Fiction


I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger


Lost in the quiet, understated telling of this story, one could almost forget that things have gone terribly wrong. Somehow Enger pulls a rabbit out of a hat, hope and renewal out of loss and tragedy. It’s a marvelous thing to marinate in the languid beauty of the language. And yet almost everything has been lost. It’s hard to put a finger on what that means. The world has changed. Our civilization is … what? In decline? Over? It’s hard to pinpoint because this is the story of a man, not a world. 

The protagonist, Rainy, known intimately by his first person narration, possesses an equipoise both admirable and probably dubious. Could we navigate this as well? But it’s his lyrical telling that carries this immersive tale from peaceful accommodation through terror and ultimately beyond.

It's also about sailing.



The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut


It is hard to approach The Maniac independent of Benjamin Labatut’s earlier remarkable novel, When We Cease to Understand the World. I gushed about that one a few years ago. For anyone who hasn’t read it—and you should—I offer comments on that book again below. There, Labatut told an almost plausible story of twentieth-century science that never was. In brief, he subtly shifts the biographies of pivotal scientists, offering a clever parallel between quantum mechanics and the modern mind: we are increasingly out of touch with how we reach conclusions and form our beliefs.

Both books make use of what reads as a journalistic presentation of challenging historical and scientific material, presented through the lives and minds of leading scientists of the time. But there is something odd and oddly compelling going on. There is no way anyone could really have access to some of the interior mental details. And subtle nuances are altered to suit the author’s purposes, but only rarely. The effect is to present the reader with a twofold task, as reading becomes at once an act of immersion and of interpretation. I find the project beguiling!

The Maniac, then, arrives already comfortably situated in the Labatutian genre. Immediately the lives of physicist Paul Ehrenfest and polymath John von Neumann are understood to be a blend of biography and invention, largely the former and where the author requires, the latter. The prose is dark and beautiful, at times feverish; the approach to truth enigmatic, yet mostly in accord with known history.

The structure of the novel is unconventional, presenting another puzzle for the reader to solve. The first section is a lyrical account of the sad and haunting mental deterioration of Ehrenfest. One of the founders of modern physics, he was a colleague of Einstein, Planck and Bohr, and a beloved mentor to many others. While many of the details are well known, we are somehow in the mind of an omniscient narrator, and even the expert would be nonplussed at many of the particulars.  But there is an emphasis that serves Labatut’s purposes. Ehrenfest was known to respect the necessity of mathematics to do modern physics, but was wary of its increasing abstraction, feeling that meaning came from the physics, not the equations. In The Maniac, Ehrenfest struggles with detachment from the math. He is confused by it. This becomes part of his depression, maybe a cause, maybe even something that pushes him to suicide. That the reader isn’t certain about this telling is characteristic Labatut.

The second section, the bulk of the novel, focuses on polymath John von Neumann. That in itself is of interest, as history recalls his prodigious mind as a force of nature, and there are few great biographies available. His life story is delivered through a collection of fictional recollections by many who knew him. These are carefully crafted, each section written in the characteristic style, such as we know it, of the chronicler. Von Neumann is seen as the preternatural prodigy, the towering mathematical genius, the self-involved husband. But there is always a matter of emphasis. It’s subtle, because it is entirely plausible to regard von Neumann for his rigorous pursuit of the atomic bomb, for the founding of game theory, for his precocious perception of the power and potential of computing. 

And yet Labatut’s von Neumann is a cold, relentless almost inhuman calculator. Consequences and benefits of his work are secondary to his deeper goal. Math provided the framework for quantum mechanics, but in Labatut’s telling, von Neumann was in search of a mathematical understanding of all of reality. That seems possible, but, again, the reader isn’t quite sure.

It is worth considering that MANIAC was an early computer from the 1950s - Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator And Computer - whose designed was based on von Neumann’s ideas. Though in the novel’s title, “The” iconicizes its referent “Maniac” in a way that is deliberately ambiguous.

The final section tells the story of AlphaGo, the Go-playing computer program that defied expectations and defeated the human champion Lee Sedol in 2016. The IBM chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue had defeated the World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in a landmark1997 match. But Go had been regarded as a far greater challenge to computing than chess, in no small part because of its far more numerous potential game-states. Sedol retired from Go a few years later, highlighting the human and emotional fallout. The narrative follows the documentary AlphaGo directed by Greg Kohs in many respects. But the omniscient narrator of unknowable details and mental states feels intentionally both impossible and plausible in an otherwise apparently journalistic reporting.

While lucid on its own, the finale needs no explicit connector. Relentless mathematical logic destroyed Ehrenfest. Von Neumann, designer of the most destructive weapons, embraced it to the limits of what is human. AlphaGo is the descendent of von Neumann, a triumphant computing intelligence. Von Neumann envisioned the future, and that future is now. We are left to our own evaluation of this arc. 

