C.J. Farley’s Who Knows You by Heart is hilarious. It’s also one of the most shocking novels you’ll read this year. There’s no violence—no physical violence, at least. But if you think tech companies are soul-sucking avatars of Moloch, you don’t know the half of it.
Who Knows You by Heart follows the exploits of Octavia Crenshaw, a Black coder who goes to work for a tech giant called Eustachian (motto: “We Get What’s Between Your Ears”). This company, headquartered in Arkhaam, New Jersey, does “audio entertainment” but also deals in AI and a level of data mining Palantir can only aspire to. Octavia joins because she’s brilliant, ambitious and needs money to pay off her late mother’s reverse mortgage. Eustachian not only pays an eye-popping salary, but also offers stock options.
Along with being a creative and expert coder, Octavia has a nose for horse hockey, and there’s plenty of it at Eustachian. The company makes its employees sign NDAs every time they turn around and judges their performances according to something called “Microsectionality.” Nobody really knows what that is, but the few employees who are Black women seem to always come up short. Octavia is wary of her co-workers, to whom she gives nicknames such as Blue for his hair, Wombat for her Australian accent and Parseltongue for being socially reptilian. The exception is Walcott, another Black employee. Though she claims she doesn’t believe in love—her one big lie to herself—Octavia falls in love with him. But when they embark together on a super secret project, the most shocking of the book’s “Wait . . . what?” moments happens.
Farley knows the culture of the tech industry and how it relates to the few Black people it troubles to employ. It’s no surprise that all Eustachian’s conference rooms are only named after white New Jerseyans (Frank Sinatra, but no Whitney Houston or Lauryn Hill) and that a prosperous Black community was forced out to build the offices in the first place. Octavia is sharp and indomitable, and Who Knows You by Heart is a keeper.