By Wehttam Tropapar

The novel: ebook and paperback available.

LoveMe Inc. is Matthew Rapaport’s fourth novel, a new story in a new place, with new characters, including the narrator (also Matthew), who is but thirty-eight years old. Ah to be young again… And yet, despite it’s narrative separation from the person of the author, Matthew manages to contrive some marketing for himself and his particular skills.

The story begins ambiguously in the summer/fall of 2027. Matthew, a programmer and statistical analyst, is contacted by a libido-endowed artificial intelligence (AI) and leads him into the employ of Dr. Pamela Parker (who researches psycho-sexual pathologies in women) and her post-grad student Lakshmi Tripathi. When the book opens, Matthew has already seduced and fucked six of Dr. Parker’s patients—I’m drifting into spoiler country here! No sex is portrayed in this part of the narrative, but his “bad boy” behavior comes back to bite him (and not in the good way). 

Together the three of them, along with the AI, discover that certain women can be politically liberalized by orgasms. Between them, and soon more characters come into play, plots are hatched to help sway the national election of 2028, which the Republicans—having, as we know, won in 2024 by disinformation-appeal to an undereducated electorate—plan to fix so that electoral politics in America is ended once and for all.  

There are multiple twists in this plot. AI is at the center of most of them. To tell you anything would commit major spoilers. Here is a minor one: how does Matthew Rapaport market himself? The full answer has two parts, but I’m only going to reveal one. His three novels (Foreign Agent, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, and Cult of Aten) are the last three novels in the training corpus of the libidinous AI! Of the second, I will only say that it is one of the novel’s tragedies.

Mr. Rapaport is surely honing his craft. This is the most complex of his novels thus far, and except for a limited amount of gratuitous sex—90% of all the sex being softcore—the action all connects up sensibly. Moreover, there are no hanging threads needing resolution in epilogs. Mr. Rapaport ends this one properly!