Summary
The novel's fourth chapter is narrated by Lincoln, son of Sasha and Drew, describing his infatuation with his coworker M. He uses mathematical detail to depict his feelings, as he has counted the number of freckles on her face and has tried to map the statistical probability of his possible romance with her. He also accumulates a box of objects which he would like her to examine as part of a test to measure her response to them in the hopes that one of them is the key to her affections. He adds that unfortunately she has a boyfriend, but enumerates the ways in which they appear incompatible. He, for instance, does not dress up for Halloween, while M comes to work dressed as a teacup.
From there, Lincoln describes his work at Mandala as a "counter," someone who quantifies information on their users to better predict their future consumer behaviors. He also adds a note about "proxies," people who seek to confuse Mandala's counting efforts by creating replicant online personas of different users in an effort to live off the grid. He is called into a meeting with his superiors who say there is a mole in their midst, and that an investigation will be carried out to discover who that person is. After the meeting, he and M have a conversation in a break area. After some initial discussion of the meeting, M flirts with him, but tells him that she is in love with her boyfriend. Shortly thereafter, Lincoln learns that they are engaged, sending him into a state of despondency. He takes a few days off and returns home, where he is comforted by his sister Allison, with whom he is very close.
It is then revealed that the mole is O'Brien, one of Lincoln's good friends and boss. O'Brien is fired. In a speech outside the building, he apologizes to his team members but says he has no regrets about his actions. Lincoln is disturbed by this information, as he trusts O'Brien and now starts to wonder if O'Brien did the right thing by fighting against Mandala. Lincoln is promoted after a wave of layoffs. He decides to host a team-building barbecue, which Allison assists him in planning and executing. He is surprised when M, who lost her job in the layoffs, appears at the party. The two talk during a private moment in the house, discussing math and probability. They then look outside at the stars through the window. Lincoln says that he will never actually be able to pinpoint the moment they fell in love. He adds that they later get married.
The novel's fifth chapter is narrated by Melora and Lana, daughters of Lou and Miranda Kline. As young girls, they live with their mother in Los Angeles. She divorced their father after he had an affair with a young punk rocker. They are close with their mother and view their father as fairly unreliable. One day after driving them to ballet practice, their father takes them to the beach. From then on, as he says to Miranda, he wants to be a bigger part of their lives. He learns how to tie their hair into a bun and invites them to his house with increasing frequency. They remain primarily tied to their mother, but develop a better relationship with him. They note that, many years later, their mother becomes one of the most prominent "eluders," individuals who live outside of Mandala's purview. After going to work with their father one day and seeing his gold and platinum records, they take an interest in his work.
Around the same time, their mother expresses an interest in returning to school to finish her degree in anthropology. She leaves her travel agency job and dives into her work. Eventually, she decides to search for the Brazilian tribe her college mentor wrote his book about. She goes on an extended trip during which she has no ability to communicate with her daughters. They move in with their father during a tumultuous period in his life. His relationship with Jocelyn, the young woman he cheated on Miranda with, falls apart, and his troubled son Rolph commits suicide. His daughter Charlene blames him for Rolph's death and makes a scene when she locks herself in the bathroom. Initially Lana and Melora are frightened by these terrible events in the house, but they find strength in their bond and try to resolve things. They get Lou and Charlene to go to family therapy while also getting him to eat healthier. Their mother returns, but they find that their closeness has waned. They feel she has been permanently altered by her trip. They move in with their father and she begins work on a book that wins her great critical and academic acclaim. it deals with patterns of human behavior of how they can be predicted and understood.
They become increasingly involved in their father's business and personal life, working full time for his record company. At the same time, their mother becomes a star academic. Their father begins a slow decline, as streaming begins to destroy his company's income and he suffers a series of debilitating strokes. Unsure of how to save him, they sell their mother's ideas to social media companies to keep his company alive. At the end of the chapter, Melora becomes the sole narrator and notes that her sister Lana joined their mother and the other eluders. She is sad about the loss of their formerly unbreakable bond.
