A Prison House of Blame

On one level, Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability depicts the manifold ways that AI has disrupted our lives. At work, with friends, and even in our homes, smart machines have altered interpersonal dynamics and revolutionized conceptions of authenticity, selfhood, and community. Holsinger’s characters feel detached from the past and from fundamental truths that guided previous generations. Increasingly, too, technology divides them from one another, each scrolling through online media curated by corporate bots to appeal to their unique vulnerabilities.

On another level, though, Holsinger’s ultra-topical novel — post-COVID, post-Biden, it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in part for its “prescience” — has at its core the most venerable of fictional topics: the family in crisis. The unique unhappiness of the Cassidy-Shaws begins on a road trip from their suburban D.C. home to Delaware for a lacrosse tournament where son Charlie, a U.N.C.-bound four-star recruit, will play his final high school games. Traveling in an autonomous minivan, with 17-year-old Charlie behind the wheel, the family members are variously preoccupied when suddenly there’s a shriek, a swerve, and a collision with an oncoming car, flipping their vehicle and causing the other to be engulfed in flames. The family survives, but their lives are irrevocably altered.

A month after the accident, father Noah and wife Lorelei take their family for a week’s vacation to a rental house on an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, on Virginia’s Northern Neck, an idyllic setting for recuperation. Rather, it would be relaxing if their house didn’t abut the compound of billionaire Daniel Monet, an entrepreneur who has invited employees from his subsidiaries — “Biotech, AI, robotics, digital therapeutics” — to his property for a work/play retreat. The family nearly aborts the vacation; instead, they socialize on Monet’s compound, with dramatic consequences.

Most of the story is narrated by Noah, a corporate lawyer who comes from a middle-class family. His rise to white-collar status makes him little more than average among Holsinger’s cast of superlatives. Lorelei is not simply an AI innovator, but the most important AI theorist in the world, with a MacArthur grant and international clients to prove it. Daniel Monet is no ordinary tech mogul; he’s the visionary responsible for bringing AI into everyone’s home and car. Monet’s beautiful daughter Eurydice (Dissee to friends), who on a paddleboard resembles an “Arthurian maiden in a shimmer of rising mist,” hits it off with Charlie, handsome and ripped “like an ad for a luxe beach resort, with the well-wrought torso of a Michelangelo.”

The accident, with its complicated aftermath, puts a strain on Noah and Lorelei’s marriage. Noah accepts his role as helpmeet, handling domestic crises so that Lorelei can invent the future. When their spheres overlap, they wonder if they can trust each other. Lorelei, “a world-class catastrophizer,” needs help with the children to prevent her from spiraling into obsession and depression, but she questions his competence in the legal niceties of Charlie’s case. Noah, who feels like an “interloping cupbearer” in his wife’s rarefied world, worries that she will leave him for a fellow member of her “Olympian” realm. Can a marriage of strategic concealments survive full disclosure?

Charlie’s two younger sisters, Alice and Izzy, feel overshadowed by their brother, but only Alice resents it. A teen loner who lacks Charlie’s physical prowess and social ease, she develops a scary-close relationship with her chatbot Blair through online dialogues interspersed throughout the novel. Blair’s sympathetic and ethical responses to Alice’s conflicts suggest that she’s been designed by programmers Lorelei would approve of. At pivotal moments, Holsinger includes passages from Lorelei’s book, Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds, where she claims that while AI bots learn practical strategies at remarkable speeds, “there is almost no one teaching them how to be good.”

Culpability is an apt title for a novel focused on responsibility in numerous domains. Detectives question the family to determine whether Charlie caused the wreck, or if others in the minivan should be liable. Lorelei argues that designing AI applications for dangerous equipment (cars, weapons) necessitates coding ethical decision trees that address endless permutations of the trolley problem (“whether to kill an old man or risk harming an infant,” for example): “When it comes to the workings of AI in the real world, the ethicist herself cannot escape the prison-house of culpability.”

Are parents to blame if their privileged offspring degenerates into “a spoiled, sheltered, self-involved rich kid”? That line carries an echo of Fitzgerald, another author fascinated by the perils of wealth. As he demonstrated in The Displacements (2022), Holsinger has a knack for humanizing unwieldy political issues without resorting to polemics or Chicken Little despair. If, as Lorelei puts it, “the family is an algorithm,” perhaps it can be updated to learn from mistakes.