Culpability by Bruce Holsinger: book review
Overview: The book opens during the car accident that ensures that Cassidy-Shaws's life will never be the same. Their autonomously driven minivan collides with another car, killing its two passengers. While various members of their family are injured, all five of the Cassidy-Shaws survive and are left to reckon with the roles they played in this fatal car accident where the two people in the second car died. A family vacation to attempt to regroup only makes things worse as a second tragedy befalls the family, further complicated by the involvement of the tech billionaire next door. In the backdrop of these incidents and the family's attempt to cope through the investigation, Holsinger demonstrates how AI and LLMs are pressing in on everyday parts of being alive, interfering with our lives, and calling certain freedoms into question. Overall: 3.5
Bruce Holsinger attempts to package a kind of crime thriller with a family drama and then swirl in a healthy bit of moralizing and catastrophizing about AI as the sprinkles on the ice cream sunday. All of these different aims achieve varying degrees of success that leaves the reader with a disjointed experience, though one that is also far from unpleasant.
Where the book succeeds, though sometimes risks teetering over the top, is in its capacity as a crime novel. There's the car accident and the dogged detective that wants to be able to bring criminal charges to avenge the death of the couple in the Honda that burned, and then there's a second incident that involves missing people and a breathless search scene that closes out the novel. While heavy handed at times—and when this second incident kicked off I thought to myself really—it does give the novel a propulsive feeling. Holsinger adds to this by using a few basic principles of fiction well. His chapters are usually short, but they're also well modulated. There's a constant tension about what will happen next, which way it'll slice for the future of the son that was behind the wheel and the father who was supposed to be supervising him, despite the autonomous driving being employed. He presents lots of interesting moral questions and possible avenues their lives could go down that are entertaining and thought provoking. And every member of the family is harboring a secret, which, despite being told in the first person point of view of the father, Holsinger manages to keep very close to the surface through additional material inserted between the chapters (text exchanges, memos, excerpts of Lorelei, the wife's, academic work). In a time where I'd felt somewhat listless about my reading, this one got my butt in the chair by employing the winning tactics of genre in an approachable way.
Then there are the elements that succeed to a lesser degree. The kind of middling aspect of the book is the time where it acts as a family drama. There are great filler scenes that develop the characters to a certain extent and just have the fun vacation vibes of a beach read, which helps inflect the tone. These are when the novel works best on the interpersonal field. But most of Holsinger's attempts to write family dynamics and show the honest realities of these connections fall flat. The conversations are awkward and stilted. The father feels like the wrong choice for the sole narrator, often. And I can't tell if it's the father's character or a pitfall of Holsinger's writing that makes so many of the descriptions stilted and awkward. There are interesting broad strokes dynamics at play, but they are sabotaged by how much of the actual page space in the book is devoted to the father talking about his son's chiseled abs and perfect lacrosse body. There are obvious reasons the father is over-invested in his son's now precarious lacrosse career, but it feels like Holsinger uses the complete wrong lens and language to express it. The emotional content of the book just felt awkwardly miscalibrated to the larger framing.
Finally, a similar problem of clunkiness is unearthed in the bits that are very "and now we're going to talk about the dangers of AI." Which, it should be noted, I completely agree with Holsinger's sentiment. I am on the same team! I also think a lot of what is happening with AI, LLMs, etc, is bad and scary and needs more regulation and human oversight from people with actual morals. I couldn't be more on his side. And, yet, I found myself rolling my eyes as the book concluded and the detective, the father, and the mother all go on long monologues about AI during extremely one-sided conversations. Prior to the end, Holsinger had done a good job of showing how it is subtly infiltrating all of our lives in ways that feel insignificant in isolation but feel quite eerie in a book bringing it all together and points your attention through a funnel—cars with autonomous driving, houses that run entirely off of home management systems with human names, apps where LLMs front as friends for lonely teens, and more. The reader gets excerpts of Lorelei's writing on AI and ethics throughout. We don't need these big, unrealistic speeches at the end. Holsinger should trust that we can pick up the clues. We've been reading the book! This just cheapened the ultimate effect of the novel for me and exposed the thinness throughout. You can see all the strings and leavers in this novel, and while it was a fast, engaging read, I prefer to have to work a bit harder to understand the mechanics of the puppet show.
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