The sixth chapter of the novel is told from Charlene's perspective, as she accesses the memories of her father and his friends. She is able to do so with Mandala's Own Your Unconscious technology, which lets its users view the memories and feelings of other people who have uploaded their consciousness to its digital cloud. She describes a trip he took to a cabin in the woods with several of his friends in the 1960s. Quinn, the leader of the group, is romantically interested in Ben. They arrive at the cabin, owned by a man named Tor, and smoke marijuana. They then eat a vegetarian feast and travel into the woods at night. Quinn and Ben split off from the group and Lou watches a brother and sister duo perform a traditional song on guitar and clarinet. He has a moment of clarity in which he realizes he wants to be a producer, as a way of making his mark on the world. Charlene says this is the first group he signed. He returns home and reunites with his wife and children, but his mind is clearly elsewhere.
Analysis
A major theme in this section is love. In Lincoln's chapter, he expresses his intense feelings for his coworker, M. He describes how he thinks about her constantly, cataloging everything from the number of freckles on her face to her work habits. He tries to use his analytical perspective to better understand what his chances with her are. He also tries to imagine what object might best endear him to her. What frustrates him is the way in which the circumstances that might spark a romantic connection between them are ultimately beyond enumeration. He admits this in the moment when they finally do get together, as he tries to identify the origin, or "x," of their relationship, and cannot, which suggests that he has started to believe that some things about life can't be captured by statistics.
Love also appears prominently in Lana and Melora's chapter. In the beginning, they describe how they shared an intense and almost inseparable bond with their mother, crowding into her bed on weekends to form "the monster," a fictional creature made of blankets with one heartbeat. However, they then describe how, after their mother went on a research trip to Brazil, they were forced to rely on one another to survive the chaotic circumstances of their father's house. This closeness is evidenced in their choice to use the plural pronoun "we," suggesting that their thoughts and feelings were frequently unified. When their mother returns, they feel a new distance from her. Finally, Melora notes that she alone now runs their father's business, as her sister has joined the "eluders" and fallen off the grid. This gap pains her, as she ends the chapter by imagining reuniting with them on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Love is evidenced in both the intense emotional connection the sisters share and also in the sadness that Melora feels at their more recent separation.
Patterns are another important aspect of Lincoln's chapter. He remarks that much of human behavior is fairly predictable. In his view, people often act in a way that is easy to collect and count. He says that his job, and that of all of the "counters" at Mandala, requires him to look at the world in a way that is focused on patterns and numbers, breaking down seemingly random or unique events into data sets that can be interpreted. However, he quickly notes, this does not make human behavior any less beautiful. He compares these human patterns to the rhyme scheme of poetry, saying that perceiving their form does not make the actions less meaningful.
Charlene's chapter largely focuses on the experience of the past. However, unlike Drew or, later, Roxy, she does not focus on a moment she actually witnessed herself. Instead, she relives a trip to a cabin her father, Lou, took when she was a child, identifying it as the instance in which he was inspired to pursue a career in music. She is able to experience the moment panoramically, as her father and all of his friends uploaded their memories to Mandala's digital cloud. While she does not state it exactly, her interest in this trip seems rooted in the fact that it was the moment their father began to slip away from them, focusing more and more on his career in music and the chaotic world that came along with it.
This takes on a particularly poignant aspect at the chapter's end, when Lou returns home and is greeted by his children and wife in his idyllic home. Charlene says that they assumed they would live there "forever," but as the reader knows from the previous chapter, Lou would later leave them. What Charlene gains from looking at this trip through her father's eyes (and the perspectives of his friends) is the ability to access his feelings of frustration with his typical life, as well as the wonder he experiences when he realizes he can make his mark on the world with the musical duo he hears at the cabin. The deep melancholy of the chapter comes from Charlene's understanding, in hindsight, that she essentially lost her father after this trip.
