“Hum,” Helen Phillips’s third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May’s face. She is participating in a paid experiment in “adversarial tech,” undergoing a procedure that will ever so slightly alter her features, making her harder for surveillance cameras to identify. As the book opens, May is mid-op, the needle advancing its “slender and relentless line of penetration” across her temple, toward the skin of her eyelid. What lies on the other side of the surgery? “Some sort of transformation, undeniable but undetectable,” Phillips writes. “Faint shifts in shading . . . her features wavering a bit between familiarity and unfamiliarity, the way she might look in a picture taken from a strange angle.”
The novel takes place in a dystopian world that is at once recognizable and subtly different from our own. Climate change has devastated the environment. (“If only the forests hadn’t burned,” May thinks. “If only it wasn’t so hard, so expensive, getting out of the city, getting beyond the many rings of industry and blight.”) Cameras and screens are as omnipresent as the pollution in the air; privacy, access to nature, and freedom from advertising have become luxury goods. Many jobs have been automated, including May’s. Previously employed by a company that developed “the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence,” May was laid off after unwittingly training an A.I. network that made her obsolete. Her husband, Jem, a former photographer, is keeping them afloat as a gig worker, emptying mousetraps and cleaning out closets. The couple’s anxiety about the future has filtered down to their children, the eight-year-old Lu and six-year-old Sy, who are shown doting on a cockroach, obsessing over disaster-preparedness manuals, and rejoicing at flavorless strawberries. The kids fill their insomniac parents with love and fear. “What will this planet hold for them by the time they’re our age?” May and Jem ask, clutching each other in bed.
Phillips specializes in imparting a gentle shimmer of uncanniness to the intimacies of domestic realism. Her novels draw on sci-fi and suspense tropes, but they tend not to be plot-driven or outwardly dramatic. Instead, Phillips writes meditative fables about marriage and motherhood, grounded in sensuous details (the “sizzle” of seltzer, the “numbing calm” of lotion) and interested in the material facts and affective textures of their characters’ lives. “Hum,” in particular, belongs to a class of recent fiction that entwines everyday descriptions of parenting with ecological anxiety. These books grow out of a salutary trend in literature that, as the author and translator Lauren Elkin wrote in 2018, “put the mother and her perspective at the center of their concerns,” exploring maternal ambivalence in order to combat idealized notions of caregiving. Books such as “A Life’s Work” (2001), by Rachel Cusk, “Department of Speculation” (2014), by Jenny Offill, and “Little Labors” (2016), by Rivka Galchen, circled themes of shame and guilt, often in the context of creative ambition: when the narrators worked on their art, they felt bad about ignoring their kids, and vice versa.
In eco-anxiety mom lit, the shame and guilt have found a new object, not unwritten pages or unrealized professional goals but the destruction of the planet. The narrators of these books are painfully aware of anthropogenic climate change and runaway capitalism. They radiate terror about the dystopian world that coming generations stand to inherit. In Lauren Groff’s story collection “Florida” (2018), a mother spends her day doomscrolling: “While my sons are in school, I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species.” The narrator of Offill’s novel “Weather” (2020), also a mother, might have the same tabs open; she’s taken a job answering panicked listener e-mails for a climate-crisis podcast. In Kate Zambreno’s “The Light Room” (2023), a mom ventures outdoors in “spooky heat—a flash of the future for her children.” “Why have children?” her babysitter wonders. “We’ll all be dead in fifteen years.” Animating these books is a recurring concern that maybe you can’t be a good mom in the age of climate collapse; maybe, if you aren’t actively blowing up oil pipelines, you shouldn’t have kids at all.
The vision of the future presented in “Hum” is less apocalyptic than some of these mothers fear. (The protagonist of Christine Smallwood’s “The Life of the Mind,” from 2021, imagines children clinging to a storm-tossed raft while they berate her for her inaction on carbon emissions.) The book’s chief interest is not the Armageddon hovering in the wings but the dehumanizing, anhedonic grind of May’s daily life, a constant battle against the temptations of consumption and technologically mediated distraction. In Phillips’s plausible dystopia, people rely on technology to compensate for ecological ruin; they bathe in the beauty of screens because they’ve made the physical world ugly.
The book shrewdly connects maternal guilt to consumerism. May signs up for the facial modification in part so that her family can afford a swoony, unthinkable extravagance: a visit to the Botanical Garden, a walled nature park that is the toast of rich-person Instagram. The trip is an attempt to atone for the precariousness of Lu and Sy’s childhood, and when, in the admissions line, the kids light up at an advertisement for overpriced gumdrops, May can’t bear to deny them. No sooner does she approve the purchase—it only takes two words—than the gumdrops are “in their mouths . . . dissolving fragrantly on their tongues.” The scene raises the question of what lasting happiness you can offer your children in a world where pleasure is craved, conjured, and exhausted in the width of a breath. How do you preserve their well-being when everything is disposable, and, if you can’t, how do you make it up to them? Of course, May’s society is set up to exploit these anxieties. She’s endlessly targeted with ads for kid-related products and experiences that she feels terrible buying and terrible not buying.
