IT seems, sometimes disconcertingly so, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is particularly true for Eric Muller, the extraordinarily likeable, nebbish, über-geek protagonist of Gabriel Roth’s debut novel, The Unknowns. The story of the misfit who makes good is hardly new, but Roth’s character has been — like much else in our world — heavily upgraded thanks to the miracle of the internet. The world now belongs to people like Eric: those who would once have been considered super-geeks, but who manage, after an adolescence of angst and social pariahdom, to create and sell off dot-com companies and become millionaires.

Surprise, surprise though — despite his success, Eric is still that socially awkward kid who seems destined to remain on the periphery of … well, everything. Dot-com dollars aside, he can’t seem to dissociate from the gawky teenager he once was: the kind of kid who started taking notes on the girls in his high-school and compiling dossiers on them so that he could figure them out (you can imagine, given the inevitability of high school, how this plays out). No great wonder then, that the bulk of The Unknowns is spent on Eric’s meticulously planned wooing of and interaction with Maya, a journalist wunderkind with some significant trauma of her own.

As the book opens, Eric is walking into a party, at exactly 10:32 p.m. because it’s early enough for him to “imagine that [it] will live up to the promise inherent in the notion of a party.” This is the sort of rumination that runs throughout The Unknowns, and will likely polarise readers; Eric will either come across as dramatically effete and incapable of working through the most basic emotive situations, or he will be a charming bumbler growing into his own identity and personality.

As with all good books, there is significant back-story. Although we meet Eric at a time when he has ostensibly found success, there are many flashbacks to times when it would have been hard to ever imagine him having a social future of any sort. Between fantasies of romancing his crushes by means of a text-based video-game and his desperate need to classify and categorise things (ironically, the root of his future success), Eric is something of an idiot-savant; the only problem being, of course, that he’s more the former than the latter.

Yet, it is his obsession with documentation and understanding the “unknown,” whether that’s girls or computer code, that leads to his remarkable understanding of “the user experience,” albeit very much in the abstract. The book follows Eric’s relationship with Maya, who after a reasonably brief period of time shares with him traumatic memories of childhood abuse. For Eric, an inveterate gatherer of data, Maya’s repression and subsequent recovery of memories are irresistible. The less comprehensible she and her story are, the more intrigued and incapable of self-restraint he becomes.

In an effort to uncover the “unknowns” associated with this, he begins to parse her life and experiences, along with his own, subconsciously reducing the sum of their joint experiences into an algorithmic function. They interact in San Francisco in 2002, following the American invasion of Iraq, an act that throws up its own set of false positives, including the positively odious weaselry of Donald Rumsfeld: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Not for Eric. Nothing in his world should be an unknown, known or otherwise. This desire for understanding informs everything he says and does, whether it’s attending a party, reaching for conversational gambits on a date, or analysing why he feels so chuffed at the thought of getting to stay in Maya’s apartment after she has left for work. The ability to observe and capture nuance gets him the girl; his inability to know what makes her tick comes between them. Eric’s focus on discovery shows up his hard-luck father in a particularly harsh light as a failed businessman with grandiose — and unrealistic — dreams, but also reveals the desperation involved in one man’s desire to somehow strike an elusive jackpot. You can’t help but pity Eric on some level as an almost hopelessly awkward specimen of humanity, and yet be enraged at the fact that someone this incredibly dense has somehow managed to capitalise on his own greatest weaknesses to become a success.

The reality, like most things, lies somewhere between these two extremes of emotion, and is the most compelling realisation that The Unknowns is about, quite literally, that — all those things that are, for Eric, unknown quantities. Fortunately for all concerned, the scale of this ignorance — or at least unawareness — is so vast that it’s both a treat and something of an ordeal to see Roth navigate through the emotionally-fraught straits that make up Eric’s life. There’s a strong overtone of young adult literature in Roth’s writing, a sense only underscored by Eric’s own description of his journey as one in which he’s “stretched across … life’s twin goals: … uncompromised happiness and not being a loser.” But at its core, The Unknowns reduces down, like a particularly sticky sauce, into a pretty basic question of faith versus fact — is it possible to accept truth as a subjective, interpretive experience, or is it only fair to review things in the cold, hard light of rationality? Check back in a few years — there will undoubtedly be an app for that out there somewhere on the internet.

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The Unknowns

(NOVEL)

By Gabriel Roth

Little, Brown and Company, US

ISBN 9780316223300

240pp.