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<\/p>\nA family of five happily embarks on a trip to a sporting event as \u201cCulpability\u201d opens. The vibe of fun and innocence lasts for precisely four pages.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when their self-driving automobile, with teenager Charlie Cassidy-Shaw in the pilot seat, smashes into a car, killing its two elderly occupants and injuring all of the Cassidy-Shaws. Charlie is so badly hurt that his lacrosse scholarship to the University of North Carolina is in jeopardy. In the aftermath, they\u2019re trying to heal from the trauma at a Chesapeake Bay beach house, where we begin to realize that each of the five, even grade school student Izzy, has reason to believe the crash was their fault. <\/p>\n
\u201cCulpability\u201d is not a thriller \u2014 it\u2019s in the cracks-in-a-family-emerge genre of \u201cOrdinary People\u201d and \u201cBefore and After\u201d \u2014 but, with all of the unfolding secrets and ominous hints of something nefarious at the Chesapeake Bay mansion next door, it is a propulsive, difficult-to-put down novel.<\/p>\n
This is maybe the place to confess that I get a lot of pitches for books, usually nonfiction, dealing with artificial intelligence and I usually delete them because, although I know I\u2019m already benefiting from AI, it freaks me out a little. If I had known how much AI has to do with \u201cCulpability,\u201d I might have nixed it but I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t because I was riveted by its portrait of the sneaky, helpful-but-not-always way AI has wormed its way into our lives.<\/p>\n
We know from the beginning of the book that Charlie\u2019s mom, Lorelei, is a MacArthur \u201cgenius grant\u201d recipient who studies the ethics of AI. It also turns out that the family\u2019s billionaire neighbor, whose helicopter keeps them awake nights, is heavily invested in AI. Even the family\u2019s day-to-day activities \u2014 selecting music on their virtual assistant, texting with a friend \u2014 depend on virtual help they\u2019re not even aware they\u2019re using.<\/p>\n
That makes \u201cCulpability\u201d sound Stephen King-esque. It\u2019s not violent in the way a King book would be but there\u2019s an insidiousness to how imperceptibly the family member\u2019s lives are changing and to their helplessness in the face of it. The best kind of suspense usually comes from realistic situations where we are, as the title hints, somehow culpable for the bad things that happen to us, and that\u2019s true here. The car accident may be out of the family\u2019s control (or maybe not) but everyone makes small, seemingly logical decisions that add up to a Jenga tower of bad choices.<\/p>\n
Holsinger, whose previous novels include \u201cThe Gifted School,\u201d is adept at capturing the tiny errors humans in the same family can make, thinking they\u2019re protecting each other. Parental decisions that narrator Noah dictates without consulting wife Lorelei, phone calls from the police that Charlie nervously avoids, secrets that daughters Alice and Izzy keep because they\u2019re afraid they\u2019ll get them in trouble. You needn\u2019t have been in a trauma such as a fatal car wreck to recognize these people, who are blessed with the illogical logic we all sometimes fall victim to.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Culpability,” written by Bruce Holsinger, delves into AI’s impact on our lives by putting the characters, quite literally, in the driver’s seat. (Spiegel & Grau)<\/p>\n
What \u201cCulpability\u201d says is that we need to confront that logic, that our world is more delicate than we realize and that, with the turn of a wheel, it all can change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A family of five happily embarks on a trip to a sporting event as \u201cCulpability\u201d opens. The vibe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-29275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}