Charlotte’s Web

Anxieties about artificial intelligence replacing writers clearly inspired Do You Remember Being Born?, the latest by Sean Michaels, whose debut novel, Us Conductors, won the 2014 Giller Prize. Rather than building a story around a new author contending with this emerging threat, Michaels centres his tale on an established poet working with the technology. This focus grounds a narrative about cutting-edge robotics in a conventional theme: how growing older impacts one’s usefulness, economic security, and ability to relate to others.

Irreverent, quick-witted, and eccentrically attached to a tricorne and cape, the seventy-five-year-old poet Marian Ffarmer is comfortable with the spareness of a hermitic literary life in her late mother’s Manhattan apartment. But she hasn’t saved much money, and with her middle-aged son struggling to buy his first home, she feels “humiliated” that she can’t help him, even if “the son of a poet grows up knowing his...