When I was about thirty pages into this book, I told my boyfriend I felt like it was going to be an unsubtle comedy, and I think it pretty much was, but that was totally what I was in the mood for. I wanted a fast-paced and plot-driven book that I was going to be totally engrossed in, and this book was exactly that: I regularly found myself completely absorbed in it on the subway or at lunchtime, and definitely stayed up past my bedtime reading it one night, only to decide to stop before the end so I’d have the pleasure of more of the book on my morning commute. This is Connie Willis in To Say Nothing of the Dog mode, more or less, and it’s a whole lot of fun.
The book is set in the near future and centers around characters working at Commspan, a smartphone manufacturer that’s trying to build the next big thing to try to compete with Apple. Briddey’s boyfriend, Trent, has just asked her to get an EED (empathy-enhancing device? the abbreviation isn’t spelled out anywhere that I noticed) with him: it’s a surgical procedure that will supposedly let the two of them sense each other’s feelings. He says he wants to propose to her, but wants to be connected via the EED first, so she’ll know how much he loves her. But, um, they’ve been dating for six weeks, and I decided on page 6, when it’s mentioned that Trent drives a Porsche, that he’s clearly going to be a jerk with ulterior motives. Briddey’s female co-workers are all telling her how excited they are for her, but another co-worker, C.B, a genius tech guy who works by himself in a lab in the company’s basement, keeps trying to tell her that maybe elective brain surgery is not such a great idea, for a whole lot of reasons. But Briddey and Trent get the surgery anyway, and it’s no surprise to C.B., or to the reader, that there are unintended consequences, which Briddey then has to deal with.
I had a few issues with Crosstalk, like the fact that by the end of the book I still had no idea what Briddey’s job actually was, despite that she’s apparently important enough to have an assistant. (Trent, meanwhile, has a secretary, which was a difference in terminology that felt gendered and weird.) And C.B. is apparently the only tech guy in the company? Or are there other tech people but he just works on his own? Also, this book is really straight: we hear about a bunch of other couples who have gotten the EED, and all of them seem to be male/female, which was a minor annoyance for me: it would have been easy to have the Commspan co-worker who tells Briddey how transformative the EED has been in her relationship to have been in a relationship with a woman rather than a man, or for any of the celebrities name-dropped to have been in a same-sex partnership. And some of the surgery’s unintended consequences and the explanations around them felt a bit thrown together or problematic, in ways it’s hard to talk about without being spoiler-y. But overall, I was so swept along by the plot that I didn’t really care.
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