Stop All the Clocks
by noah kumin
arcade, 240 pages, $27.99
As the purveyors of artificial intelligence attempt to replace literature with a deluge of slop, it is only natural that the literary world should return fire. Maybe, outgunned and outmanned, this will prove to be our Masada. But, as Harold Bloom once said, “They have the numbers. We have the heights.”
Enter Noah Kumin. His debut book, Stop All the Clocks, is a novel of ideas nested inside a techno-thriller about the invention of a text-generating AI. Set in 2015 and 2016, the plot centers on the alleged suicide of a tech billionaire, Avram Parr. His former partner, Mona Veigh, suspects he was murdered, a suspicion bolstered when she finds herself being followed and surveilled as she investigates. Gradually, she is drawn further into the mysteries surrounding Parr’s death, which implicate Parr’s own questionable dealings. Her investigations draw a slew of characters into her orbit: a suave henchman, comical normie careerist drones, an overly idealistic neighbor, and an amusing yet notably principled detective. However, Veigh’s own invention, a poetry-generating computer program called Hildegard 2.0, proves more significant to unraveling the mystery. While Veigh’s intentions for the program are fundamentally metaphysical—she sees it as a tool to understand the divine origin of language and poetry—the villains seek to convert it into an instrument of mass distraction, an LLM that will humor and indulge its users to no end. (Perhaps this rings a certain bell.)
Avram Parr incarnates an odious Silicon Valley archetype, the sort of techno-maximalist who identifies as a “rationalist” and thinks of the real world as “meatspace.” He is disgusted by the banality of the masses, we learn through his diary entries, yet his own Promethean aspirations belie his inability to appreciate poetry or apprehend anything beyond the literal. He’s a pastiche of tech moguls in the mold of Bryan Johnson, who injects himself with his son’s blood and obsessively measures the strength and frequency of his nighttime erections. Kumin happily taps the rich veins of irony and comedy that are transhumanism and AI accelerationism. He writes, “Worst of all was Parr’s thin-lipped smile when he’d show up for their monthly one-on-one and invariably ask ‘Read any good poems lately?’ This was his idea of a joke. He told her that since their interview he had been prioritizing his ability to make jokes.”
Kumin might deny that his novel is intended as a frontal assault on the purveyors of AI. On his podcast, he is polite and diplomatic toward the representatives of tech. As the editor of New York’s Mars Review of Books, he has facilitated a fair amount of dialogue between the votaries of tech and the dwindling disciples of the humanities. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to read Stop All the Clocks as an indictment of the techie mindset, or as an elegy for the disappearance of authentic poetry.
Regardless of whether tech leaders are philistines, technology has its own momentum, tugging us along with it. And it bends inevitably toward the routinization and standardization of human life and away from the contemplative virtues necessary to compose or even read poetry. This is why Stop All the Clocks, despite its hard-driving plot, is so suffused with melancholy. It presents the human spirit stranded in a graying world, at the mercy of vast, inhuman powers, caught in “one long, continuous, not quite decipherable meta-story unfurling through the ages and describing, in its circuitous way, the secret will of the gods (whoever they were).”
Mona Veigh seems to be the only poetry appreciator left in New York, defying social pressure from her tech enthusiast peers and reading Housman and Auden (the source of the novel’s title) in defiant solitude. Poetry helps her to weather the “cold and ahistorical” force behind tech. This force, writes Kumin, “took no real pleasure in conquest or glory. It let out no wild yawp of victory. Instead it was like a virus, or a line of code in infinite loop, replicating itself for no other purpose than to have done so. It was a future in which all the passions had been eliminated in favor of icy knowledge.”
And yet Stop All the Clocks is neither nihilistic nor fatalistic. Kumin is hopeful, and his novel challenges and questions rather than tempts us to despair. (In fact, I could have stomached a far darker ending.) He writes, “Thus there was, Mona posited, some kind of independent force looking out for whatever might be inspired or transcendent in this world, whether literary or no, and she felt, at her brighter moments, that this force—in all its mystery and majesty—might be muffled or sent underground but could never be utterly denied.” Those of us confined to this underground can be grateful for Kumin’s words of consolation.
