Words&Dirt

Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a novel about a nightmare road trip across America. The protagonist is Abbott, an anxious, 26-year-old Lyft driver who spends his free time as a small-time streamer. The story starts when Abbott meets Ether, a voluble young woman who offers him $200,000 cash to drive her and a mysterious black box from California to Washington, DC. The catch is that he has to leave immediately, ditch his phone, and travel with her in complete secrecy. Abbott and Ether are pursued by a tattooed criminal who wants the box for unknown reasons, and a retired FBI agent also gets involved. As they travel across America, people on social media learn about the situation and start churning out conspiracy theories about what’s in the box and what will happen when it reaches its destination.

It’s not a bad premise, and Pargin injects some classic thriller energy into the rising action that carried me along for the first hundred pages or so. I was initially irritated by both Abbott and Ether, but started to enjoy their banter as I learned more about them. The novel’s middle stretch is the strongest, containing genuinely clever commentary on contemporary American politics, media, technology, and culture. There’s also some worthwhile exploration of the modern gender wars, with Abbott and Ether serving as stand-ins for the legitimate grievances that both men and women bring to this debate.

Pargin’s concept of the “Black Box of Doom” is an excellent metaphor for how social media traps people in distorted, fear-driven information bubbles that they come to interpret as reality. People then create and perpetuate conflict in a desperate attempt to validate the version of reality that their personalized Black Box has served up to them. In an era where collective action seems less and less attainable due to information atomization and political polarization, Pargin invites us to seek the edges of our Black Boxes and peer around the corner to see what else is really happening in the world.

That’s pretty much all the praise that I can manage for Black Box of Doom. For me, it falls into a well-populated category of novels that don’t fulfill the promise of their good ideas. The characters don’t have much depth and simply serve their roles in moving the plot forward. Abbott and Ether are possible exceptions to this, but even so, Pargin’s attempts at true character development are uninspired. Ether gets a chance at redemption and Abbott discovers a nascent form of masculine courage, but neither of these progressions packed a transformative punch.

I struggled to get through the last hundred pages of Black Box of Doom, which was funny given how much was going on. I could tell it was supposed to be exciting but I felt like the story ran out of intellectual fuel and then tried to make up for it with a chaotic, action-heavy conclusion. I found myself not caring what was in the titular “Black Box” and then underwhelmed by the final reveal. The novel feels overstuffed and frivolous, which I guess makes sense if you consider what passes for “seriousness” in American culture and politics these days. If this ironic twist was intentional on Pargin’s part, I’ll give him full credit for that.

Rating: 4/10