This year, I started going to a few of McNally’s new Book Clubs. On November 20th, I attended my first installment of the Broken Dishes Book Club with Swati, where we discussed Hum by Helen Phillips. Because I have the memory of a goldfish and can’t sit still for more than 3 seconds, I take notes like an insane person whenever I attend anything vaguely intellectually stimulating (and yet you’ll never catch me with a notebook at work). As a result, I always leave Book Clubs or talks with pages and pages of scribbled notes and doodles, but I rarely come back to them. So, like with the rest of my Substack, I decided I would push myself to turn those chaotic notes into something readable.
Before I delve deeper into the topics we discussed during Book Club, I figured some background on the novel would be useful, whether you’ve never read it, or simply need a refresher.
Hum is a short novel set in a dystopian but easily imaginable near-future, where AI robots called Hums are a normal part of the landscape, capitalism, advertising, and consumerism have reached mind-boggling heights. Climate change has also gotten significantly worse, with one the characters checking and reporting on the AQI daily. Hum is set in a major city that strongly resembles New York, with skyscrapers, delivery trucks, and a number of pests that May’s husband, Jem, is often hired to eliminate as part of his task-rabbit like job. (Spoiler alert: I hated Jem.)
Hum opens on the main character, May Webb, getting a minor procedure done so her facial features will be unrecognizable to cameras and Hums as part of a paid study. Let us be clear, she is doing this for money, not out of privacy reasons, or as a form of rebellion against AI. Since losing her corporate job to AI, her and Jem’s finances have been tight and they are struggling to keep up with their middle class lifestyle. Immediately upon getting paid, May spends a large portion of her earnings on discounted last-minute tickets for three nights at the Botanical Gardens, a luxury nature experience. When she returns home following her procedure, Jem and their two children, Sy and Lu, are in their “wooms”, egg-like immersive devices. When they emerge, they are shocked and disturbed by May’s slightly different facial features, but those feelings are quickly set aside once May announces their Botanical Gardens trip. While the children are ecstatic, Jem frowns at May’s reckless spending (even though I don’t see him getting his face altered to get more money). That night, while they all get ready for the Botanical Gardens, Sy’s bunny, a sort of AI Apple Watch with which the children communicate all day long, gets highjacked and a terrifying monster takes over the screen, sending the children into frenzy. Unable to fix the bunny, May makes the (completely rational, if you ask me or literally anyone) decision to remove her children’s bunnies off their wrist. She also decides to leave her cellphone at home, encouraging Jem to follow suite so they can get the most of their immersion in nature. Once at the Botanical Gardens, the family spends two days of nearly full-bliss, shadowed only by minor squabbles between the children, and the apparent disconnect between May and Jem. Their story takes a sudden darker turn when when May and Jem take a short nap by a waterfall, during which Sy and Lu somehow manage to leave the Botanical Gardens. Upon waking, May panics, but quickly enlists the help of a Hum. Despite the children not being immediately trackable as they are not wearing their bunnies, the Hum is able to find video footage of them, and to send an alert out. When Sy and Lu are finally found, they are irate at their mother for ‘losing them’ and Sy kicks her in the shin. When the family finally returns to the city and their normal life, May finds out that a video of the previous day has gone viral. In it, she is shown hysterically screaming at a Hum, overlaid with footage of Sy and Lu crying about their mothers having “ripped their wrists”. May is painted as an anti-AI rebel who has altered her face and put her children’s safety at risk. Her inbox is flooded with e-mails from trolls and some rare sympathizers. In the next few days, she is contacted by the Bureau of Family Aid who have opened an investigation into her parenting. As part of this investigation, a Hum visits their home, to the great delight of the children, and requests access to all of their devices. Using this and an eerie ‘therapy session’ with May and Jem, the Hum is tasked with establishing whether or not May is fit to be a mother and to keep custody of her children. The novel ends with a scene of the family and the Hum getting to know each other under a pillow fort in the family living room. The Hum tells them he made a ‘portrait’ of May that confirms she is a good mother. The novel closes on May sitting in her woom, taken back to the start of the novel, when she is about to get her face altered. This ending is open ended enough that one could assume the unfolding of the novel was a dream or a reverie. The Book Club agreed it was more likely to show that May’s alteration of her face was done out of necessity and love for her children, and what was the Hum used to make its judgment.
Phew. That’s it for background! Let’s move on to to the topics we discussed during the Book Club.
We opened on a brief discussion of the world-building in Hum. The group agreed it was very minimal, which we all thought made sense for a novel so short and compact. Very little background was provided on the dystopian elements of the story: Hums, the children’s ‘bunny’ devices, the ‘wooms’ they all retreat to, and how the world devolved into the state it’s in. I personally think the lack of background was a purposeful stylistic choice, and not a bad one at that. Technology evolves so fast, and I for one could not give anyone a breakdown of when or how ChatGPT came to be, why I scan my palm to pay at Whole Foods, or how my Uniqlo bag just knows exactly what’s in it… None of the elements in Hum are hard to imagine, so I think a lot more world-building would have detracted from the story, and I really enjoyed its compactness. However, I do think that Phillips made use of weak plot devices to move the story forward. The first one is the appearance of the monster on Sy’s bunny. None of the characters have a particularly strong reaction to something that essentially decides the rest of the novel (since it triggers the removal of the bunnies, and the kids getting lost). The monster highlights the ways Tech and AI can be used nefariously, but I didn’t love that it decided the rest of the novel. Another plot-hole that really bothered me was how easily the children escape the Botanical Gardens. They are painted as a safe, luxury haven, and the family runs into countless Hums during their trip, so this felt incredibly lazy.
