A strange thing happened when Joshua Cohen was deep into writing his new novel, “The Book of Numbers.” It started to come true. He had already written most of the book, a dense, dizzying story about a struggling novelist named Joshua Cohen who is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of the shady billionaire founder of Tetration, a Google-like technology company whose revolutionary mission is to “equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves.”
The fictional Joshua Cohen stumbles across a bombshell when he learns that Tetration is sharing consumers’ search-engine history with government intelligence agencies. Several years ago, the real Joshua Cohen showed a draft to a friend, an expert in cyber security and civil liberties who warned him that a plot twist based on such a revelation might be a bit of a stretch.
Then, in the summer of 2013, Edward J. Snowden, the former C.I.A. systems administrator, leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing the extent of the United States government’s warrantless surveillance of its citizens, and the role that communications and technology companies played in handing over consumer data. Mr. Cohen read in disbelief about a web surveillance program, XKeyscore, that was not unlike his invented program, called “autotet.”
He was elated.
“The world made this book true while I was writing it, which of course is the paranoid’s greatest fantasy,” he said, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of grapefruit juice in his small basement apartment in Red Hook one morning. “The question now is not, ‘Is this true,’ but, ‘How can we live with it?’ ”
“The Book of Numbers,” a dense, unbridled 580-page epic, is the latest and perhaps most ambitious entry into a growing literary subgenre that some book critics have labeled “The Great American Internet Novel.” Notable specimens include Thomas Pynchon’s gleefully paranoid tech takedown “Bleeding Edge”; Dave Eggers’s ominous “The Circle,” about a sinister Internet company that comes to control everything from personal finance and health care to elections; and Peter Carey’s cyber thriller, “Amnesia,” which was inspired by WikiLeaks and features a persecuted computer hacker.
Mr. Cohen, 34, has taken the tech trope even further with “The Book of Numbers,” which the novelist Adam Ross called “the single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era.” The narrative explores how technology permeates every aspect of our daily lives and consciousness, altering how we construct our sense of self and infecting our speech. (Mr. Cohen’s frequent use of the invented verb “tetrate” serves as a reminder that “Google” is a relatively new verb.) Technology is no longer something we simply use, it is something we are used and shaped by. As the novel’s shadowy antihero describes the transaction between the search engine company and its users, “All who read us are read.”
The novelist Norman Rush, an admirer of Mr. Cohen, said the ambition and scope of “The Book of Numbers” set it apart from earlier fictional works about our growing dependence on technology. “It’s a theme that’s so big, it’s daunting, and it’s hard to know how to get at it,” he said. “He’s a very extravagant risk-taking writer, and it took that kind of spirit.”
Mr. Cohen said a simple, nagging question provided the spark for the novel.
“What are the basic principles behind these devices that have come to dominate every aspect of my life?” he said.
Mr. Cohen, who seems more comfortable on the fringes, and sniffs at M.F.A. programs — “A degree in servitude,” he called them in a 2010 interview — doesn’t seem at first like the best-equipped person to bridge the divide between literature and technology. He writes his first drafts in longhand on legal pads. His book collection, which spills from shelves into neatly organized stacks on the floor, includes books in German and Hebrew, languages he reads fluently and has translated. The first sentence of “The Book of Numbers,” takes aim at tech adopters, using a crude expletive to tell those who are reading the book on a screen not to bother. “I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands,” the narrator continues.
Mr. Cohen tried to tackle the unwieldy subject from the inside. He read more than 180 books, including wonky treatises about surveillance and cyber security, books about the history and architecture of the Internet, and memoirs and biographies of technological innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, a German computer pioneer (a portrait of Mr. Zuse glares down from the wall above Mr. Cohen’s desk). He visited the National Security Agency’s museum of cryptology. He studied technology patents on Google patent search.
He also learned to write computer code, reading books on Python programming and taking online classes. “I was interested in the connections between these algorithms and language,” he said.
Early on, he had turned to his friend Ben Wizner, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, for feedback. They shared books about surveillance and privacy and had intense, alcohol-fueled debates. Mr. Wizner, who ended up representing Mr. Snowden, said the depiction of the “surveillance economy” in “The Book of Numbers” was alarmingly accurate, and added that he hoped the book would drive a more robust discussion about Internet-enabled surveillance.
“There’s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,” Mr. Wizner said. “For some people, the novelist’s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can’t.”
Mr. Cohen grew up in a book-filled house in Atlantic City, N.J., and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music. When he was 20, he moved to Berlin, with money from a music composition prize. “I was broke, just about as broke as I am now,” he said. “I went with this romantic idea that I would just write and live on $300 a month.” To scrape by, he worked as the Central European correspondent for The Forward, and ghostwrote two memoirs by Holocaust survivors.
He published his first short story collection, “The Quorum,” in 2005, and was paid “$50 and beer.” He made incrementally more, in the three- and four-figure range, on his next few books. For his 2010 novel “Witz,” a dark satire about the last Jew on earth that was turned down by at least eight major publishers, he says he received a small advance of around $1,200 from Dalkey Archive Press.
“I’ve spent a decade entirely broke, published by small presses, read by no one,” he said. That is no longer the case. This week, Random House is publishing “The Book of Numbers,” which some have compared to sweeping works by David Foster Wallace and Mr. Pynchon.
“The Book of Numbers” also shares some literary DNA with classic stories by Poe, Nabokov and Dostoyevsky about doppelgängers and doubles, a theme that Mr. Cohen felt was ripe for reworking in the Internet age. In the novel, the writer Joshua Cohen is handpicked to ghostwrite the memoir of Tetration’s founder partly because they have the same name, and he is irked that his famous subject takes up the first 324 entries on Tetration’s search rankings, making his own writing virtually invisible.
The real Mr. Cohen has been similarly haunted by another writer named Joshua Cohen, a political philosopher. Once, when Mr. Cohen was giving a reading in Berlin, a man approached him with five copies of the other Joshua Cohen’s philosophy books to sign. The man could not be reasoned with, so Mr. Cohen signed them. Occasionally, the other Joshua Cohen gets review copies intended for Mr. Cohen, or Mr. Cohen gets mistakenly invited to speak at philosophy conferences.
But Mr. Cohen has started to overshadow his Internet twin in search engine rankings.
“I’m destroying him on Google, which makes me so happy,” he said.
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