Calista's Flameout

Calista's latest effort, Flameout, is a sharp send-up of the surveillance state, as well as a pessimistic exploration of morality and personal responsibility. Flameout is buoyant and entertaining, but it carries a hard cynical edge that was missing from Calista's earlier satires.

As the story starts, a government agent, Brian O'Malley, is trying to hack into a personal computer used by Julie Fleishman, a minor politician in the opposition party. O'Malley is good at his job, but he has begun to question the morality of the surveillance. As his supervisors push him for results, he squirms, trying to find some way to avoid complicity. But he is saddled with student debt, and if he leaves his job the government will do its best to tarnish him in the eyes of potential employers. There appears to be no way out. O'Malley sinks into depression, unable to take pleasure in anything, and starts drinking heavily. Even his favorite hobby, homebrewing, ceases to offer any escape for him, and simply becomes an excuse for more drinking.

But O'Malley's darkest moment also proves to be his salvation. He finally breaks into Fleishman's computer, where he finds nothing more embarrassing than a few racy (but non-pornographic) pictures and a few unflattering emails. But more importantly, he also finds Fleishman's beer recipes (she, too, is an avid homebrewer). O'Malley brews a tart wit beer using one of the recipes, and it is delicious. In fact it is by far the best beer that O'Malley has brewed. Suddenly he sees a way out! He surreptitiously fixes the security flaws on Fleishman's computer, pretends to his bosses that he was unable to penetrate it, quits his job, and opens a brewpub. Fleishman's amazing recipes make it an instant success, and it soon grows into one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the country.

Here, though, the story sours. Fleishman's career does not go as well as O'Malley's—after losing a close election, she leaves politics to open a brewery. The problem is that her beers are seen as unoriginal knockoffs of O'Malley's best-selling beers—in fact they are basically identical. Fleishman endures the ridicule of beer reviewers and the scorn of beer drinkers. She is forced to rely on her retired parents for money to keep the brewery afloat, and she feels like a failure.

All of this would be more tolerable if O'Malley felt some responsibility for Fleishman's predicament. But he feels no guilt. Worse, he sees his actions as heroic, having shielded her from surveillance. Of course he ignores that his surveillance has also ruined her life. Here we are forced to consider what the real cost of surveillance is. Would Fleishman have been happier if the government had seen her pictures and emails, but her recipes had been ignored? Is it the act of surveillance or its real-world consequences that should concern us?

But the deeper questions are moral ones. Calista cuts into them with a deft, almost surgical touch, and yet for the reader the result is like being mauled with a hammer. Are humans driven to cast themselves as heroes no matter what the truth is? Are they self-justifying to the point of absurdity? It is hard not to answer those questions in the affirmative, and it is a bleak picture that emerges. After all, if a wrongdoer is forever shielded from recognizing the wrong, then how can true justice ever be done?

As the story ends, Calista has set O'Malley and Fleishman on a collision course. O'Malley is scheduled to appear at a beer festival to give a talk on recipe design. Fleishman will be at the same festival, pouring a new beer that she hopes will redeem her reputation and save her brewery. But first, she attends O'Malley's talk, where she recognizes his recipe... and here the book closes with the fuse lit, but the fireworks unexploded. It is for us to imagine the likely confrontation, and for us to argue about whether O'Malley can redeem himself, whether humans are capable of transcending their petty self-righteousness, whether, after all is said and done, there is any hope for us.