A doubter's almanac

Review by New York Times Review

IT'S HARD TO create a great literary monster. The character's behavior has to evoke repulsion in the readers, meanwhile engaging their sympathy for the suffering soul beneath. In Ethan Canin's new novel, "A Doubter's Almanac," the mathematician Milo Andret is certainly despicable enough. With relish and malice, he manipulates the lives of his family members. He humiliates his wife, curses his daughter and bedevils his son. He uses women. He demeans his colleagues. He is a raging, nasty drunk. Twice, he nearly commits murder. In the face of all this, can Canin also portray him as a tragic figure worthy of pity? The novel's success hinges upon the answer. Andret's mathematical genius is established early, when he proves the famously difficult (and fictional) Malosz conjecture. For this, he wins the highest mathematics prize and becomes a distinguished professor at Princeton. He also reveals his appalling personality, as when he walks into a department meeting and sees a "startlingly uniform wall of bulbous Semitic features." The premise is that Andret's great talent - a "curse" he inherited - privileges his noxious behavior, supposedly inherited as well. He acts without "shame or apology," being "capable of neither." Canin writes beautifully about Andret's encounters with the great difficulties of mathematics. At the same time, he shows how this work is marbled with adolescent competitiveness and egotism. To solve a certain conjecture in the 1970s, racing against a 14-year-old opponent, Andret purloins a personal computer (which, anachronistically, runs the C++ language). Seeking solace after a failure, he turns to his stable of women. A heaving, hot breath is involved. Interspersed with scenes of Andret's struggles are those of his sleeping with the four women among whom he rotates. Andret, correctly, calls himself a cad. The most egregious example concerns his secretary, Helena, whom he beds between other trysts. Andret brings her to the funeral of his first mentor, where he will see the one unattainable object of his desire, his enigmatic ex-lover Cle (short for Cleopatra). Afterward, heading to dinner with Cle and her husband, Andret coaches Helena to generally keep her mouth shut, to pretend she is not his secretary and not his girlfriend. At the table, even Andret can see the "humiliation confounding her." Bad enough. After dinner, Andret wants to sleep with Helena and pounds on her hotel-room door. She refuses because he's dead drunk. But then, oh yes, she relents and pulls him into her room. At this juncture of "no" meaning "yes" (not the only such in these pages), I took a moment to toss the book across the room. The second part of the novel is narrated by Andret's son, Hans. Andret, banished from Princeton, has been teaching in one less distinguished college after another. Soon we learn the startling fact that Helena, the formerly humiliated secretary, has become Andret's wife and Hans's mother (and is still enduring humiliations). Hans tells us that Andret, to the end, retained "every ounce of his logical brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his nearautistic introversion and his world-class self-involvement." He then describes his childhood, and the central tension here is the battle between Andret and Hans: Andret's insistence that Hans has inherited the mathematical gift and Hans's desire to flee the curse. The family lives in a shoddy cabin by a muddy lake. Andret works in an outbuilding, believing he has "one thing left" in him, mathematically speaking. Here Canin's descriptions of nature are exquisite, as they are throughout. When Hans looks at insects on leaves, for instance, he sees that "entire civilizations had developed on the bottoms." Wonderful metaphors abound: "Life is cleaning a rented house." Yet Andret's malevolence predominates. In one harrowing scene, a drunken Andret seems on the verge of throwing his young daughter, Paulie, into a ravine. Then he slaps Helena to the ground. The narrative moves in repetitions of events, each pass revealing further details. However, the circular nature of the storytelling creates a problem. Andret studies a branch of mathematics called topology, and the book's architecture mimics ... topology. The story moves not in flash-forwards or flashbacks but in flash-arounds, time as a Möbius strip: a twisted shape with a single surface and a path without exit, which circles endlessly. This leads to narrative and thematic cycles: Mathematical genius is inherited through three generations. Mothers surrender their best selves for the sake of their families. Fathers are math teachers. Addictions go from father to son. A wooden chain that Andret carved in one continuous piece, without breaks between links - a topological structure - becomes a key symbol in the story. This intellectually imposed structure overwhelms the emotional undercurrent of the novel, the more dramatic, affective, one-way arrow of bodily time: Andret's aging beyond the young years when great mathematics generally is done, his slow path from cirrhosis to death. Even his dying comes in cycles: a near-death (at one point Andret's doctor seems to be digging his grave!), a remarkable recovery, another near-death, etc. In a climactic scene hinted at for hundreds of pages, we witness the full blast of Andret's brutality. Andret, Helena, Hans and Paulie are at the dinner table. Andret suddenly explodes. He says Hans has wasted his entire life. Helena was "never smart enough"; she is a "five-dollar whore." Shockingly, he calls his daughter a particularly vile expletive. Finally Andret jumps from the table, grabs a crowbar, swings at Helena, nearly kills her, then falls backward onto the floor. In the most inexplicable moment in the book, Helena drops to the floor and blankets Andret as if he were a child, soothing him, murmuring "I