A claustrophobic story of motherhood in a near-future dystopia, Hum follows an eventful week in the life of May Webb and her young family. Sparse in plot but rich in structure, the novel portrays a world whose details are strange and new, and whose outlines are drawn from our own reality. To prove her point, author Helen Phillips lists her factual references in a series of endnotes that would not be out of place in an academic article.

Hum begins with May undergoing a lucrative facial-altering operation performed by a “Hum” – the name given to the human-like robots that populate May’s world. Although they don’t look particularly human, they act eerily human, and the novel explores this uncanny valley of emotions deeply and unerringly.

The operation is designed to render May unreadable to the ubiquitous AI camera surveillance, and serves as a surprisingly effective plot device—it introduces us to Hums and May in quick succession. The familiar yet fearsome Hum cuts micro-alterations into May’s face—and then sells treatments that it can instantly bill and order, like an Amazon-owned C3PO.

May is unemployed and has agreed to this operation for financial reasons, despite the alienation and dysphoria it is likely to cause. The changes from the operation are intended to be minor, but she and her family are immediately painfully aware of these changes. Rarely has a novelist so clearly attributed her own alienated labor and physical dysphoria to a character.

Professionally, May had been helping to improve AI communications, but when the network reached a certain level, human intervention was no longer necessary, and May lost her job along with all but one of her colleagues. Both she (and the reader) can see the bitter irony in this, but it also helps us understand why the world is busy humming. In an even greater but different irony, May’s husband Jem supplements the family income with varied and underpaid odd jobs that, as the week goes on, focus more and more on killing mice for rich people.

Throughout the novel, May is constantly on a shopping spree. She’s trying to escape the constant unpleasant hum of everyday life, and every interaction she has (almost exclusively with AIs) ends with an opportunity to buy something to make her or her family’s precarious middle-class life easier. It’s only half a step removed from our lives in 2024 America, and it’s totally relatable.

With the money she receives for her partial disfigurement, May buys her family an overnight trip to the Botanical Garden. She grew up in the forest until it burned down and her family moved to an inadequate housing project. She remembers the sights and smells of the greenery and wants to return to this paradise, even if only temporarily, and share the experience with her family.

A holiday in the illusion of nature that the walled garden provides is also a chance for the family to escape their “buzzes” and “bunnies.” Bunnies are wrist-worn monitoring and entertainment devices for children. They provide a constant soothing experience for children and overprotective parents. Removing them is traumatic for both, and yet, like the buzz, they are scary in ways we recognize all too clearly.

Wooms are immersive, personalized, ad-driven internet experience devices. They drive a wedge between human relationships, like locking ourselves in our room with a laptop in an extreme way. In addition to these devices, of course, all adults have phones, which are addictive tethers to work, photos (memories), surveillance, and so-called “social media.”

In addition to the dystopian technology of the future, May has to contend with the same banal nightmares as any mother: that she cannot protect her children; that someone or something will take her children away from her; that she cannot provide for her children; and that her children do not love her. She is extremely human and, in fact, it is precisely this depth of feeling that is missing from the sums.

The events at the Botanical Gardens throw May even more off balance and the novel plunges into the abyss of the uncanny valley. Phillips’ short stories are often Kafkaesque or dreamlike and Hum shares that nightmarish feel of the events, but without abandoning a dizzying realism. Reading the novel feels like being in May’s thought bubble, looking through a fisheye lens and gasping for air.

Readers have been eagerly awaiting Hum after Phillips published a string of acclaimed books, including her latest novel, The Need (2019), which was nominated for the National Book Award as a New York Times Notable Book. The novel does not disappoint. Due to May’s extreme and constant insecurity, reading the novel can be an uncomfortable experience—like a rollercoaster of anxiety. But because of Phillips’s succinct symbolism and assured plot development, the reader is left delighted, enlightened, and not a little concerned about the future.