What’s ordinary is that most people have this ability to read those around them. What’s remarkable is Compton’s ability to describe it. His psychological acuity is one of several elements that sets his book apart from cultural artifacts that do no more than evoke nostalgia for received ideas of a mod-era England. In Katherine Mortenhoe this tendency appears briefly only once or twice—especially in a scene involving rich swingers, and even here Compton wisely subverts the hackneyed idea of a ’70s drug orgy. Instead of indulging in the excess, or giving any of it a sensual sheen, there’s a sad lack of intimacy and vagueness that suggests actors going through the motions. Katherine’s mortality, revealed in the midst of what is meant to be hedonistic revelry, isn’t so much a buzz-kill as it is the blossoming of a truth that makes all the rest seem fake.

Physical evidence of her sickness has a similar effect on waylaying bikers in another set piece. Confronted with the real real, the fake real—the constructions by which groups or individuals enact ritual to get what they want, or even to try to forget the simple, basic truth that everybody dies—is torn apart or rendered inert, without agency.

Interiority and intimacy push back against nostalgia by placing the reader always in the present, continuous moment. By grounding the story in the human dimension, these qualities open a space for the themes of the novel that are directly concerned with the superhuman, with media and machine. Roddie, who as we learn early on has been implanted with a camera that records all he sees, is “the man with the TV eyes.” He and his boss Vincent are the 1970s equivalent of today’s most parasitical reality show creators and hosts. Their world is an uncanny mirror of our own, of an age in which everyone really is a camera eye, or at least carries one around in his pocket.

And just like today, the communication is two-way for Roddie. Things come through the screen in our modern life all the time now and infect us. We let the pixels that gather to form images or words affect us mentally and physically—we let that happen, we in many cases wish for it happen. We, in a sense, allow a kind of hypnosis to occur, by which we are then transformed, not always in positive ways. Compton suggests that those closest to the epicenter of the ubiquitous image-making, people like Roddie and Vincent who manufacture it and benefit from it, are those who suffer its greatest deformation: “The state of communion withered. The bones beneath these people’s faces were just as true, and the heroism just as possible, but the people themselves were recently constructed, totally alien. They were NTV [network] people.”

In an age in which privacy isn’t just vanishing but willfully renounced, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe seems not only relevant but proactively current. Katherine’s motivations and reactions and thoughts about her world are familiar but not trite. They include the questions we are only beginning to puzzle out: What should I share? What is my private self apart from my public self? How do I get off the grid? How does what I share affect those around me? Why do I feel like part of me has to die for another part of me to be revealed? And while the book is set before the existence of an ever-flowing social-media stream, it depicts a society in which it’s possible to become media: Roddie is literally transformed into a recording and broadcasting device. The book forecasts a world in which people crave virtual emotion; they have to feel feelings much like vampires have to drink blood.