Benjamín Labatut’s 2021 novel When We Cease to Understand the World was one of the year’s surprise hits; riding a wave of word-of-mouth praise and the boost of a couple influential critics, the book went from NYRB translated curiosity to an indie bestseller, ending up on both the New York Times’ 10 best books of the year list and former President Barack Obama’s year end favorites list. The book, which juxtaposed five chapters on various scientists and mathematicians, was widely praised for its W.G. Sebaldian blending of fact and fiction (each chapter got progressively more fictionalized, increasing in fabulism like a Fibonacci sequence) and its elegant and erudite presentation of complicated theoretical concepts, especially quantum physics. Corrina de Fonseca-Wollheim’s New York Times review sets a representative example for the book’s wider reception: “[Labatut’s] true subject is the ecstasy of scientific discovery and the price it exacts — from the individuals who sacrifice everything in its pursuit, and from the human species, which gains ever more powerful tools to master a world that keeps eluding comprehension.” In other words, this was an ‘I F’ing Love Science!’ book for lit majors, who could read a piece of typical lit-fic (the last twenty years of fiction has all been Sebald-tinted anyway) that had the sheen of scientific importance behind it. And as a friend of mine who actually works in the sciences reported, plenty of STEM majors had finally found a piece of fiction made for and about them after the horrors of having to read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens in their required undergrad humanities course.
I read the book over the course of a two hour flight; it has a sort of slick propulsion to it, greased like a well-tuned machine to reach its climax, which turns out to be the comprehensive victory of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and, by extension, the fundamental instability of the known scientific world. No book that you finish in two hours and change is that bad, but I came away from the book with a feeling of uneasiness. Not from any titular inability to understand the world – I’ve read my Thomas Pynchon, I know the horrors of empiricism, and part of becoming an adult is realizing just how little objective truth there is, even at the cellular level; reality can’t be contained, I’ve known that since I was fifteen – but from the sinister construction of the novel, which seemed to have no narrator at all, just a disembodied voice that delivered factual sounding sentences with a lyrical bent. With a faux-journalist air of objectivity, Labatut’s novel skipped all the thrilling uncertainties of Sebald and Sebald’s many imitators; where the narrators of those books made tenuous connections across history and the arts because those connections only made sense in their own disordered path of thinking, Labatut’s narrative machine made grasping connections as if they were part of a mathematical proof, with no outward expression of strain. Adam Mars-Jones, who reviewed the novel in the London Review of Books, was one of the few critics to point out the tenuous connections that animated the book, with “little-did-they-know segue[s]” constituting a “rather desperate strategy [of] unifying a mass of miscellaneous material.”1 A typical Labatut construction, as he explained, is the idea of Fritz Haber dying without the knowledge that his invention of Zyklon-B would be used to kill his family in the Holocaust, a lurid counterfactual construction that Mars-Jones decries as a “festival of grotesque irony” that degrades both Haber and his murdered family members.
Sebald’s fictions are built on narrative mania – Rings of Saturn begins in a mental hospital, The Emigrants is a melancholic’s portrait of melancholia, etc. – while Labatut’s merely focus on mania as a means to an end. That end is the frustratingly simplistic construction that undergirds his English language work: the protagonist either goes mad from discovering something that changes their field, or the protagonist is so mad that it leads them to discover something that changes their field. Never considered is the theoretician as a normal guy with a regular relationship to their work and discoveries; one can only study the physics of turbulence with a turbulent mind.2 It’s a facile conception of genius in two ways: one, it doesn’t consider someone so smart or advanced that they can completely sublimate their own discoveries into their worldview (as plenty of scientists are able) and still live normally; it also rejects the possibility of someone who can live outside of their work. Believe it or not, some people can differentiate making a living and all the rest of life. I’m more familiar with the lives of novelists than physicists, so I can give some examples here: Pynchon has written extensively on depths of human depravity, and by all accounts is a stoner who likes watching TV and doting on his wife and kids; Kafka found his own stories pretty funny rather than terrifying, and was something of a bon vivant during his short life; Don DeLillo has spent his career tracing out the dark underbelly of American life, and also loves sitting back and watching a baseball game. Maybe you wouldn’t call any of those people ‘normal,’ and they’re certainly not boring, but they’re at least recognizable; whatever they’ve realized in their work doesn’t completely consume them in their day to day lives. Are the left-brained scientists and mathematicians so different? I feel like I’ve seen a picture of Albert Einstein with his tongue out at some point… was he the only fun one? Surely the scientists at CERN hit a happy hour after some particle smashing at work, and then head home to their partners, hey honey how was work, oh, the usual, so what are we going to watch tonight, or maybe I’ll sit back and read one of these back issues of the Swiss version of The New Yorker I’ve been meaning to catch up on… No? They just go home and ponder suicide? Got it.
