Hence

In 2025--although books are obsolete--a book on the famous chess match between a man and a computer is reissued, an event that sparks serious debate about the place of technology as opposed to human creativity

Timothy Briggs, a flaky chess genius and college dropout, takes on the world's smartest computer chess program, ANNDY. In reporting this championship tournament at MIT, the media paint Timothy as waiflike and irresistible. Meanwhile, the confused young man identifies with Reverend Rabbitt, a televangelist who bleeds profusely on prime time, and with Ma-chan, a 12-year-old Japanese prodigy who writes music that might have done Mozart proud. To this media-dominated environment, add an overprotective mother, two girlfriends, an acidulous older brother, a possessive chess trainer and a messianic computer scientist who wears green shoes. The result is a tricky house of mirrors in which private and public selves, real and fictive events, collide and overlap. Leithauser ( Equal Distance ) sets this sophisticated entertainment in the form of a novel written in the year 2025, looking back at the tournament of 1995. This distancing device sharpens his observation of the weakening of family ties, the commercialization of religion and the media's shaping of reality.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A fine poet and deft, discriminating literary critic, Leithauser surprises us by writing a novel whose plot is clumsily dense, whose characterizations are stereotypically predictable, and whose intellectual reach lies vaporously beyond sensible grasp. Supposedly a reprint (in 2025) of one of the last novels published (1995), Hence recounts the struggle between an innocent, vulnerable chess genius (who may strike some readers as a mutant of Lil'Abner or an idiot savant ) and a wisecracking computer named ANNDY. Opportunities for satire aboundwhether high-tech glamour, public relations, silly mothers, or prissy brothersand all are pummeled with leaden force. Meditations about values, personal, familiar, and national, aspire to profundity but sink to the banal. About Hence , one asks despairingly, Whence? Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.