'The Immortal King Rao': Tech capitalism fiction

Vauhini Vara's debut novel fuses an immigrant success story and dystopian cautionary tale.

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Consider the Dalit. If you’re of a certain age, you first heard of them as the “untouchables,” members of India’s lowest caste.

King Rao is a Dalit; King is his first name, given to him in a burst of ambition. He fulfills that ambition and then some in Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao,” which I decided to read after it was named a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

After an extremely humble start in India, Rao’s path to fame and fortune in America tracks closely with the rise of Apple, Facebook and other tech giants that have woven themselves into the fabric of our daily lives. But in his world, capitalism and government have completed the ultimate merger, with citizens now known as Shareholders and with the term “social capital” taking on a new, insidious meaning.

Rather than pledging one’s labor to any single corporation, trading hours for dollars, kyats, or cedis, Shareholders would sell it at will and be compensated in Social Capital, based on the Algo’s prediction of the actual value they had produced.

King Rao’s story is told alternately by an omniscient narrator and by his daughter, Athena, who’s grown up on an Washington island where her father has retreated after plummeting from grace. Seclusion doesn’t shield her from the activities of an anti-Shareholder resistance cell that’s taken up residence on the next island over. Athena runs away one night and moves in with them, becoming increasingly fascinated by their charismatic leader, who in an ingenious twist turns out to be connected to her in a way that she never could have imagined.

Part immigrant success story, part dystopian satire and part coming-of-age story, Vara’s novel represents the arrival of an intriguing new literary voice.