Title: Book of Numbers
Rating: 2 Stars
A couple of times a year, I like to sit down and spend a week or two with a book that I know is going to kick my ass. These are books that it cannot be said that I’m looking forward to reading. Usually, when I start one of these books, for the first couple of days, I give serious consideration to abandoning the effort. When I start reading a book, I make a pledge to myself that I will always read at least the first twenty percent of it. Almost invariably, I get sucked into what the book is trying to accomplish and I persevere through it.
People have asked me why I do it. Why would I read a book that actually kind of fills you with a bit of dread before you start on it? I guess my answer is about the same as when you ask a mountaineer why they want to climb Mt Everest. Not just because “it’s there”, but because the very difficulty of it, the challenge of attempting it, and persevering to your goal makes it, at least for me, worth it. Even better, every now and then you come across one of these monstrosities of a book and you end up enjoying it.
In the last several years, I’ve read several books that were extremely challenging. There was Antkind, by Charles Kaufman, a hilarious book full of an army of Donald Trump clones. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, was oddly compulsive reading about tennis and Alcoholics Anonymous. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (RIP!), was a beautifully told story about horrible massacres led by a giant bald man. The Seventh Function of Language, by Laurent Binet, positioned the great semiologist, Umberto Eco, as the world’s unlikeliest action hero.
There were also the books that kicked my butt so hard that I had to use a guide to even get an idea of what was going on. There is the day in the life of an Irishman in Ulysses, by James Joyce. I also bought a key for that great World War II action novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. My favorite part of reading Gravity’s Rainbow is the section where the person that wrote the key basically threw up their hands and were like, yeah, we don’t know what’s going on here either.
There were two books that absolutely kicked my butt and took my lunch money. I didn’t have a key and maybe I should have had one, but I don’t think that it would have made much of a difference. JR, by William Gaddis, was over 700 pages of exactly replicated English speech (complete with run on sentences, partial sentences, and ums and ahs). It was murderous to read.
The other was Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, which was comprised of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. I still don’t know what was going on, but my closest guess was that Beckett was progressively trying to remove elements of a novel to determine how minimal a novel can be. By The Unnamable, the bulk of the novel apparently consisted of a disembodied voice speaking out in nothingness. If I recollect correctly, The Unnamable was barely over one hundred pages, but reading those hundred pages seemed interminable.
It’d been a while since I tackled a difficult novel, so I thought that I was due. I chose Book of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen. I’d just read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Netanyahus. I wasn’t blown away by it, but several people recommended Cohen’s Book of Numbers. When I read its synopsis, it gave off a respectable postmodern aroma, so with some trepidation I dove in.
The Book of Numbers is about an author named Joshua Cohen (see! right away, metafiction!). At this point, he is somewhat of a failure. His novel that was going to bring him fame and glory had the horrible bad luck of being released on 9/11, so it got lost in the tragedy. Since then, he’s just been poking around picking up work when he can find it. His marriage to his wife, Rachel, appears to be ending.
At the nadir of his life, he receives a phone call. There is another, much more famous Joshua Cohen, famous for starting one of the top software companies, focusing on search. A globe trotting billionaire, he decides that he wants to publish an autobiography. Clearly not wanting to author it himself, he decides to bring his name doppelganger on board to ghostwrite it.
This begins an adventure as the author Joshua Cohen traipses around the globe with the mogul Joshua Cohen (known as Principal), learning everything that he can about his life. If the author Cohen completes the novel, he is guaranteed a significant payday.
Around the story is all kinds of drama regarding his wife trying to find Cohen to serve him divorce papers, Cohen’s infatuation with an Arab woman that he’d only had seen in a burqa, a WikiLeaks like organization trying to get the content before Cohen can publish, and the fact that the Principal, although still relatively young, appears to be dying of cancer (Steve Jobs anyone?).
I’m sorry to say, but I didn’t find any of that really interesting. Don’t get me wrong. Cohen is clearly a smart, talented writer that occasionally writes ingeniously. When I’m reading a difficult novel, there has to be some kind of a spur in the text that will draw me in. Many times it’s humor. I think that there were times that Cohen was trying to be funny. Given the fact that Cohen is Jewish and regularly refers to that fact in the novel, there seemed to be a Portnoy’s Complaint element to it. Even although Portnoy’s Complaint wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, it was funny and I appreciated that. The antics of the character of the author Joshua Cohen just wasn’t amusing or really, even interesting.
As I reached the twenty percent point of the novel, I gave serious consideration to pulling the plug and giving it one of my very rare one star reviews. Luckily, around then, the novel inside the novel kicked in and we learn how the Principal, along with some fellow Stanford students, formed the company. It described the struggles as they tried to find a niche / make a profit. We learn of Moe, an Indian that we first meet when he was working at a startup desperately trying to create a universal remote for all devices in the absence of any standards. This was one of the few amusing parts of the novel. Moe turns out to be an engineering genius whose products drive the company’s success, until he is driven out in a corporate bureaucratic coup.
This part of the novel perked my interest up enough for me to finish. Clearly patterned after Google / Apple, I found the fictional ins and outs of the company’s success over the ensuing decades to be at least interesting reading.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. The end of the novel puts us back into the author Joshua Cohen’s world where he’s trying to finish the novel and evade the WikiLeaks wannabes. My interest level in the novel subsequently dropped.
I won’t say that I regret reading Book of Numbers (that would have earned it the dreaded one star). It also was not as difficult to read as JR or Beckett’s Trilogy. It’s just that, of all of the challenging novels that I’ve read, it was the least interesting.
dorkenstein 