Early on in Cloudthief, one character reads “a creased old heist novel about the holdup of an armored car in Denver.” That the novel in question is Elliott Chaze’s unimprovably titled Black Wings Has My Angel (1953) becomes increasingly clear from what follows.¹

In Chaze’s book, the narrator, Tim (not his real name), and the femme fatale Virginia (not hers either) drive across the United States to commit a carefully planned crime. Along the way she dreams of bathing in dollar bills, he hides his money from her, and they buy a fake wedding ring. Tim alternates between suspicion of Virginia and something that, to his embarrassment, might be love. But even at their closest, they never really trust each other, and at one point he finds her in a bar picking up a black-haired stranger. Nevertheless they pull off their daring heist (is there any other kind?) and head to New Orleans—their apparent success undermined only later by the revelation that Tim is narrating from a prison cell.

All of this happens in Cloudthief too. Yet whereas Black Wings is unfailingly taut, Nathaniel Rich’s fourth novel—his first in eight years—is a far baggier affair, with the Chaze-derived heist just one of its components and indeed just one of its heists. There’s also much shifting of narrative styles and the inclusion of many of Rich’s abiding themes and anxieties.

In those eight years, Rich has published two works of nonfiction about climate change. Losing Earth (2019) was a piercing history of the wasted decade between 1979, when the science was already established, and 1989, when the US blocked an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Through most of the book Rich stayed true to his pledge that, even when covering global warming in nonfiction, he’d try to “stay away from any kind of activist impulse.” Toward the end, though, he could hold it together no longer and went full-blown Old Testament prophet, warning of “the vengeance to come.”

Second Nature (2021) was a looser collection of essays on the subject, in which Rich largely kept his promise to acknowledge awkward complexities. Occasionally, however, he wasn’t above a spot of activist hyperbole. At one point, for example, he writes of “the threat to human civilization…advancing more rapidly than at any time in the last sixty-five million years”—which, by my reckoning, is approximately 64.99 million more years than human civilization has been around.

But in his fiction Rich has been as good as his word—or rather his two interconnected words. On the one hand, “if you’re reading a realistic novel set in the present day that has no awareness of [climate change]…it feels dishonest. It’d be like reading a novel written in 1945 in Europe that doesn’t mention the war.” On the other, while “climate activism needs better propaganda, I don’t think the novelist is the propagandist they are looking for. Once a novel starts writing to advance some kind of…political doctrine, the work suffers.”

In fact only two of Rich’s novels so far (including this one) qualify for this double demand. As a brilliantly achieved, if maybe overstuffed, exercise in literary tricksiness, his debut, The Mayor’s Tongue (2008), could never be mistaken for a realistic novel. His third, the noirish and hugely entertaining King Zeno (2018)—which, for the record, contains a femme fatale named Virginia—is set not in the present day but in the late 1910s in New Orleans, although it does still manage to smuggle in some climate-related material with the construction of the Industrial Canal, a significant factor in the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.²

But in Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Rich showed how well a novel can combine the awareness of climate change and a reluctance to propagandize. Although written before Hurricane Sandy hit, the novel was published the year after, lending it an unplanned topicality, since it features a hurricane that floods New York—albeit far more catastrophically. Yet it has much satirical fun at the expense of the catastrophists who predicted a storm—in particular the main character, Mitchell Zukor. Even when he was a student, “the way other people fantasize about surprise inheritances, first-glance love, and endless white empyreal pastures, Mitchell dreamed of an erupting supervolcano that would bury North America under a foot of hot ash.” He also has a dread of microwaves and cell phones.

And once he becomes a corporate futurologist, it’s ever more apparent that Mitchell’s fear of apocalypse coexists with a kind of yearning for it—and not only so that he’ll be proved right. Researching the various disasters that could befall the world, he finds the information “thrilling” and “delicious,” and “doomsday prophecy” through the ages “tremendous fun.” None of which means that he isn’t also genuinely frightened—or, as the drowned city soon demonstrates, that he shouldn’t be. After all, “paranoia has its advantages.”

And now there’s Cloudthief, in which the unnamed narrator (“Tim” comes later) is an ecojournalist engaged in a comprehensive reckoning with his trade. The novel opens in 2014, with him already jaded by constantly writing about

the global catastrophe…. When there was a fire, a flood, a toxic airborne event, my phone dinged…. I had learned that, so long as you had a good story, you could always find an environmental angle. For there was nothing, anywhere, immune to the Collapse. Not even, I suspected, the self-storage industry.