love you, I love you," although we know that is not exactly true. Why is anyone licensing Andret's verbal and physical brutality? (Frankenstein's unhappy creature does not attack the blind man who takes him in.) An attentive reader would already know there is a problem in Andret's great mathematical proof, but should anyone forgive violence as a response to great disappointment? The answers can come only through the character of Helena. Her inner life is the key to what could be the novel's complex emotional depths and Canin's creation of a great monster. Yet he portrays her as being just a hairbreadth short of a masochist. As Andret nears what seems a final death, I believe Canin meant to show the constrained circles breaking open. With embarrassingly obvious symbolism, Paulie knocks into the carved wooden chain and chips it. The book's last 50-odd pages dissolve into a Lifetime movie. Andret's former victims are there to care for him: Helena, whom Andret had abandoned; Paulie, who had cut off communications; Hans, still internally battling his mathematical fate. And suddenly: Re-enter Cleopatra, the unattained object of Andret's desire. In the soapiest scene, the dying Andret has fallen asleep on the sofa. Helena is kneeling on the floor alongside him. Cle, goddess ex machina, crowns Helena as Andret's one true love - Andret told her so, she says. The devastated Helena cries, Why did Andret confide in Cle but not in her? Why did Andret show the hallowed wooden chain to Cle but not to her? Cle goes to Helena and takes her hands. She helps her rise up from her knees. Then Cle holds on to Helena's hands and kisses them. And - lo! - Andret lives still. Hans calls it his "final recovery," and by now I hoped it was. The book ends like a Kodachrome travelogue: The family travelers are briefly untroubled. Hans remembers being happy. A fiery sun sets in the west.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In his thoroughly absorbing new novel, Canin (America, America, 2008) gives readers a nuanced, heartbreaking portrait of a tortured mathematician, throwing in a lucid, riveting explication of algebraic topology for good measure. Milo Andret spends a lonely childhood in the woods of northern Michigan, which serve to calm his racing thoughts. Upon acceptance to Berkeley, he feels the pressure to produce great work and is made aware of his awkwardness in social interactions. It's there that he first begins to drink and to lash out at his fellow students, feeling both a burning ambition and an overwhelming jealousy. When he discovers the proof to a longstanding problem, he becomes a superstar and is hired by Princeton, but his drinking and his arrogance sabotage his career, leaving him disillusioned. The second half of the book, narrated by his son, Hans, who is also a brilliant mathematician plagued by addiction, details the great cost of Milo's genius to his family but also points the way out for Hans, who finds solace in his supportive family and a means to avoid his father's fate. Canin, in translucent prose, elucidates the way a mathematician sees the world and humanity's own insignificance within it. A harrowing, poignant read about the blessing and curse of genius. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Canin, the New York Times best-selling author who has achieved both critical and commercial success, is sure to garner plenty of attention for this epic novel, which will be backed up by national promotion and an author tour.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The mysteries of higher mathematics and the even deeper mysteries of the human heart are the unlikely themes of Canin's (America America) novel. With stunning assurance and elegant, resonant prose, Canin follows the life of Milo Andret, who is both blessed and afflicted with mathematical genius. Milo's aspirations take him from a lonely boyhood in northern Michigan to Berkeley, Princeton, the hinterlands of Ohio, and, finally, to a defeated return to the rural Midwest. Essentially asocial and so unworldly that he didn't taste alcohol until graduate school, Milo is gradually embittered by his failures at love and his jealous relationships with his colleagues. Meanwhile, he pursues the exquisitely arduous process of constructing complex mathematical theorems in his mind. When, at age 32, Milo proves one of the greatest theorems in the history of mathematics, he becomes a scientific superstar. But by then he is an alcoholic, and he destroys his career in acts of reckless abandon. Fascinating in its character portrayal and psychological insights, the novel becomes even more mesmerizing in its second half, which is narrated by Milo's son, Hans (the first half features close third-person narration on Milo). Hans also has a brilliant mathematical mind but is scarred by his father's cantankerous, often vicious behavior and poisonous disillusionment with ambition and higher knowledge. Hans's exorbitantly lucrative career as a high-frequency futures trader founders when he becomes addicted to drugs, but his redemption comes through marital and familial love. Though the book is occasionally repetitive, Canin's accomplishments are many, not least of which is his ability to lucidly explain the field of algebraic topology. But it is his superb storytelling that makes this novel a tremendous literary achievement. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Taking place over decades, this latest novel from Canin (America America), an accomplished author and professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a compelling family saga that follows troubled math genius Milo -Andret from birth to death. Milo goes from inauspicious beginnings in rural Michigan to solving a decades-old mathematical problem and teaching at Princeton. We are with him when he impresses his first teacher and takes his first drink. He becomes his own worst enemy, cutting short a promising career because of his alcoholism and womanizing. The second half of the novel is told by his son, who inherits many of the same skills and problems. In addition to the involving narrative, the novel is a subtle meditation on creativity, happiness, and fate, and Canin's ability to explain complex mathematics is nothing short of miraculous. VERDICT A moving, spiritual journey, this poetic novel clocks in at well over 500 pages but begs to be read in one sitting. It will delight literary fiction readers of all stripes with its diverse themes, from coming of age to love, grief, and addiction. But a warning; it's tough to keep a dry eye through this one. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]-Kate Gray, Boston P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

