At the very moment banks are striving to rebrand themselves as tech firms, internet giants have become the new banks, morphing from talent magnets to pariahs. Even their employees are in revolt.
These vignettes shift from the present-Eva living as a social pariah, a husk of her former self-to the past, and are jumbled with the non-chronology of memory.
The Trump administration has escalated pressure on North Korea by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation.
Mr Hammond has been (successfully) trying to restore fiscal probity to the Ministry of Defence, long a pariah in Whitehall for its casual approach to the military equipment budget.
And internationally, an Egyptian bombing campaign carried out on Ethiopian soil would be almost inevitably interpreted as a major act of aggression and Egypt would stand to be cast as a war-mongering pariah state.