The reason for that puzzling final reference is that his friend Ces, “an inveterate conniver and hustler,” has discovered what little security mini storage facilities have. Since the guards at certain locations are around only during the day, all you need is to rent a space yourself and invest in some rudimentary lock-picking equipment; then you can spend your nights breaking into other units. At first the narrator thinks Ces told him this as the basis for a story in the Magazine,to which he’s a regular contributor, and he sets to work on the environmental angle: “How much energy, for instance, did those billions of square feet of air-conditioned storage space occupy?… How many species would go extinct because of our inability to throw out our crap? That might get me a couple thousand words.” As it turns out, though, Ces has theft in mind, and despite the narrator’s “severe moral discomfort”—overcome with perhaps plot-accelerating ease—the two are soon helping themselves to whatever they can find in a facility on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Ces then reveals another surprising discovery: one of the storage units is occupied. After they’ve waited for hours outside it—where Ces’s choice of reading material alerts us to the influence of Chaze—a beautiful woman emerges, introducing herself as Virginia. For a while the narrator pretends that his interest in her is purely journalistic; he sees her as the subject of a piece about the difficulty of vanishing from society in the Internet age—something she has tried to do with impressive thoroughness, by creating so many false identities that, he admits, “to this day I don’t know Virginia’s birth name.” But after a few evenings together, the relationship moves past the faux-journalistic and they have sex, during which the narrator is struck by her “apparent contradiction between emotional indifference and physical abandon”—what he later calls her “professionalism, even.”³

Virginia is a woman of many obsessions, including, appropriately enough, 1950s American crime novels. Her biggest, however, is “the tech industry’s shadow autocracy”:

“G—alone,” she said, “is more powerful than any sovereign nation. G—is our president. M—is our NSA. T—is our Congress. F—is our national press. A—is our post office, food delivery system, and all our retail industries combined.”

“Such statements,” the narrator admiringly adds, “fell well outside of conventional wisdom…in the fall of 2014.” As for those rather coy dashes, his explanation is that he doesn’t “want unnecessarily to increase the odds, already high, that this manuscript will be suppressed.” (Personally, I suspect that Big Tech might be able to see through his cunning ruse, especially when it comes to G—: “You could probably guess it. I’ll put it this way: you could find its name in a search.”)

This first section of the book does succeed in making mini storage feel uncanny, but apart from getting the narrator and Virginia together, it doesn’t fully earn its fifty pages. It might have been placed in mini storage itself—and despite the attempts to integrate this section by comparing as many things as possible to mini storage from here on,⁴ the novel takes off properly only once the pair is caught by a guard, who expels them into the outside world.

And there, it transpires, Virginia has a long-conceived plan. Again in advance of most people, she knows that data centers “were the nerve ganglia of our society. They were Fort Knox, Fort Meade, Langley, Area 51, the Library of Congress, and IRS headquarters combined.” In a 2015 review of Saul Bellow’s nonfiction in these pages, Rich quoted Bellow: “For a very long time the world found the wonderful in tales and poems, in painting and in musical performances. Now the wonderful is found in miraculous technology.”⁵ And in Cloudthief, even though data centers are the book’s bad guys, their sheer scale prompts an unmistakable sense of wonder: “G—housed the data of more than two million businesses—real estate brokerages, Hollywood studios, software firms, oil and gas giants. G—stored the data of the army, the navy, the US Postal Service.”

Virginia has researched the security of these places as well and found that its laxity almost rivals that of mini storage. Suddenly something of a criminal mastermind, she assembles burner phones, wigs, and costumes and renames the narrator Tim, and the two head off to the real-life G—data center in Pryor, Oklahoma, to steal some secret data. For his part, Tim (let’s stick with that from now on) secures an advance of $7,340 from the remarkably patient Magazine by pretending that he’s going to write a long article on data centers, where “cash-strapped companies, like cash-strapped citizens, reduced their rents and sent their cumbersome possessions to”—you guessed it—“mini storage.” After all, returning to his usual brief, “these anonymous, quasi-secret information treasuries released monstrous quantities of greenhouse gases.”

Not that Tim—or for that matter Rich—has abandoned his journalistic ways completely. We’re given a well-informed account of how these enormous warehouses got the euphemistic name “the Cloud,” and another of why they’re necessary: “Our laptops and mobile devices were so light because they consisted of little more than a screen, microphone, and antenna. The wonders they produced were merely borrowed, at approximately one thousand megabits per second.” And as the pair drives to Oklahoma, Tim’s reckoning with his professional life continues.

