminations on what makes a job a 'good' one, and whether driving for AllOver counts; about awkward but sweet first hangs that might be dates ... The book is, in other words, a tale of drift in the gig economy—but one you get coaxed into reading by the novelty of its conceit ... Quite obviously not a sci-fi utopia, with self-driving cars helping to produce a radically better society. But it’s also not a conventional dystopia, because nothing dramatically dreadful happens. Instead, everything is wrapped in an air of mournful belatedness.
The majority of the novel is made up of Teresa’s recollections, which are occasionally heavy-handed, reflective of McNeil’s straightforward and thorough style ... Teresa’s almost obsessive reminiscing about her previous jobs is an expression of her desire to impose a storyline on her life ... Technological development has a human cost. Reading McNeil’s novel, one might wonder if it’s too late to imagine the future otherwise.
The novel has been permeated for so long with Teresa’s alienated, apathetic personality that it never develops narrative momentum, and a dramatic final event leads to a painfully ironic last line rather than closure. Strong, stinging social observation that doesn’t entirely work as fiction.
