David Leavitt of the New York Times reviews The Most Human Human in today’s Sunday Book Review:
“The Most Human Human” [is] an irreverent picaresque that follows its hero from the recondite arena of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to the even more recondite arena of legal deposition to perhaps the most recondite arena of all, that of speed dating — and on beyond zebra. What Christian learns along the way is that if machines win the imitation game as often as they do, it’s not because they’re getting better at acting human; it’s because we’re getting worse.
Christian is at his best when he is at his most hortatory. “Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make,” he inveighs early on. “Not 50 one-night stands, not 50 speed dates, not 50 transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak. Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.” And later: “For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don’t let them banalize you.”
As “The Most Human Human” demonstrates, Christian has taken his own words to heart. An authentic son of Frost, he learns by going where he has to go, and in doing so proves that both he and his book deserve their title.