Next, we moved on to the Hums, who are essentially walking personalized advertising machines, and yet seem highly conscious and nurturing. We discussed whether we though they were just advertising machines, or whether they actually had nurturing feelings. There is a striking passage where a Hum gets injured, and other Hums immediately rush to help him, gently lifting him up and getting him to safety. With so few human interactions showcased in the novel outside of May’s with her family (and even then, they spend a lot of time in their wooms not communicating), it was interesting to showcase the Hums exhibiting something as human as caring for one another. Whether the Hums are just advertising machines is an interesting question, and we didn’t get to any conclusion as a group. I personally find the fact that AI is becoming more and more human both eerie and disturbing, and often reflect after I use ChatGPT at how easily I gender or thank him it (I know, fucked up).
Next, we discussed the overpowering emotions of guilt and inadequacy, which most characters exhibit at some point during the novel. At the top of the list is obviously May, with her near-constant guilt and anxieties as a mother. Like many of us today, May is trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle. She is fed ads across her devices, triggering her consumerist anxiety and guilt, whether she makes a purchase and regrets spending the money, or doesn’t and feels anxious that she cannot afford it. She then seeks to feel better, but since humans have progressively lost the ability to self-soothe, she uses her devices, which inevitably push more ads on her, and the cycle starts all over again. Jem also showcases his guilt and feelings of inadequacy in a self-pitying moment (told you I hated him) where he apologizes for being “such a shitty provider” (right on). Interestingly enough, some people also thought the Hums exhibited inadequacy, especially when it became clear that they too enjoyed a break from constantly advertising to humans.
“The thing is, May," the Hum said, “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.
Towards the end of the hour, we discussed whether there was a moral to the novel, or if Helen Phillips wrote it with any sense of hope. I personally didn’t see either in my own reading, and thought Hum was written as a warning, but the majority of the group thought there were were many instances of hope, so I’ll list some. 1) May knew her daughter’s favorite color when the Hum didn’t. 2) May and Jem somehow still have sex despite their reliance of porn in their wooms. 3) Families, familial love, and reproduction continue to be compelling and bring meaning to people’s lives even in a sad, broken, dystopian world. 4) Despite being increasingly isolated from her connections, May feels compelled to bake banana bread for her friend Nova, who has just given birth. 5) May is still on the look out for beauty, and wants to share it with her children. This last piece did move me, and reminded me of one of my favorite quotes by the French adventurist and author Sylvain Tesson: “ne retenez que la beauté”, “remember only beauty”. But I felt that beauty was so hard to come by (unless one has money) in the world Phillips invented that it was not possible she saw it as being of much hope either.
Another interesting question we asked ourselves as part of the conversation was whether we considered the novel to be art. The answer was pretty unanimously no, and we all agreed it read more like a well-researched essay. The numerous notes at the end of the novel, which provide background for various quotes, added to the essay-like feel. Someone said that it didn’t feel like Phillips enjoyed writing it, and it’s true that her anxieties about climate change and motherhood permeate throughout her writing. Her prose is nonetheless limpid and somewhat poetic for a dystopian novel, and I found Hum easy and enjoyable to read.
Throughout, we also discussed the characters in depth, starting with May, and whether she was passive or active, and whether or not she was actually a good mother. Starting with the first point, many mentioned they often thought “how did she get here” about the various unfortunate situations May ended up in. I personally didn’t think too much about this while reading Hum, but thought her passivity was very interesting. She makes a lot of rash, poor decisions, but most, if not all, are driven out of necessity. She gets her face altered because her family needs money. She somewhat impulsively buys tickets to the Botanical Gardens because she wants to make her family happy, for once. She rips off her children’s bunnies off their wrists, but only because her son’s is malfunctioning. She decides not to take her phone with her on the trip as a way to force herself to be more in the moment. There is so little motivation behind any of her actions, and yet she is judged harshly for them by her world and the readers of Hum. Regarding the second point, whether or not she is a good mother was a divisive topic among the group. Some people thought she wasn’t, and used her falling asleep as an example of that, as well as her reckless spending. I thought she did her best in a challenging and isolating environment, and was more concerned with the massive inequality between her and Jem. Over and over, she is the only one being judged. Jem receives no consequences whatsoever for any of the events that happen in the novel, and is barely supportive of his wife as her motherhood is put into question. A few people shared my strong dislike of Jem, as well as the conviction that we would find out he was cheating on May (he isn’t), but as I mentioned earlier, most were more neutral towards him. His character is meek, shallow, and quite flat, so I suppose it makes sense that most people didn’t think about him as much as I did… I’m just deep in my man-hating era (sorry
). Interestingly enough, most of the group found the children despicable, even though I actually didn’t read them that way at all! I thought they were run-of-the-mill annoying, scared, screen-obsessed children, who exhibited normal amounts of sibling rivalry and love, and were pretty cute with each other and their parents. Maybe I was just so mean to my brother growing up that I read them as normal kids when they weren’t!The last thing we discussed is the title. In the novel, one of the Hums explains to Sy that they are named for the sound Om, from the ancient Indian spiritual and religious tradition, but I was curious what everyone at Book Club thought about that. Swati, who leads the book club, said that the title and the name of the Hums worked because it sounded like “Mum”. Someone else chimed in with the thought that “Hum” is the beginning of “Human”. The Hums also fit in with the similarly soothingly named bunnies and wooms, emphasizing their nurturing qualities. The Hums’ names are particularly at odds with the fact that they really are just sleek, metallic billboards on legs. Someone in the group mentioned that a hum could easily be tuned out but the sound would still be present; try as they may, the inhabitants of Phillips’ world cannot escape the Hums and what they mean about the world they live in.