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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the author of America America and The Palace Thief, explores the nature of genius, rivalry, ambition, and love among multiple generations of a gifted family.
Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley he realizes the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is a seduction, opening Milo's eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there--and the rival he meets alongside her--will haunt him for the rest of his life. For Milo's brilliance is entwined with a dark need that soon grows to threaten his work, his family, even his existence.
Spanning seven decades as it moves from California to Princeton to the Midwest to New York, A Doubter's Almanac tells the story of a family as it explores the way ambition lives alongside destructiveness, obsession alongside torment, love alongside grief. It is a story of how the flame of genius both lights and scorches every generation it touches. Graced by stunning prose and brilliant storytelling, A Doubter's Almanac is a surprising, suspenseful, and deeply moving novel, a major work by a writer who has been hailed as "the most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation."
Praise for A Doubter's Almanac
"[Canin] is at the top of his form, fluent, immersive, confident. You might not know where he's taking you, but the characters are so vivid, Hans's voice rendered so precisely, that it's impossible not to trust in the story. . . . The delicate networks of emotion and connection that make up a family are illuminated, as if by magic, via his prose." -- Slate
"Alternately explosive and deeply interior." -- New York ("Eight Books You Need to Read")
"A blazingly intelligent novel." --Los Angeles Times
"Math made beautiful . . . Canin writes with such luxuriant beauty and tender sympathy that even victims of Algebra II will follow his calculations of the heart with rapt comprehension." -- The Washington Post
"A masterful writer at his transcendent best." --BBC
"Elegant and devastating . . . A Doubter's Almanac is exquisitely crafted. Canin takes us readers deep into the strange world of his troubled characters without ever making us aware of the effort involved. . . . An odd and completely captivating novel." --NPR's Fresh Air
"There is a shimmering loveliness to Canin's glimpses of higher mathematics. . . . A Doubter's Almanac is a novel whose achievement is fully equal to the . . . tragedy it portrays. Ethan Canin understands both the allure of great intellectual accomplishment and the price it exacts from those who pursue it. Unlike his protagonist, his own prodigious effort has produced a work of exquisite and enduring beauty." -- Bookreporter
"Ethan Canin writes about mathematics as brilliantly as T. S. Eliot writes about poetry. With this extraordinary novel, Ethan Canin now takes his place on the high wire with the best writers of his time." --Pat Conroy
"A book that raises the bar for novelists." --Literary Hub
"Staggeringly ambitious . . . a story of majestic sweep." --Paste
Author Notes
Ethan Canin was born in Michigan, in 1960. Although he did not publish his first book, a collection of short stories titled Emperor of the Air until 1988, he has enjoyed considerable success in a short period of time. The collection of short stories received high praise and encouragement from Danielle Steel, Canin's high school English teacher. All the more impressive is the fact that the book was written and published while Canin was at Harvard Medical School, where he received his M.D. in 1992. Canin asserts that medicine is a more useful profession than fiction writing.
Canin's subsequent books include The Palace Thief (1994), a collection of stories that appeared in Esquire, Granta and The Paris Review; the novel Blue River (1991); and For Kings and Planets (1998). In addition to his M.D., Canin earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford in 1982 and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1984. Canin lives in California and has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, The University of Michigan, The University of California at Irvine, and San Francisco State University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
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.
Kirkus 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.
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
New York Review of Books 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.
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.