STARRED Book Review: Freelance by Kevin M. Kearney

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

Fueled by teenage angst and paranoia, Kevin M. Kearney’s Freelance is a brilliant commentary on technology, humanity, and the gig economy.

Listless and adrift after barely surviving high school, Simon shirks college fully believing he is destined for greatness. He moves into a party house with Dylan, a young professional who often pontificates on the failures of politics while chugging I.P.A.s.

To stop-gap the time until he lands on a career, Simon borrows his parents’ Subaru to drive for HYPR, a ride-hailing app known for low pay and monopolistic leanings. While Simon’s goals are independence, wealth, and purpose, gig work proves overwhelming and demeaning. Not to mention that his only real friend is an OnlyFans girl named Angelica. But when things couldn’t get any worse, HYPR offers Simon a spot in the Gifted Young Dryvers Academy, a bonus and a path to significance.

Episodic with a roguish yet also somewhat hapless main character, Freelance joins the canon of great picaresques like Lazarillo de Tormes and Confederacy of Dunces. Not that Simon is particularly prone to mistakes or dishonest, but more that his gig living and dependence on his parents’ kindness places him at a step beneath the lower classes, and his rise occurs without any particular acumen or skill. Simon becomes a modern day Pícaro, comedic in the sense that his rags-to-riches expertly satirizes many aspects of corrupt society. However, whereas the hero in a classic picaresque fools those around them, Simon is the one fooled into greatness.

Another turn away from the picaresque is Kearney’s use of close third person narration that sometimes shifts in perspective from Simon to, among others, his later romantic interest, Cassie.

With this turn, Cassie is given a depth that helps balance the humor of Simon’s follies with meaning. Cassie, an early twenties single mother who also feels unsure of her next steps, parties away her uncertainties with Simon’s roommates, but she wants something deeper, more intimate, more meaningful. By playing her search for meaning along with Simon’s search for greatness, a fresh tension emerges from Kearney’s story.

When Simon’s HYPR app begins directing him toward legally suspect behavior, hanging in front of him a carrot of cash, Cassie lures him away from the ride-share app’s capitalistic leanings. While the conflicts and tension that drive Freelance forward shift and grow as the story goes on, Simon’s major choice is between the wealth and power offered by HYPR and the human connection that Cassie can provide. While the HYPR app’s suspicious behavior adds an ominous tone crying for Simon’s downfall, Cassie offers the reader a sense of hope.

It’s not surprising to see more novels about gig economy breaking into the world, and the coming of age genre is nothing new. But Kearney presents a fresh take on both of these subjects. Though Simon may grow wiser because of his adventures, and though Kearney does leave him on the brink of romantic love, Freelance doesn’t necessarily promise any kind of change.

While Kearney doesn’t offer any answers about tech, AI, or interpersonal relationships, he asks new questions, or at least asks the old questions in a new way. The final pages contain the kind of ending that cries to be read twice because the meaning of the book is not only on the page but beyond it. Freelance is the kind of book that’s over too soon and that lingers once you’re gone.

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