β Scribed by Gabriel Roth
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Eric Muller has been trying to hack the girlfriend problem for half his life. As a teenage geek, he discovered his gift for programming computers-but his attempts to understand women only confirm that he's better at writing code than connecting with human beings. Brilliant, neurotic, and lonely, Eric spends high school in the solitary glow of a screen.
By his early twenties, Eric's talent has made him a Silicon Valley millionaire. He can coax girls into bed with ironic remarks and carefully timed intimacies, but hiding behind wit and empathy gets lonely, and he fears that love will always be out of reach.
So when Eric falls for the beautiful, fiercely opinionated Maya Marcom, and she miraculously falls for him too, he's in new territory. But the more he learns about his perfect girlfriend's unresolved past, the further Eric's obsessive mind spirals into confusion and doubt. Can he reconcile his need for order and logic with the mystery and chaos of love?
This brilliant debut ushers Eric Muller-flawed, funny, irresistibly endearing-into the pantheon of unlikely heroes. With an unblinking eye for the absurdities and horrors of contemporary life, Gabriel Roth gives us a hilarious and heartbreaking meditation on self consciousness, memory, and love.
Roth cracks the code of the male ego and nerd culture in his meditative and absorbing debut. Formerly an ungainly, computer-obsessed high-schooler who sheepishly tracked female classmates in a journal, Eric Muller has grown into a twentysomething self-made millionaire after founding and quickly selling a dot-com start-up in 2002. Now capable of luring women to bed with droll sarcasm and painstakingly calculated guile, Eric meets Maya, a journalist for a San Francisco alt-weekly, whose quick wit proves irresistibly challenging to Eric. Meanwhile, others seem to assess his success with the expectation of a handout. A onetime schoolmate Eric has since snubbed considers dropping out of MIT to start a computer-programming company with him, his mother battles postdivorce blues, and his financially desperate father seeks help to redeem his failed attempts as an entrepreneur. As Eric hides from the feebleminded, he unwittingly bares his soul to Maya, who reveals a startlingly dark secret about her past that might thwart his advances. A convincingly introspective narrative that traces the masculine rationale, Rothβs novel reinterprets love in the digital age. --Jonathan Fullmer
'he is a class act, witty and insightful, poking fun at the sort of men who can become dotcom millionaires without understanding the first thing about human beings.' Mail on Sunday
'Gabriel Roth fearlessly tackles some weighty issues - including false memory syndrome and the Iraq war - in his debut. The result is a novel of two [...] halves: the first a geek-com of frequently Woody Allen-esque brilliance, the second something altogether darker and more searching. [...] Roth is a genuinely exciting talent.' Daily Mail
'[a] sparky, neurotic debut novel [...] Roth has a sharp awareness of trends and this comes out, hilariously, in Eric's dry commentary. The earnestness of youth is wittily depicted [...] Eric could be a creep but Roth has imbued him with such a hefty amount of humorous self-doubt that you can't help but root for him. [...] The Unknowns is a confident novel that manages to be both funny and sad. Buy it' Daily Telegraph
'invigoratingly contemporary: ironic, informal, self-deprecating and energetic. [...] Roth is dexterous enough to handle the intermingling of comedy and tragedy [...] Roth is certainly an exciting new writer, and The Unknowns contains ample material for a fine debut - perhaps even enough for two.' Literary Review
'Roth's remarkably funny, tender book is much more than one code-writing kid's success story. [...] Roth writes in a gently self-mocking, utterly disarming style that gives The Unknowns an unusal type of tension.' New York Times 'A wise and mature novel, a cool and contemporary one. It announces the arrival of a bright new talent.' Andrew O'Hagan, Booker-shortlisted author of Our Fathers
'The Unknowns is so staggeringly funny and smart that its depths and sorrows, when they came, took my breath away.' Megan Abbott, author of The End of Everything and Dare Me
'The Unknowns is wonderful, a wry, ironic novel about the perils of contemporary romance, where you can collect intimate details about people you've never met, but still not know the truth of somebody you want to love.' Scott Turow, best-selling author of Presumed Innocent
'Fast, funny, full of snappy dialogue, and never losing its poise. Gabriel Roth is a find.' Sebastian Faulks, best-selling author of Birdsong
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