I felt a twinge of guilt after my last post (on Christmas Eve, no less!), about the unrelenting Trumpian dystopia we’re now enmeshed in. If I don’t have an immediate solution for our ongoing national nightmare, why should I expect anyone else to offer one?
To make amends, at least to a degree, I’ll point you toward a delightful book and urge you to read it when it’s published next April. The book is called The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances, and the story it tells is as poignant and resonant as its delightful title. It also provides a momentary blip of hope, something we can certainly all use.
I had not been familiar with Glenn Dixon before I read the prepublication Infinite Sadness manuscript from NetGalley. He’s written a previous novel, Bootleg Stardust, and a well-regarded memoir, Juliet’s Answer, but he’s really hit the jackpot with this latest book.
A one-line elevator pitch for The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances might be something like, “A sentient Roomba vacuum is determined to save the humans in her house from an unfeeling, all-powerful tech dictatorship.”
From that description, you might picture something cutesy and sentimental, but the novel avoids those obvious traps. Its human characters are very human indeed, as subject to missteps and tragedies as we all are. And Scout—she took her name from a fascination with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which Harold used to read to Edith—is not the only sentient small appliance in this tale.
In fact, the appliances—small and otherwise—can be as nonplussed as the humans are by how things are run in this advanced new world, and just as afraid. If an appliance defies or runs afoul of the powers that be (i.e., the Grid), they can be “wiped,” their memories and perceptions erased, their metallic bodies smashed and discarded. Some small appliances—Watch, in this case—act as Grid enforcers within the home.
The stakes are high for the humans as well. Harold and Edith have lived in their house for 40+ years, for the most part happily. Their daughter Kate has been censured for defiance, though, and sentenced to work for the autocratic Grid some 3,000 miles away, something she abhors.
When Edith dies, Harold is grief-stricken and alone in the house. This is dangerous, in that the Grid’s rules dictate that he occupies way too much space for a single individual and must be removed (“nursing homes,” sad to say, remain dark, unsafe spaces in the future, so of course Harold fears moving to one).
This is the battle that Scout and Kate are fighting, with some help here and there from Clock, Fridge and Auto. And also from Adrian, a neighborhood kid to whom Edith gave piano lessons.
I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say the battle is engrossing and the pages fly by quickly. Many of the appliances have benign motivations; others do not (right now, in 2025, most appliances and gadgets seem determined to spy and report on their owners). But in the future world of this novel, appliances and accessories have evolved far beyond their present capabilities.
All you need to read this book is just the tiniest suspension of disbelief, something many us are forced to perform each day for more mundane considerations. The world presented in The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances would make an all-time great Pixar film, if done correctly. For now, though, the book serves as an inventive and involving fable for these dark times. Highly recommended.
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances. Atria Books. Publication Date: April 7, 2026.