Book Review: Love Is An Algorithm
Here’s my review of Love Is An Algorithm by Laura Brooke Robson. Leave a comment if you’ve read it, plan to read it, or have any book recs to share. And don’t miss today’s writing prompt.
Love Is An Algorithm by Laura Brooke Robson is a novel so entertaining you might miss its underlying philosophical inquiries and insight into everything from the meaning of life and what it means to create and consume ‘good’ art and valuable tech and navigate various stages of various types of relationships, and more. It will make you laugh out loud and reflect on your own life, often in the span of a few sentences, and would make a great selection for any book club. This story is a love story with some intellectual and emotional depth, though it’s easy to let its witty and humorous banter fool you into believing it’s just another clever romcom.
At the beginning of the novel, we’re introduced to Eve and Danny who are on their first date. We then learn that Danny has co-founded a dating app called Pattern with Eve’s brother, Julian, who was also his college roommate, which is how the two met each other ten years prior. As the novel continues, we follow Eve’s and Danny’s individual stories and how they intersect and diverge at various points in their lives, and how those individual stories work to write their own joint love story.
Eve is a struggling musician in the city, going against her wealthy parents’ wishes, trying to chart a path of her own where she is seen and valued for who she really is. Danny is a city transplant struggling to overcome his feelings of unworthiness around fitting in, eager to help others but reluctant to seek help from them. And they both have insecurities and lessons to learn when it comes to communicating effectively, like all of us do.
When Eve and Danny start dating, Danny and Julian update their dating app to help existing relationships thrive once people find each other via the app, giving users in relationships on the app relationship health and compatibility scores and insights, as well as access to an AI chatbot called Bug that offers them real-time relationship advice. Danny and Eve sign up, and as a result continue to learn more about themselves, their relationship, their loved ones’ relationships, and the limitations of AI, along with the reader, though not in ways you might expect.
And this spurs so many questions, including the most important one broached throughout the novel: What are the parts of being human that AI will simply never be able to capture or replicate? Which is also prominent when Eve, reluctantly, starts using AI to help her write a new music album that ends up becoming more popular than her previous album yet less accepted by her existing fan base and critics.
Through all the ups and downs they go through, together and separately, Eve and Danny’s relationship blossoms over the course of the novel. Especially once we learn how their paths were always connected to each other outside of AI at the end of the novel, emphasizing the mysteries of love itself and how love outside of AI also operates like its own algorithm— there are rationalizations and data that explain how it develops and operates, but its mysterious and magic-like quality is what makes it so special, intimidating, and real.
This novel also explores the patterns and challenges of platonic love and parental love and how those types of love affect our romantic love life too, both inside and outside AI algorithms, which is interesting for me to consider as I just finished The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis before reading this book. It’s also interesting to consider because we cannot fully understand how we exist in one type of relationship without understanding and seeing our patterns inside the others.
The thing I loved most about this book was its witty banter. The banter between Danny and Eve was my favorite, but each character brought their own personality and quirks to the mix via their own flavor of banter, which made them each well-defined yet connected. And this was fitting seeing as how essential communication is to identity, relationships, as well as the progress of AI, living, and even art.
Overall, I would recommend this novel to those who enjoy literary fiction and the introspection that such works bring, as well as those who are in the mood for something that reads like an enjoyable romcom but has some extra depth to it.
Here are some notable passages from the novel:
“Good art does not answer questions. It asks them. Good art is not certain; it’s curious.”
“But in the depths of her pain, Eve finds something: an unshakable faith in her own experience of the world. No one can tell Eve who she is. No one can tell Eve how to feel.”
“‘No one ever gets anywhere trying to create something smart. Try to create something real.’”
“Also, she does not wish Danny were here. Because she is so mad right now. So mad at all the ones and zeros cannibalizing real people’s thoughts and faces and ideas and spitting out literally anything. She is mad at technology for being so good at what it does. She is mad that there is no going back.”
“Bug, Danny realizes, has subsumed Danny’s internal monologue. Even when he resists outsourcing his decisions to an app, the app lives on in his consciousness. It’s the Tetris Effect—when people discovered video games, and video games became habit, and all at once, a whole generation’s worth of people closed their eyes to dream and saw only brightly colored squares slotting into place. How many people has Danny Tetris Effected? How many people are out there equivocating about urgent and personal choices because they have begun to think like carefully modulated LLMs: waffling yes-men on an endless quest to avoid original thought?”
“You don’t know how it feels to be known, really known, until someone comes along and knows you better.”
“I can give you information, but I cannot give you the wisdom of being alive. And that’s a worthy thing to live for—do you think that’s enough?”
Have you read this book yet, or plan to read it soon? Leave a comment to start a discussion. Or tell us what we should read next. And don’t forget to subscribe to receive future book reviews in your inbox, along with other engaging posts.
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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Today’s Writing Prompt
Writing Prompt: “The algorithm made me...”
Write a journal entry or piece of flash fiction that begins with: “The algorithm made me...”
Writing Tip
Before you begin writing, consider what you already know about algorithms and how they work. If you don’t know that much about them that might be even better as you can always make things up as you go for this one.