At his gloomiest he decides that “my articles had changed nothing about the world, apart from helping a few of my subjects—the do-gooders, the crusaders, the whistleblowers—get jobs and speaking gigs.” He also declares that “my old self, the crusading principled journalist…was dead.” Yet this declaration is clearly wishful thinking—because he also suffers from a sort of climate change Tourette’s syndrome, remarking on its effects everywhere they go. During one of his moments of fondness for Virginia—and possibly of Rich’s for self-satire—Tim dreams of a future life together and imagines “shared bookshelves. Movies on the couch. A pantry stocked for the apocalypse.”

Eventually they reach the Pryor facility, where the security proves as hopeless as Virginia had hoped. There are only three guards, and they aren’t even G—employees; they work, at minimum wage, for a private security firm named L9X.

Tim’s own plan is to get a job with L9X. Virginia, though, speeds things up by going to a bar, picking up a G—employee with dyed black hair, sleeping with him, stealing his ID pass, and probably (although this isn’t entirely clear) killing him. Her lurch into full-on noir femme fatale is also accompanied by that of Tim into full-on noir narrator. When he spots her mid pickup, he orders a shot of bourbon and thinks:

I could make it to the bar in ten paces. Along the way, on the end of the bar, I’d pass a nearly empty beer bottle. Without breaking stride I could grab it by the neck and smash it into Black Dye’s face before he cottoned my approach. I chewed a french fry and imagined the crunch of orbital bone.⁶

Tim’s temporary metamorphosis into Chaze-like tough guy comes across as a fun jeu d’esprit, but it’s another aspect of the book that doesn’t feel properly integrated. For most of this section, the longest of the three in the novel, Cloudthief triumphantly achieves its aim of combining contemporary thriller and journalistic thought provoker. Nonetheless there are moments—and this is the most conspicuous of them—when it reads like a slightly dutiful homage to Black Wings, as if Rich were nodding respectfully toward Chaze’s MO rather than sticking with his own. Happily, none of that takes away from the excitement once Rich returns to business as usual—and Tim, back to his old self, comes to understand that Viriginia seduced Black Dye for the sake of the heist and uses the stolen ID to enter the facility.

When he’s inside, his movements are directed through an earpiece by Virginia, who is in the parking lot and knows the layout from a blueprint she studied in Pryor’s city hall. Many a close shave later he emerges with four servers, each storing about sixteen terabytes of data, compared with the paltry ten of the entire Library of Congress. After an equally exciting escape from Oklahoma, the pair makes it to Tim’s hometown of New Orleans (where Rich has lived since 2010). There they go their separate ways, with two servers apiece—although not before Virginia has inscribed a farewell message in a book.

In the third section, the novel grows even baggier. Throughout, Tim has been in touch with his sister, Zoe, who has Usher syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes degeneration of sight and hearing. Now he visits her in their childhood home in the suburb of Kenner, where he proves yet again that he still hasn’t kicked the climate anxiety habit: “I had never trusted Kenner tap water and held it partially responsible for Zoe’s syndrome…. Then again, we lived in a part of southern Louisiana the EPA had deemed a ‘sacrifice zone’; tap water was hardly our only exposure.”

Returning to New York, Tim is greeted by two more classic noir tropes. His apartment has been trashed by someone who was evidently looking for something, and a nosy neighbor (elderly, female, indignant at the idea that she snoops) is on hand to confirm the sighting of a sinister-looking stranger. Understandably Tim moves out and goes to stay with Ces, taking his servers with him. Yet for all Ces’s IT expertise, he can’t figure out how to get into them. Only then does Tim look at Virginia’s inscription in the book and find that she’d written down Black Dye’s username and password. But now comes the tricky part: What happens next? This is an uncertainty Rich initially appears to share.

For Tim the best bet would be to find among all those terabytes a story for the Magazine, whose editors, with that eerie patience of theirs, don’t appear to be hassling him for his piece on data centers. To this end, he pitches the “sworn testimonies by a handful of intelligence agents with high-level security clearances, that the US government held, at an air force base in New Mexico, an inventory of recovered extraterrestrial spaceships and the corpses of their pilots”—which Tim inevitably glosses as “an alien mini storage.”⁷ But as he can’t provide the required proof without revealing his stolen sources, this plan must be abandoned. He goes through the files he’s gathered from the two servers, “making sure I hadn’t forgotten some other story, when I realized I had.”