This complex portrait of a troubled math genius and the effect his gift has on those close to him combines a strong narrative and bumper crop of themes. For his seventh work of fiction, Canin (America America, 2008, etc.) first presents some 200 third-person pages focused on Milo Andret, an only child whose aloof parents give him a freedom he exercises in the Michigan woods. There, he discovers unusual talents as a whittler who carves a wooden chain more than 25 feet long from a beech stump. A late-blooming math whiz, at Berkeley grad school in the 1970s, he specializes in topology, whose practitioners "built undrawable figures in their imaginations, then twisted and folded them." He also discovers LSD, sex, and academic competition, laying the groundwork for long-term addictions. He gains fame in math and a job at Princeton, but heavy drinking, sex, and the drive for another milestone undo him. Canin then switches to the voice of Milo's son, Hans, who reveals he has been the quasi-omniscient narrator of the first section, based on stories told to him by his ailing father. It's an awkward, risky shift that pulls the story away from its focus on a deeply intriguing character (though perhaps a useful lesson in unreliable narrators for the author's classes at the Iowa Writer's Workshop). Hans gives his boyhood observations of Milo's "Olympian drinking" and is surprised to realize how "normal" his own childhood seemed. Yet he also struggles with addiction, from an Ecstasy precursor to cocaine as well as the high of a quant's wins on Wall Street, which is where Hans uses his own considerable math skills. Ultimately a nice guy, he pales beside the fiercely irascible, hurtful patriarch. Book clubs may dig into the many interesting veins herefamily, ambition, addiction, lustbut Mean Dad was the motherlode, and it's not clear that Canin's easing of the darkness makes for a better novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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A Late Arrival From the kitchen window, Milo Andret watched the bridge over the creek, and when he saw Earl Biettermann's white Citroën race across the span he hurried out the door and picked up a short hoe. Biettermann was driving too fast. Reckless was the word for it--but that's the way he'd always been. Arrogant. Heedless. Lucky to stumble onto the right roads, the right career, the right woman. Lucky even to be alive. For any other driver, the route from the bridge to the cabin would take five minutes: Andret figured it would take Biettermann three. Outside under the trees, he crossed as quickly as he could toward the garden, his feet today somehow obeying his commands. Next to the strawberries he lowered himself into the folding chair and used the coiled hose to dash a few palmfuls of water onto his shirt and hair. The sun was high. He ought to be sweating. He heard the car throw gravel as it made the turn into the driveway. Then the engine shut off. A fan came on the way it did in French cars. Biettermann probably loved that fan. One door slam. Andret waited. Then, a second. He let them knock at the door to the cabin. His name called: "Professor! Professor!" This was an affectation. Then steps on the cluttered path to the back of the house, where he was bent low over the plants, pulling strenuously at the roots of a marauding false grape. "Professor Andret!" He turned to offer his greeting, squinting, wiping the spigot water from his brow. A shock: Earl Biettermann was in a wheelchair. He realized he'd heard something about that. From her, maybe? He couldn't remember. She was here, though--that was the important thing--and now she was guiding her husband in a wheelchair, pushing him in front of her across the bumpy ground like an offering. It could have been awful: but he saw immediately that it wasn't going to be. He also realized with a start that she'd been the one driving. Impossible Milo Andret grew up in northern Michigan, near Cheboygan, on the western edge of Lake Huron, where the offshore waters were fathomless and dark. The color of the lake there was closer to the stormy Atlantic hues of Lake Superior than to the tranquil, layered turquoise of Lake Michigan, which lapped at the tourist beaches on the far side of the state. Milo's father had been an officer in the navy during the Second World War, a destroyer's navigator driven by the hope of one day commanding his own ship; but at the age of twenty-four, after an incident in the Solomon Sea, he'd abandoned his ambitions. The incident had occurred in November 1943, just a year before Milo was born. Coming north out of the straits near Bougainville Island, the destroyer had been hit by a string of Japanese torpedoes, and in the wake of the explosions the ship's life rafts had drifted into unknown waters. Milo's father and another sailor had managed to get aboard one of the rafts, and before nightfall they'd picked up two more men. A week later, though, when a British cruiser finally sighted them off of Papua New Guinea, all but Milo's father had been eaten by sharks. By