Volume 54, Number 4 · March 15, 2007
The Way We Live Now
By Michael Dirda
Surveillance
by Jonathan Raban
Pantheon, 258 pp., $24.00
On January 16, 2007—the morning I planned to start reading Jonathan Raban's new novel, Surveillance—The Washington Post carried a front-page article under the series headline 'A Day in Our Digital Lives.' The reporter, Ellen Nakashima, opened her innocent-seeming story this way: 'The tracking of Kitty Bernard begins shortly after she wakes up.' Bernard, it turns out, isn't a suspected member of any criminal or terrorist organization; she's a fifty-six-year-old real estate agent in Reston, Virginia. Over the next dozen or so hours she exercises in her condo building's gym, fills her car with gas, makes a call on her cell phone, stops at a house she's trying to sell. She also drives through a toll booth using her EZ pass, searches for some information on her laptop, and arranges to meet her husband for dinner at a restaurant in a local mall. An ordinary day.
Review, 3426 words
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