This novel demands much of the reader. It addresses vital science—beautiful, though with disturbing consequences—whose effects are only now playing out, some seventy years after von Neumann’s death. Labatut has served up a fascinating treatment. Who is the ideal candidate for this book? Anyone who loved his earlier novel will find this one dessert: rich and strangely irresistible, despite the dark shadows it casts. Aficionados of twentieth-century science will have much to savor and ponder. And it is damn good writing.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Wow. Many books are great, some are even works of genius. But I don’t remember ever before feeling that a book is unique in its essence, in its very construction. This one is. To paraphrase Philip Pullman’s cover blurb, it feels like Labatut has invented a new genre. This work cleverly and almost diabolically blends fact and interpretation, fiction and nonfiction, in a way that is delightful and unsettling. There is a frisson of discomfort to read a reliable account of people well known to you, mostly famous and important scientists, to trust an author’s impeccable research, only to have the hairs on the back of your neck rise as you realize that the narrative has shifted into an account that didn’t take place. Or only might have taken place, so that you find yourself in the realm of neither fact nor fiction. You have been subtly taken in by a shrewd and unreliable narrator, one who is working to his own mysterious purposes.

What makes this book the richer, is that while no knowledge of the characters is required, the more you know about them, the deeper the mysteries. I have spent much time with many of the principals, as the intellectual revolution of 20th century physics has always fascinated me. Einstein of course, though he is mostly a silent partner here. Haber, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohr: these are more than heroes to me. They are the authors of one of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of humankind: the quantum revolution and quantum mechanics. A beautiful theory which yields correct results without fail. And which many would describe as inscrutable and incapable of being fully understood outside of the math.

So to put Labatut’s methods under the microscope, in a way that will spoil nothing, Fritz Haber invented the chemical warfare that introduced a heinous new method of killing during WWI. Days after its first use, his wife Clara died by suicide. One possibility historians have entertained is that the motive was her revulsion at what her husband had created. But there was no note, and the matter remains unresolved. In Labatut’s telling, Clara accuses Haber of perverting science and killing on a massive scale, and she shoots herself in the chest. Apart from the false conviction of the narrator, Labatut here has done something fascinating. He has taken one possibility, and by observing it, reified it. In this version, we observe their argument, and one of many possibilities is made concrete: we now have a result. In a parallel to quantum physics, a result remains in a state of possibility until observed, at which time it assumes definite characteristics. Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive until the box is opened. Clara kills herself because of Haber. Brilliant, and yet the reader must work to see the parallel.

The title: When We Cease to Understand the World. What are we to make of this? Clearly quantum mechanics is the manifest topic here. Perhaps the most entrenched, unassailable theory in science, and yet not understood in human terms. But Labatut has something more in mind. Like elementary particles, the very ceasing to understand itself has a host of possible manifestations. We know things but are ignorant of their ultimate consequences. We derive formulae but can’t follow our logic in doing so. We don’t understand our own cognitive processes in reaching conclusions. Some claim to understand things that no one else can follow, in a triumph of subjectivity. The consequences are personal and painful, not only theoretical and philosophical. Something has been lost, something that Labatut sketches out subtly through compelling vignettes. We are disconnected from ourselves, forsaking our human way of perceiving ourselves and our environment. 

Labatut has written a beautiful book. His research is impeccable. There is a longing here for a time when the world was more comprehensible. Where is the acknowledgment of our changed relationship to what and how we understand? How effectively and elegantly he expresses his lament! And I feel astonished at his creation of a form in which to do so. Almost paralleling the process of the creators of quantum theory…..this is a work of art, and an achievement to be reckoned with.


     
                               Nonfiction




The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand


I am happy to report that the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History has aged well. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club remains a crackling insight into a formative era in American intellectual history.

The Civil War marked a vivid transition in the social and political arrangements in the United States. But what is less well recalled is the way the trauma of America’s most bloody war opened up a formative new era in American thought. From the vantage point of more than  a hundred years, that story lies in some obscurity.

The Metaphysical Club brings this adventure to life through the lives and thinking of four individuals who came together just after the war. For a brief moment, early in their lives, they met regularly in Cambridge Mass to exchange views. As they elaborated their ideas in the subsequent decades, those formative interactions continued to resonate.

Three of these figures are still well known to many: the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, educationalist and philosopher John Dewey, and psychologist William James. The fourth, something of an intellectual inspiration to the three, was Charles Sanders Pierce. His name was a dim shadow to me, but he was an influential logician and philosopher ejected from the academy after the scurrilous revelation of cohabitation before a divorce was finalized . All four had fathers who were part of the era of American ideas swept away by the war. Including Pierce, whose Harvard mathematician father Benjamin was one of the first American scientists whose work was recognized internationally for its own merits.

The various threads of the story are intricate, and Menand transits the terrain with a sure and approachable hand. First the backdrop: objections to the empiricism of John Locke and his cohort, who believed all knowledge and meaning derive from experience; the probabilistic statistical mechanics ushered in by the work of LaPlace, Bolzmann and Maxwell, transplanted into the realm of philosophy; the revolutionary ideas of Darwin, and their deployment, for better or worse, into notions about the social world. 

