2023-07-26
Amid the convergence of dream, memory, and virtual reality, an investigative reporter suspects he's being played.
If this debut novel had a soundtrack, its theme song could be Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and this would be the key line: “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” A veteran journalist, Quentin Jones definitely knows something is happening—something involving emergent technology, the erosion of privacy, and the amoral exercise of power by both government and private enterprise. A piece involving some of this had been spiked by his newspaper, even though it was well sourced, because of pressures from above. Whether causal or coincidental, his romantic relationship had crumbled as well, while he was on leave from the paper. Undaunted, he plunged deeper into his investigation that nobody wanted him to report, and he discovered that he had barely scratched the surface. He unearthed a corruptive and corrosive hellhole, with a heart of darkness that is way darker than anything Conrad could conjure. Is humanity really this relentlessly inhuman? Or is this some sort of elaborate video game? The book's framework is a further source of mystification, as Jones isn’t narrating his story directly but rather telling it to a group of reunited journalists, friends from j-school, and this group must be wondering if their friend has lost his mind—not to mention wondering how he manages to recall page after page of dialogue that is often more like soliloquy. The backstory becomes foregrounded, focusing on a former protégé of Jones’, an embedded journalist gone rogue, now feared dead. Somewhere in this vortex where past meets present, perhaps some answers lie.
There is a shuddering power to this relentlessly grim narration.
"[A] cerebral thriller . . . Jackson depicts the world as 'stranger, wilder, deeper, more open than you’ve been made to know.'" —The New Yorker (Best Books of 2023)
"The Dimensions of a Cave is intensely mesmerizing, thanks to the rich prose and deft use of transitions to seamlessly jump between settings, reflection, dialogue, and back again . . . Taking on complex themes and whittling them down to the core message is not an easy feat, nor is the amount of research that went into building the foundation that this book rests upon. Jackson emerges as a fascinating writer willing to engage with the zeitgeist of the day, without falling for the fickle trends. Centering his debut firmly on resonant values and themes will ensure The Dimensions of a Cave carves a new spot in contemporary canon." —Alexander Pyles, Chicago Review of Books
"The Dimensions of a Cave could hardly be better timed . . . part quest, part metaphysical mystery, but in this deeply scary dystopian world, love still plays a part, as does loyalty. The best news is that Jackson is a terrific storyteller, and you need to keep reading to find out what he has in store for us—horror or hope." —Lee Langley, The Spectator
One of the more accomplished American novels of the twenty-first century . . . Unfalteringly lyrical, philosophically attentive . . . Besides his acuity, erudition and humor, Jackson’s most impressive capability is for description . . . The Dimensions of a Cave offers an unimpeachable defense of language’s capacity to freight an environment with feeling, mentality, and the grammar of theme. In a novel fundamentally concerned with the world beyond the self, this aesthetic commitment redounds to a moral sensibility." —Trevor Quirk, The Baffler
"Interrogations of what selfhood, consciousness, and reality are, especially in a world infested by relentless images and fake news . . . [Jackson] nails the moral question about simulations and the actuality or not of other minds . . . A fascinating set of speculations." —Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
"Jackson’s inspired debut novel recasts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Plato’s allegory of the cave for the information age . . . The book’s characters, including government bureaucrats, warlords, and bohemian artists, tend to expound at length, their voices nearly indistinguishable but their tales florid and spellbinding . . . [The Dimensions of a Cave is] a timely and clear-eyed interrogation of the fictions that shield people from society’s blinding truths.” —Publishers Weekly
“Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave is, sentence to sentence, a linguistic marvel, a genre-bending tale with moral and philosophical stakes as profound as they come.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
“Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treatise with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
“Greg Jackson’s prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
“The Dimensions of a Cave tells a very contemporary story about surveillance capitalism, virtual reality, and twenty-first-century forever war, but it will still be read a century from now for the news it brings about the timeless riddle of the human self. That sounds like dust-jacket hyperbole, I know, but this book seems as likely to last as anything I’ve read in years. It’s increasingly rare these days to find a novelist with Greg Jackson’s world-swallowing ambition, and rarer still for one to make good on that ambition as gloriously as Jackson does here.” —Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
“Greg Jackson’s first novel, after his terrific story collection, Prodigals, is an ambitious and challenging work about the lies that men and journalism and government tell about each other and themselves. If Bob Woodward were to find himself in a twenty-first-century Pynchon novel, this might well be the result.” —Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country
