By Aaron Calvin

In Tracy O’Neill’s new ambitious and complex new novel, Quotients, “two people search for connection in a world of fractured identities and aliases, global finance, big data, intelligence bureaucracies, algorithmic logic, and terror.”

O’Neill, a member of the faculty at Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction or Non-Fiction, responded to questions sent her via email prior to the book’s publication to discuss her work and writing process.

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Assignment: Quotients, as it has been noted elsewhere, is a "systems novel." This connotes an ambitious, complex work of writing. You've also said this book was inspired by a meeting with a former spy. Can you tell me about the genesis of the novel and how its scope developed?

Tracy O’Neill: After I met this man who said he’d been a spy, I couldn’t stop thinking about how that experience would carry through someone’s life. Trust would be less simple. There would be an awareness that there are the official stories and the classified ones, so that the authority of the stories told is under question. A spy not only spies but knows how easy it is to be spied upon, and so there would be the feeling of being watched.

It seemed to me that there was a kinship between the spy’s problems and what most of us face today in a world in which we joke about Facebook-stalking people we’ve met, see competing news narratives every day, receive targeted ads that creep us out, and know that state violence often goes unchecked. It seemed to me that this changes the way we relate to each other, to ourselves, to authority. And its changes are driven partially by fear.

So I began thinking about a story that is one level about love and family and on another about globalization, the NSA, fake news, predatory financial institutions, surveillance capitalism. These are dangers that often feel immobilizing in our lives. To me they all fit within the umbrella of a tension between seeking safety and practices that often make us less safe. It’s a novel where the characters want to do right by your family and do not always knowing how.

A: On a similar track, what was the revision process of this novel like? When did you start bringing in other readers to give feedback and what did it take to bring this book from its first draft to its final proof?

TO: I don’t have a writing group or anything. I showed my agent almost immediately after I had a draft. He gave me some suggestions, so I did a revision for him. Later I did revisions with my book editor too. But also, I am constantly revising as I write. I’m not one of those people who writes a whole draft before I start making changes. In the end, I cut over 75,000 words.

A: What was the research process for this novel like? Was it unintentional and accumulative, or specific and deliberate?

TO: It was both. I decided early on that the main character, Jeremy, would have spied for the British in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, so I read books about that political struggle. I went to Belfast and Lisburn to get a feel for those places and brought one of my best friends. She still hasn’t forgiven me since she didn’t want to go to Belfast and is more a Paris girl. In my doctoral studies, I was reading about media, big data, and surveillance, but I also read beyond those materials.

A: How has your own complicated identity shaped your writing? Is this something brought about by deliberate choices made or something that seeps through the writing regardless?

TO: I suppose both. I was born in South Korea but raised in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Most of my early life was spent around white working class and middle class people, and so I didn’t grow up with much Korean cultural knowledge, though my embodied experience was one of someone who very clearly was Asian or Asian-American. So the dissonance between appearance and what is true is pretty fundamental to my life experience. That is very much a part of this novel. And while I’m sure a lot of people would say that’s true of any spy narrative, I play with the relationship between appearance and reality throughout the novel in contexts separate from the espionage plot. Even the first time we meet Alexandra she muses on her “unplaceable face.” She’s aware that the people around her tend to be more curious about what her ethnicity is than learning who she is.

A: What were the biggest challenges of writing a zeitgeist novel in a time of global capitalism, where the world is fractured yet deeply and visibly connected by a myriad of forces?

TO: To me, a systems novel worth its salt needs to capture a diversity of lives and capture how systems affect these diverse lives differently. So the challenge is one of proportion. How big can you go without the narrative becoming baggy? How lean can the novel be and still capture the immense dimensions of big systems that shape our lives?

Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful and Quotients.