the time Milo was born, his father had been discharged back to Cheboygan, where he'd found work as a science teacher at Near Isle High School. It was a position from which, for the next thirty-nine years, he would neither be offered a promotion nor seek one. Milo's mother had been the first female summa cum laude chemistry major in the history of Michigan State University; but she too was willing to forsake her ambitions. She raised Milo until he was old enough to go to school, and then she found a job as a secretary in the sheriff's department in Alpena, the county seat. In Alpena, she typed reports, brewed coffee, and made mild banter with a generally courteous group of men several years her senior, more than one of whom could neither read nor write. This was most of what Milo knew of the lives of his parents. After school his father graded homework in his office, and after work his mother sometimes stepped out for a drink with a few of the other secretaries from her building. On most afternoons, Milo walked up the hill from the bus stop to an empty house. By now it was the mid-1950s. In those days Cheboygan was already something of a resort town, although Milo didn't realize this fact until he was older. For most of his childhood, he knew only the deep woods that ran behind their property--350 acres of sugar maple, beech, and evergreen that had managed to remain unlogged during the huge timber harvests that had denuded much of the rest of the state. He spent a good part of his days inside this forest. The soil there was padded with a layer of decaying leaves and needles whose scents mingled to form a cool spice in his nose. He didn't notice the smell when he was in it so much as feel its absence when he wasn't. School, home, any building he had to spend time in--they all left him with the feeling that something had been cleaned away. The shaded hollows of his particular tract were populated by raccoons, skunks, opossum, and owls, and by the occasional fox or porcupine. The small meadows were ringed with ancient birches that crashed to the ground when the younger trees crowded them out, their fallen, crisscrossed trunks making shelters and bridges for him to discover. The woods were in transition, his father had told him. When a great tree came down, the report could be heard for miles, a shifting crescendo of rustling and snapping as the trunk yanked away the limbs around it, culminating finally in a muffled thud like a sledgehammer striking moss. Whenever this occurred, Milo would set out to find the corpse. He had an intricate memory of the landscape's light and shade and could tell instantly when even a small piece of it had been altered. Something in his brain picked up disturbance acutely. How many hours he spent in those woods! He was an only child and from early in his life had invented solitary games--long treks into the landscape with certain self-imposed rules (two right turns to every left, exactly a thousand steps from departure to return, the winding brook crossed only where it bent to the west). These games passed the most precious part of the day for him, the too-short interlude between the time the school bus released him at the bottom of the hill and six o'clock, when his mother came out to the edge of the woods holding the lid of a garbage can and banged it three times with a broom handle to call him for dinner. The Andrets lived fifteen miles from the beaches on Lake Huron; but it might as well have been a hundred. His father stayed to the land in a part of the state where everyone else was drawn to the water. This was no doubt attributable to his experience in the Solomon Sea, but Milo was too young to understand something like that. On weekends his father went hunting with his friends or tinkered around the house, or if the weather was poor he sat in a chair by the fire and worked puzzles from a magazine. In the Andret family, there was never any question of shared recreation--no canoe trips, no bicycle rides, no walks together at the shore. Such dalliances were from another universe. There were no pets, either, and no games other than a couple of boxes of playing cards and an old chess set of Philippine ivory that had been brought back from the navy. If Mr. Andret was at home, he was either grading schoolwork or performing household repairs, walking around with a tool belt and setting a ladder against the eaves. He would finish one job and move on to the next, never alerting anyone to what he was doing. If his mother was there, she was in the kitchen, at the small table by the window, with a glass and a book. If Milo wasn't at school, he was in the woods. The Andret house was an old-fashioned, darkly painted, thoroughly ornamented Victorian that had been built by a prosperous farmer at the turn of the century, as though it would one day sit on the main square of a town. It was three stories high with a steeply raftered roof whose scalloped tiles radiated a statuesque formality. But to Milo there was always something disappointing about this formality. From the time he was young it had seemed forlorn to him, like a woman in a ball gown sitting at a bus stop. (This wasn't his own phrase; it was his wife's, uttered many years later, when she first crested the hill.) The walls were an evening blue, both inside and out, and the exterior trim was a deep maroon. Everything a shade too dark. There was a sidewalk in front, but it ended at the property stake. A brass mailbox stood on a post at the head of the driveway, and an exactingly painted garage looked out from buttressed eaves at the rear. The property boasted all the details of a fine residence in a fine little town, except for the town itself, which had never appeared. The Andrets' house was the only one for miles. Excerpted from A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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