Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

A delightfully entertaining, deceptively poignant debut novel about a humanlike bot named Jared, whose emotional awakening leads him on an unforgettable quest for connection, belonging and possibly even true love.
 

Jared works as a dentist in small-town Michigan. His life is totally normal, except for one thing. He is a bot engineered with human DNA to look and act like a real person.
 

One day at a screening of a classic movie, Jared feels a strange sensation around his eyes. Everyone knows that bots can’t feel emotions, but as the theater lights come on, Jared is almost certain he’s crying. Confused, he decides to watch more old movies to figure out what’s happening. The process leads to an emotional awakening that upends his existence. Jared, it turns out, can feel.
 

Overcome with a full range of emotions, and facing an imminent reset, Jared heads west, determined to forge real connections. He yearns to find his mother, the programmer who created him. He dreams of writing a screenplay that will change the world. Along the way, he might even fall in love. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins.
 

Delectably entertaining and deceptively moving, Set My Heart to Five is a profound exploration of what makes us human and a love letter to outsiders everywhere.

Easily one of the most creative and whimsical novels I’ve read in many years. Simon Stephenson’s Set My Heart to Five is a thoughtful (and occasionally edgy) commentary on human behavior and societal culture wrapped up in a seemingly light-hearted, meandering AI bot adventure. Despite being compared to Vonnegut’s ideologies and writing, the book’s content reminded me a lot of Daniel Keye’s Flowers for Algernon (which is one of my all-time favorite novels) in which both stories feature an innocuous narrator who does not understand the complexities of human behavior and terrible people around them. Set My Heart to Five’s premise of an AI bot developing feelings admittedly isn’t new territory, but the style of delivery and humorously dry character voice puts it in an entirely new area.

First and foremost, Set My Heart to Five is not going to be for everyone, nor does Stephenson make an attempt to be mass-appealing. Jared’s character voice is somehow both frank and dry, yet also entirely comical in a witty, dark humor kind of way; you know that one friend who always talks about the unspoken elephant in the room that’s not socially acceptable, yeah that’s Jared. Full of fun wordplays and paradoxical situations inspired by the idiosyncrasies of human behavior, this is smart and classy humor. It’s impossible to not find Jared’s bamboozled descriptions of events funny, and the book easily captures the amusement of childhood innocence that’s compared to bots’ lack of feelings. The premise is clever. By utilizing a grown, autonomous adult, the book is able to explore places and plot threads that a typical young character could never do (ie. the bafflement of getting drunk in Vegas, staying at a sketchy motel used by prostitutes and drug-dealers, etc).

The writing is also incredibly distinctive to Jared and unlike anything I’ve read, to the point where I have no idea what Stephenson’s actual writing style is like. As the book progresses, some of Jared’s recurring phrases become dad-joke style humor (or should I say, bot-joke humor) become jokes in and of themselves, one of which is “Humans, I cannot!”. I’ve seen a bunch of reviews critique these recurring phrases as lazy or lame, but the repeated use is by design. Bots follow predetermined logic and thought processes, and Stephenson uses that awareness to purposely use Jared’s signature phrases in increasingly outlandish situations. There’s a recurring theme of movies, scriptwriting, and formulaic composition that’s very detailed and effective (no surprise given Simon Stephenson’s experience with screenplays for Pixar and other Hollywood studios), I’m convinced every repetitive phrase is by design. On that note, having worked on Luca, Set My Heart to Five also captures the unique humor, insightful meaning, and Pixar-esque tone while having adult themes and edgy jabs that would never be greenlit for production. This novel actually feels like it could be a love child between Pixar and A24.

What I liked most about the Set My Heart to Five is the surprisingly deep cutting commentary made about human behavior. Despite the lacksy daisy pacing and sunny tone, there’s some pretty harsh commentary hidden in there that I thought was amazing. I can see a good number of them being offensive to those with conservative views (this is a generally left leaning if you want to look at it politically, which you shouldn’t, though it also pokes fun at socialist culture), but that’s only because Jared can hit so close to home with the tact of an AI chatbot. In this world, Elon Musk vaporized the moon and North Korea was erased by nuclear explosions… along with New Zealand by accident; four years after publication, this book is surprisingly prophetic. Despite the book having a loose plot and progression, the bulk of the novel consists of behavior analysis. Below is a quote that represents both the unique tone of commentary as well as the unhinged dark humor involved (yes Jared went there):

…sometimes after our evenings clinics he invited me into his consulting room across the corridor ‘to shoot the shit’. ‘To shoot the shit’ means ‘to patiently listen while a human drinks alcohol and complains about their concerns and grievances. Nonetheless, I always cheerfully accepted the invitation. When a human invites you somewhere, the polite thing to do is to accept. Unless they are inviting you for the sake of politeness itself. On those occasions, the polite thing to do is to decline! Human interaction can be best understood as a never-ending arms race of politeness. Holding a door open too long can all too often lead to the next Hiroshima. Or Auckland! Or Pyongyang! Ha!

Objectively, the writing, creativity, and delivery knocks it out of the park. If I had to critique anything, it would be that the pacing sometimes felt like it dragged in places and sometimes Jared’s bot babbling can bat a bit wide and run on off-topic tangents for too long. I’m a patient reader as long as the writing is doing something ambitious or creative, but I can easily see many readers tiring of the tone and unfocused chatter. Set My Heart to Five was more enjoyable for me when read in several short sessions, which gave me time to think about the commentary it was making and to avoid getting fatigued from Jared’s often excitable circuits. Although I’m not sure what I would’ve changed or cut, something about Jared’s journey to the west coast felt like it was longer than it needed to be and there was a bit of a slump once he got there.

While a lot of five star ratings are due to enjoying the reading experience or connecting with the characters, this one was more so for the wildly ambitious premise and objective quality of Stephenson’s writing. I was torn between a 4 and a 5 star rating (mostly due to the novel dragging at times while being solid on paper), but ultimately the last 60 pages or so sealed the deal for me. The less you know about the book’s storyline the better, but I found the ending to be near perfect and done in such an on-brand, Jared-written kind of way. Consistent with its warm tone (despite the situation and underlying Vonnegut-styled views), I was pleasantly surprised at how well it balanced being nuanced and emotional with being funny and sharp compared to similar stories that end on a wistful, exclusive sad note. This is an odd one that I would only recommend for intuitive readers or those interested in off-beat, sociology psyche, but it’s worth giving a try if nothing else to see how unique and creative it is.