How To Be Seen

There is at the heart of the book Lucy, a Seattle-based writer, in demand with journals like The New Yorker for her detailed, revealing profiles. Once accused of not possessing a confident point of view8212;she was like a blotting paper, her mother once said8212;she absorbs the details of her subject8217;s life through wide-ranged research and careful fact-checks with acquaintances and surreptitious bugging. 8220;It was what she did best, being a chameleon.8221;

She is a single mother to 11-year-old Alida, math whiz who harnesses algebraic equations to trace patterns in Lucy8217;s life. 8220;Her mom could hardly go to the bathroom now without Alida registering the event8230; with each new addition to the diary she was getting very slightly closer to turning her mom into a soluble equation.8221;

Completing their pseudo family is Tad, who lives in the building and supplements his income by acting in Department of Homeland Security catastrophe drills, with each detail carefully scrutinised in Washington. Tad carries restrained angst against the rapid loss of privacy, and inhabits the Internet to know what8217;s happening. 8220;He mostly read foreign media to find out what was happening in his own country8230; Then he hit the blogs and forums to keep company with like-minded internal exiles8212;those lonely late-nighters, as full of rage as he was, tapping out their latest intelligence on the administration8217;s mendacities and misdeeds.8221;

Holding the story together is Lucy8217;s new assignment. She has been commissioned to do an in-depth profile of August Vanags, sudden and reportedly reclusive author of a bestselling account of the Holocaust. Vanags, as she discovers early enough, is actually eager for company, given to lengthy monologues on the need to be on guard against America8217;s enemies. Lucy and then Alida are slowly drawn into the Vanags household. Lucy must also contend with other sources of information and doubts about Vanags8217; identity8212;gained from eager informants and from puzzling passages in other survivors8217; Holocaust passages.

And much as Lucy will deny Tad8217;s theories as paranoia, she too cannot but start at the sight of men in Hawaiian shirts casually showing up on ferries8212;post-9/11 equivalents of McCarthy8217;s men in grey suits. But caught as she is in the middle of contending arguments, she wonders, if air marshals are acceptable, what8217;s wrong with surveillance on the ground.

The end of privacy is a hot subject for current polemics. What makes Surveillance so chilling is its startling disclosures of the little means of surveillance most of us are resorting to in our own lives. It is a portrait of America in its detail but the issues confront almost everybody.