The story he’s got in mind concerns work being done on gene editing in utero to alter DNA associated with developmental disorders—including Usher syndrome. And by this point it’s not merely of theoretical interest. A few pages earlier, Virginia returned to tell him she’s pregnant and wants to keep the baby. “I won’t deny you the chance to meet the child,” she says. “But the child will not be yours. Not legally or emotionally.” It will, though, be his biologically—which means it could inherit Usher. A few pages after that, visiting Virginia back in her mini storage hideout, Tim learns that the fetus has already tested positive.

And so, for the third time, what starts as a possible journalistic assignment turns into an opportunity for crime. Tim and Ces will break into a Boston lab and make off with some Usher-curing DNA. If this sounds far-fetched, that’s because it is. Unlike the Pryor heist, this one is conducted with almost no advance planning on Tim’s part. The two men will simply enter the lab by night and hope for the best.

While waiting for darkness to fall, Tim reads Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock (1970), another thriller, but this one essentially—and not coincidentally—a comic romp. Sure enough, that’s what Cloudthief now becomes, as Rich (successfully) plays the incompetence of the plan for laughs. Once inside the lab, Ces asks the not insignificant question, “So what do you want to do?” “We’re going to steal some fucking DNA is what we’re going to do,” says Tim. “Hell yeah,” says Ces. “Now, how do we do that?”

The answer, it turns out, is by opening some freezers containing cigar boxes with droppers in them (“Nothing said Cure for Usher Syndrome,” Tim notes ruefully), grabbing as many as they can, stuffing them in cooler bags, and making a run for it. Unfortunately, they’re spotted by a technician named Rudey, who shows up near dawn. They bundle him into his car and drive back to New York, with “two dozen cooler bags of melting biohazard in the trunk.”

The knockabout fun continues with what Tim admits is the “hack B-movie dialogue” they exchange en route. (“We could do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.” “Play it cool and everything will be okay.”) It continues further when they proudly take their booty to Viriginia so it can be injected into her womb. Oddly, she’s not as grateful as they expected. Even though Rudey says they have the right bacterial enzyme needed for the potential treatment of Usher in utero, and he may know how to inject it, she turns down their offer with some firmness. “‘This guy gives injections all day,’ I said. ‘To mice,’ said Virginia…. ‘You’re all going to leave. And take those—those bags of bacteria—with you.’”

But as the three men sheepishly follow her instructions, the comedy abruptly stops when they’re ambushed by the same guard who chased Virginia and Tim out of the storage facility a few months before and who now stabs him in the neck. When next we hear from Tim, he’s been in prison for twenty years, after being “tried in a secret tribunal without public witness,” presumably at the behest of Big Tech. Yet even here, his conflicting reflections on his old job persist. Looking determinedly on the bright side, he decides:

In one way my criminal adventurism achieved its goal. My prison sentence marked, with finality, the end of my writing career: the end of my end-of-the-world journalism. This came as a relief…. No longer would I have to feel responsible for failing to impede our civilizational demise.

At the same time,

the Collapse is not entirely hidden from us…. The dining hall no longer serves berries or melon, our legally guaranteed daily sandbox access is curtailed by hazardous heat index readings and air quality alerts, and the acceptable indoor temperature range has been extended by two degrees in either direction.

Then again, “my obsession with the Collapse has been replaced by something much larger than…the fall of civilization. It has been replaced by you.”At this point we’ve long been alerted to who this “you” is. Back on page 30, Tim had said, “You’ve seen photographs from the period, I imagine,” and that this wasn’t just him being chatty with the reader became clear not long afterward, when he apologized for writing “about the first time I had sex with your mother.” Such direct addresses have remained distinctly intermittent until now, when the novel concludes by becoming a straightforward, even sentimental letter from Tim to his son, explaining himself and seeking forgiveness. Fathers and sons are another of Rich’s long-standing themes. Yet the sudden suggestion that this was at the heart of Cloudthief all along feels like a stretch. It seems just another element—and a fairly minor one at that—jostling beside all the others.

Needless to say, there’s nothing wrong with an episodic novel, not least when so many of the episodes are as good as they are here. The trouble is that you’re never sure Rich intended Cloudthief to be one. Anybody who reads it will find plenty to enjoy, to smile at, to be thrilled by, and to chew on—which you might easily (and rightly) argue is enough for any novel to supply. Even so, the sense persists that Rich had wanted to wrestle it into a more coherent whole, and he didn’t quite manage to.