The protagonists of this telling elaborate a new set of ideas about ideas. Ideas matter in how they affect action in the world, not primarily as a way of describing ultimate reality. Ideas are important for their real world implications, for how they guide behavior. The quintessentially American philosophy of pragmatism was initiated by James and extended by Dewey. Their consequentialist attitude argues that ideas are provisional, and shift over time depending on what is needed and useful. Even in legal reasoning, Holmes eschews legal formalism, and regards rulings as emerging not from theory, but from what judges already believe.

In order to tell this story, Menand needs to recreate the historical texture of the post Civil War period. We are present in the early days of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago. And we glimpse the career of social worker and reformer Jane Addams and Hull House, her mission for poor urban women. Addams’ clarity of purpose deeply influenced the ideas of pragmatist John Dewey. In the meantime, I had only a passing knowledge of nineteenth century anatomist and taxonomist Louis Agassiz, whose name appears prominently on the facade of the American Museum of Natural History. Only to learn herein of his deep involvement in scientific racism. During this period, university professors first win the opportunity to espouse opinions even when they differ from those of institutional presidents and trustees - a phenomenon only too jarring and immediate in the present moment. And who knew that one of the anti-German measures implemented during WWI was a ban on the music of Beethoven in Pittsburgh?

Menand has taken a complex chunk of US intellectual history, and traced out its roots and growth with clarity. I had the satisfying experience of connecting and illuminating threads from my early philosophy reading in a way that felt long overdue. This American set of ideas responded to the British empiricists and to Kant, and served as a bridge to Twentieth century thinkers like Quine and Rorty. All this was lost on me as university student decades ago. The Metaphysical Club had me asking myself why that was. I think I know the answer: the material is intricate; a lucid communicator, invaluable.

As influential as these ideas were at the time, they sat in relative eclipse for some half century  or more after their time. Menand suggests a role for the Cold War in this: “The notion that the values of the free society for which the Cold War was waged were contingent, relative, fallible constructions, good for some purposes and not for others, was not a notion compatible with the moral imperatives of the age.” Whether the ideas that emerged from this small group of the nineteenth-century has relevance in the twenty-first is not yet clear. But this book reads like the uncovering of mysteries hiding in plain sight. We are fortunate to have a first-rate intellectual detective to lift the veil.




On Giving Up by Adam Phillips


What is On Giving Up about? Adam Phillips’s work is many things - illuminating, provocative, layered, literary - but to summarize him, that’s a challenge. There is a quality to Phillips’ writing in which whatever one decides it’s about, it might well be about its opposite. His books flow in precise literary sentences that rarely resolve into one clear idea. Which is entirely the point. When Phillips considers a proposition, he notices how it fails, how it is inadequate, how — unstated and maybe unnoticed — its counterpoint may be just as relevant. As Phillips writes, “What are we omitting, and why?” A fair thing to ask, but you see how that complicates the What is it about? question.

I’ll venture a possibility. We might admire giving something up - alcohol, smoking, a bad relationship - in the belief that the sacrifice is good for us. But we rarely admire simply giving up. We aspire to hope, but not to despair. For Phillips, the book is about “… the essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” 

In Phillips’ account of giving up, the very idea of giving something up coexists meaningfully with the idea of giving up. Giving something up is believing in one’s life and its capacity for change. But within that conviction may lie many assumptions, including the belief that life is always worth living. As Phillips writes, “So at one end of this imaginary spectrum there is giving up as a kind of enlightening disillusionment, which brings with it the question, and the possibility, of a future; at the other there is the terminal disillusionment that leads to suicide.” 

I struggle with Phillips as I read him. I accuse him of linguistic trickery, of the deliberate misuse of language. But I am not certain he’s wrong, maybe only viscerally disturbing. Is the giving up of drinking really on a continuum with the giving up on life? He anticipates the objection that I never fully relinquish. He argues that I have not fully appreciated the assumptions and subtleties that giving up - and suicide -carry. He says it better than I could, and in his own characteristic style:

“[I}t is never clear to us whether suicide is what we call a choice, or the abrogation of choice – the choice, among other other things, to give up choosing. We are left, wondering what, if anything, could predispose someone to suicide. What could it be about a life, or supposedly about life itself, that could make this decision unequivocal? And why, by the same token, might someone need to feel that suicide was not in their repertoire?

The last is a good question. It is one of Phillips’ talents to ask questions, to suggest complexities not fully apprehended, to wonder. And objections land as if a blow upon a ghost. He wasn’t really there, he was only dealing in possibilities. Maybe I am right, and Phillips provocatively elusive. Even deliberately slippery, with an agenda to show me the limits of my viewpoint. I rail, I disagree, I protest, and I come away surer that I see only part of the picture.

You may wonder from all this fuss why I put On Giving Up on the list. I may not sound like I was a huge fan of this book . But this is a Favorite Reads list, not a recommended reads. He can be exasperating, but I do think his style and approach are worth at least one look -




Saladin in his Time by PH Newby

Readable and engaging account of this influential figure and his times. Especially interesting in its sympathetic portrayal of the non-European point of view. Saladin is seen to possess many of the traits his Christian Crusader opponents would honor: Compassion, wisdom, fairness, honest bargaining.