An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.
A teenager forges an impossible connection with a long-dead Swiss mathematician in Seurat’s debut novel.
Fifteen-year-old Ulrick Kennedy has been having nightmares. He’s a member of the paper airplane team at the elite Percival Lowell High School in New York, and he’s terrified that he’ll mess up in some way to prevent his team from making it to nationals. His father, Wall Street executive Harry Kennedy, is not pleased by his son’s slipping grades—nor by the fact that the boy cares so much about paper airplanes that he’s having stress nightmares. He’d much rather see Ulrick focus on his math studies and learn some skills that may one day serve him on the trading floor. When Ulrick and the rest of the paper airplane team lose a bet concerning the law of fluid dynamics to their eccentric math teacher, Professor Ross, they find themselves forced to take a makeup exam—one that Ulrick is willing to go to any length to pass, including buying and consuming a strange study aid called Altus Aerius Oculus (“High Altitude Eye”) from an apothecary in Chinatown. “The mixture is very selective in that it does not have the slightest effect on memory, but dramatically increases one’s analytical powers,” the woman at the shop tells him. “The active ingredient is a solution from an optic nerve of a Swiss mathematician, I forget his name.” At the same time, incautious traders at Harry’s firm find themselves targeted by the SEC over some blind bid trades that could potentially bring the whole business crashing down. Finally, back in 18th century Berlin, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is desperate to solve the Great Theorem of Fermat at the behest of Frederick the Great. As time and space begin to converge, Ulrick finds he’s doing much more than studying the laws of physics—he’s accidentally defying them.
Seurat’s prose has a technical precision that complements the many physicists and mathematicians who populate the novel’s pages. He’s particularly adept at evoking the richness of Euler’s Berlin, a place and time in which astrology, science, and the caprices of philosopher kings exert their influences side by side. The author clearly enjoys exploring physical laws, logical paradoxes, and other reality puzzles—at times, the book can feel less like a novel and more like a giant word problem. There are three main narrative threads, all of which take a long time to get going and an even longer time to reveal how they are connected to one another. Fans of this type of cerebral storytelling will enjoy the book’s payoff, so long as they manage to stick with it over its nearly 400 pages. Along the way, they can look forward to unexpected plot twists, impressive evocations of setting and character, and a wry sense of humor—here, Frederick the Great practices the flute: “A shrill, squeaky sound cut through the State Room. It was a complete surprise; even the walls of silver and pink pattern refused to resonate the ugly shriek. His Majesty tried again; he lifted the flute slowly to his mouth, and with distrust blew into the mouthpiece.”
An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2015
ISBN: 9780991323548
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Quadrature Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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