A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 576 pp., $28
‘Genius is an error in the system,’’ said the artist Paul Klee. Such can be said of the mind of Milo Andret, a brilliant, and brilliantly flawed, mathematician, and one of two main characters in Ethan Canin’s engrossing new novel. Spanning 70 years, “A Doubter’s Almanac,’’ Canin’s eighth book, is a sharply drawn saga of a father and son, the alienation that results from having a brain that doesn’t work like other people’s, and the wreckage that results from ambition run amok.
We meet Andret as the only child of two distant parents. He spends most of his time wandering about the woods and finds that he’s got a gift for knowing exactly where he is on the planet at all times; his mental mapping is, to understate it, above average. In one memorable scene, he’s out with his parents in a rowboat as evening becomes night; his father, disoriented, rows them the wrong direction, and young Andret knows it and eventually lets on.
Fast forward to Andret at his interview for grad school at UC Berkeley. When asked at what point he knew he was destined to pursue mathematics, he tells the story of the rowboat, but shifts the truth: Instead of a calm, moonless June night, it’s a gusty, cold November. The incident hints at schisms in his character that will widen and deepen as he grows older. The embellisher of the truth becomes a liar, a womanizer, a thief, a destructive, tortured, and volatile maniac. As Canin delineates so starkly, this is a man who can grapple with ideas, with the mysteries of the universe, but has trouble understanding whether the person talking with him wishes him good or ill.
In short chapters, often named after mathematical concepts (“Rise Over Run,’’ “The Noncomforming Interval,’’ “The Sum of Infinitesimals’’), we are swept up in the rise and fall of Andret’s career and his descent into morbid alcoholism.
The novel is, in some ways, a love letter to math. Canin’s passion for its creativity, simplicity, and beauty is evident. But one need not have studied calculus (or even remember how to add and subtract fractions) to appreciate the book. Canin does a fine job of making the math itself comprehensible, and Andret’s pursuit of a too ambitious goal, “of something he would never reach’’ is an experience most can identify with.
Midway through the book, a surprising narrative shift takes place. The focus turns to Andret’s son Hans, and to a lesser extent, Andret’s wife and daughter. Hans inherits some of his dad’s aptitude for math, as well as his addictive tendencies, but is more aware of how his behavior affects other people. And his ambition takes a different form. Hans aims his mathematical aptitude at Wall Street and makes a boatload of dough. “How could I go for a half-hour walk in Battery Park when it meant $25,000 in income?’’ he wonders, focusing all his energy (aided by drugs) to trading.
Notions of ascendency are among Canin’s major concerns. Here, mathematicians follow one another, building on a predecessor’s discoveries. Sons overtake fathers. Canin puts it in natural terms: When a line of birches “finally fell — in a year or two, in ten — the aspens below would shoot up, consuming their old masters in a single season, as though with teeth.’’ The world, human and natural, is in a constant state of renewal, fierce, competitive, and violent with the success of young riding on the demise of what came before.
Though occasionally headed in that direction, Hans and his father manage to veer off that path. The son helps his wrecked father, gets sober, and quits the singleminded pursuit of money for a quiet life as a teacher with his young family (his daughter ends up inheriting her grandfather’s gift/curse as well).
The women in this book, while more numerous and consequential than in Canin’s past work, are still essentially peripheral, urgers of potential, justifiers of abuse. They also must suffer Andret, who’s the worst sort of misogynist, the kind who believes he actually loves women. At one point, with his body swollen and malformed by alcohol, he opens his shirt to show his son his “rubbery breasts’’: “I’m turning into the thing I loved,’’ he says. The word “thing’’ speaks volumes, and Canin certainly pushes our ability to sympathize with his destructive genius. But as Klee also argues, “To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.’’
A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 576 pp., $28
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter’’ and can be reached at nmaclaughlin@gmail.com.
