Habitus (Electronic book text)

In this marvelously inventive, complex, and epic novel, James Flint knits a stunning vision of the intertwining connections between our personal lives, our machines, and our history with a satire on the notions of progress that unpin the digital age.

A math prodigy born to a Hasidic baker in Brooklyn, Joel Kluge is invited to study at Cambridge, where he comes to believe that the key to understanding particle physics lies in the mysteries of the Kaballah. Daughter of the inmate of an asylum near Stratford-Upon-Avon, Jennifer Several soon graduates from a TV-saturated childhood to sexual precocity and shoplifting. Judd Axelrod, the youngest of the three, is the mixed-race child of a Hollywood actress and a successful IBM salesman, with a consciousness that has a habit of slipping outside of time. On the run from his analyst, the insidious Dr. Schemata, he discovers a brilliant talent for gambling. Meanwhile, high above their heads, Laika the first dog in space has worked out how to convert information into energy - a trick that enables her to stay alive while observing them all.

Driven by the profoundly linked forces of change and chance, the lives of the three humans briefly intersect -- with the result that Jennifer becomes pregnant, her unusual fetus the product of two fathers. As the child grows, the strange synthesis of identities brewing within her points to a new and different future for humankind.

"Set against our culture's precarious leap from the space age to the digital age, "Habitus" is a sweeping epic comedy in which cosmos, characters and molecules are wrought with equal passion, grace and verve. Here comes one astoundingly good storyteller."
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, AUTHOR OF "THE ECSTASY CLUB"

"Vast and vastly ambitious . . . story-telling can't be learnt: you either got it or you haven't. James Flint has it."
LAWRENCE NORFOLK, AUTHOR OF "THE POPE'S RHINO