Eudemonia

“Brain candy this tasty is rare” A review of EUDEMONIA, by Gary Kamiya, co-founder of Salon Sophia Tonemai, the heroine of A.P. Schmitt’s remarkable debut novel “Eudemonia,” is one of the smartest, strangest -- and in some ways scariest --protagonists I’ve come across in a long while. A young Brazilian journalist based in the United States of Hysterica, Sophia is at once viciously intelligent, deeply compassionate, and alarmingly cold-blooded. As a reporter, Sophia has witnessed the ugly crimes committed by the powerful, and she is tortured by the fact that corporate crooks and warmongering politicians always get away with their misdeeds. So she becomes obsessed with the idea of punishing them. Sophia wrestles with an ultimate moral question: Is an individual justified in meting out punishment to evildoers? She’s the highest-IQ vigilante in history – Hamlet with a silencer. This premise might sound unpromisingly abstract, but Schmitt’s stiletto-sharp dialogue, dazzling range of high and low cultural references and laugh-out-loud satiric wordplay (“Faecesbook,” “Duck Chainy”, “Goldman Sucks”) make her protagonist’s quest for moral truth feel as much like a killer episode of “The Daily Show” as a Socratic dialogue. (Example: “When it comes to death and killing I always felt very natural about it, even as a child,” Sophia writes. “For a long time I thought ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was a statement unfairly singling out this guy, Thou, and I just wanted to know who did Thou kill to deserve the mention. I can’t lie about it: I looked up to Thou.”) And Schmitt captures Sophia's softer side, too, in her relationships with two memorably-drawn friends. There is a lot of great stuff in Eudemonia, and it is completely original. Schmitt’s command of English is alarmingly precise, and she is an amazingly talented writer and thinker. I have almost never come across a writer both as smart and as funny as she is and have never read anything quite like it. Eudemonia is an amazingly original piece of work. The way the moral conundrum is ultimately resolved, or not resolved, may disturb some readers. But Sophia is such an original character, and this sui generis philosophical/political thriller is so thought-provoking, that you don’t mind. Brain candy this tasty is rare. -- Gary Kamiya, co-founder of Salon.com