empathy

{{A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman}}. It doesn’t really criticize society, but the main character basically criticizes everyone. It’s a good book that shows empathy a lot.

You might take a gander at **84k** by Claire North. In the dystopian setting of not-too-far future Britain, everything and everyone has been reduced down to a single, impersonal number – a psychic net worth that governs not only your opportunities in life, but also what the omnipresent Company demands to recoup in the event of your untimely death. The book follows an empty shell of a man who works for the department that calculates the fees owed by criminals who wish to skip prison by simply making the Company whole again – a DMV for legal absolution, if you will. When he has a chance meeting with a woman from his past, he is devastated to learn of her murder shortly thereafter and finally wakes up to the horror of the thing when her murderer, a hitman for hire, promptly pays the requisite fine ($84k) and saunters back to a normal life. The protagonist decides she deserves more than a stamped letter in a file as her only only legacy, and sets out to find out what happened.

The commentary on eroding humanity in an age of technology is apparent from the first scene of the book, as a woman sees a man dying in the gutter and can’t bring herself to walk past him without trying to help, even though she knows the exercise is futile. Her frantic call to 911 has all the drama of the worst customer-service phone experiences we’ve all had – a jaunty, vaguely muffled piece of muzac on repeat, a cheery computerized voice advising us of wait times, a reminder to have your medical card handy, an aggressive sales pitch for an upgrade to an astronomically expensive tier that includes luxuries like a complimentary ambulance ride to any hospital within three miles, and the miraculous human voice who gets your name and phone number only to send you right back to purgatory in the name of transferring you to the “right department”.