In “Hum,” Phillips keeps her world just one degree shy of recognizability, deftly turning the dials of similarity and difference, a mechanic fine-tuning eeriness instead of car engines. Dinnertime finds May and Jem absorbed in their phones. Lu and Sy plead to be excused so that they can go talk to their bunnies—wearable A.I. companions on their wrists—in glowing, human-size eggs, called wooms, whose walls stream content. Adults also have wooms, although these are as likely to be used for porn as they are to be set to their original backdrop, with its “veined reddish light and the whoosh of a heartbeat,” designed to make users feel “safe and loved.”
As Phillips’s characters outsource their humanity to their devices, the machines that they’ve built become mirrors. Hums—graceful, tireless, superintelligent robots—seem to have absorbed their best selves. Phillips said in an interview that she chose the name “hum” in part because it’s “a beautiful-sounding word that can call to mind a parent humming a lullaby . . . and it’s a form of the sacred sound om.” Programmed for gentleness and empathy, hums occupy a growing number of positions in the workforce, especially in the service sector. At the Botanical Garden, they evoke Prospero’s obliging spirits, their ever-present hands causing pastries to materialize on the ground and globes of light to appear in the trees. The hums may be the most utopian thing about “Hum,” yet they seem to herald a family that marches not to the beat of a heart but to the purr of a processor.
May is anxious about the hums’ impact on society and labor, but she’s also terrified that their supernatural loving-kindness has rendered her unnecessary as a mom. There’s an implication that she wants to go to the Botanical Garden not only to immerse the kids in the last wisps of nature and break them of the tech fever that she helped spread but also to restrict the access of these digital “parents,” as in a custody battle. The night before the trip, she confiscates her children’s bunnies, dramatically ripping the tech off their wrists. Her gesture backfires: at the Botanical Garden, the kids get lost, wandering down a hidden corridor that deposits them back into the grimy hell of the city. Since they aren’t wearing their bunnies, their hysterical parents don’t know how to find them.
This scene dramatizes the primordial fear that animates eco-anxiety motherhood novels: while May and Jem remain in the garden, enjoying its natural bounty, their ill-equipped children navigate a burning world alone. The image is so potent that you could imagine Phillips spending the rest of the book developing it: how May, terrified, responds to being cut off from her kids and trapped in a fantasy she entered voluntarily; how Lu and Sy fare on the streets. Instead, the crisis resolves almost as soon as it begins. A hum sends “an emergency search inquiry out to the network,” after which the kids, shaken but unhurt, are retrieved by another hum.
Up to this point, Phillips has nimbly modulated the faceprint of our world so that her novel’s events are just slightly askew. Here, though, in an unconvincing twist, May’s story goes public, and she turns into a social-media villain, inundated with strangers’ rage at her decision to separate her children from their devices. Phillips is right that mothers are judged harshly for small imperfections, and that the Internet has amplified the pressure they feel by incubating impossibly glamorous momfluencers while hinting to users that they are constantly being watched. But this depiction of public shaming feels like a paranoid fantasy, an externalization of May’s guilt, rather than a believable development. When the Bureau of Family Aid opens an investigation into May “related to the negligent treatment of minors,” it reinforces the impression that the novel, like its protagonist, is losing the ability to distinguish between real and imagined threats. Though the state does regularly uproot children from their families, those families are not often middle class; raising your kids without screens is less a taboo than a status symbol, like buying them ergonomic wooden toys and sending them to bougie no-tech camps with equestrian facilities and gluten-free kitchens.
“Hum” ’s swerve into unreality is inseparable from its increasing emphasis on May’s guilty conscience. During the section of the novel concerned with her harassment, even the language grows hallucinatory, saturated in horror tropes, underscoring that May, who loves her children and loses sleep over their safety and happiness, has become unrecognizable to herself: a monstrous mother. It can seem as if the novel’s real question is less whether she will be found to be a good parent by the Bureau than whether she will salvage her self-image and manage to feel like a good parent.
A similar longing to be reassured runs through many novels of maternal guilt and ecological anxiety. In “Beautiful World Where Are You” (2021), by Sally Rooney, Eileen, one of the protagonists, grapples with her decision to become pregnant: she’s fearful about the state of the planet, but she displaces that uneasiness with worry about “whether I am fit to parent a child in the first place.” This progression from the outside inward mirrors the path that “Hum” traces as it registers the challenges of mothering in an age of A.I. and environmental collapse. The book seems to quell its larger anxieties—the charred forests, the bunnies—by redirecting focus to May’s guilt, allowing her, and, by extension, the reader, to revel in the pleasurable drama of shame and its release rather than think about an unthinkable future.
The book’s final pages offer May the gift of recognition, of being seen with love and tenderness. The evidence is weighed, the experts speak: she is worthy. It’s as if Phillips, like an overprotective parent, has swooped in to solve her narrator’s identity crisis—and to whisk the less tractable societal problems out of view. By making May’s recovery of her sense of motherliness, her caregiver’s identity, central to the plot, the book accepts her prioritization of her own ego and fetishizes what it portrays as May’s desperate devotion to her kids—an insistence on primal mom-love that wishes away the irresolution built into parenting. What was always true about raising a child is exquisitely true in the era of climate change: no one can absolve you or tell you with certainty that you succeeded. You live in the not-knowing, in the organ toward which the needle is moving, wondering whether, when it arrives, you might start to see. ♦