If When We Cease To Understand the World was comically indebted to Sebald, Labatut has instead taken up his countryman Roberto Bolaño’s mantle with his latest novel, The MANIAC, which is another way of saying: he’s aping The Savage Detectives. Three parts to the book (a ‘triptych’ if you want to be precious), and the big middle part is structured as a faux-oral-history ‘chorus of voices’ about a formative and larger than life figure. (Bolaño, maximalist as he was, picked two figures for his middle section.) The first section of The MANIAC might as well be titled When We Cease 2 Understand The World; it has such glancing contact with the rest of the book that it almost seems like a section that was cut from the previous novel and inserted into this one as to reassure uncertain readers that they are indeed reading the follow-up to their favorite book of 2021. “PAUL, or, The Discovery of Madness,” which sets the standard for annoying titular subtitles throughout the novel, follows the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who, you guessed it, kills himself and his son after coming to terms with quantum mechanics:
he could not shake the feeling that a fundamental line had been crossed, that a demon, or perhaps a genie, had incubated in the soul of physics, one that neither his nor any succeeding generations would be able to put back in the lamp. If one were to believe the novel rules governing the inner realm of the atom, suddenly the entire world was no longer as solid and real as it once was… [he] could not slow his descent into the dark pit toward which he seemed to be spiraling down at a faster and faster pace, not least due to the strange direction that his hallowed discipline was taking, filled as it was now with logical contradictions, uncertainties, and indeterminacies that he could no longer explain to his beloved students, as he had no way of understanding them himself.
Paul, buddy, are you ceasing to understand the world right now? Ehrenfest’s loosing grip on reality too nicely dovetails with the rise of fascism in Germany, as he arrives in Berlin in 1933 and is a witness to, in one of Labatut’s compressions of history, a veritable Nazi EPCOT, in the space of one paragraph seeing
Nazi brownshirts storming trade unions, labor banks, and cooperatives…. he walked through the ashes left in front of the State Opera, where the pages of twenty thousand books had gone up in flames, illuminating the faces of giddy boys and girls, members of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, who had raided the libraries of their universities in search of all “un-German” publications, journals, and magazine, singing, chanting and swearing oaths as they fed an enormous bonfire, while senior members of the Nazi Party murmured incantations, and Goebbels screams to a crowd of thousands, No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! Paul saw soldiers on the streets, marching to the sound of the military music that blared from all radio stations, interrupted by the shrieks of Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler…
These are all real things that happened, but to stage them all together in one paragraph is to indulge in the worst tropes of historical fiction, wherein a character is a personal witness to all the important and representative happenings of an era. Major historical events happen gradually over time, and often times off-stage, as it were; Ehrenfest instead is propelled on rails through the rise of fascism all the way to killing himself. Don’t take it from just me, though! Here’s Labatut’s final bow on the chapter: “he stood, machinelike, propelled by a force he neither recognized not understood, and took five steps with his legs as stiff as an automaton’s, to board the wagon and take his place among the rest. He would be there by ten.” Labatut wants to make it seem like the dark forces of irrationality are pushing Ehrenfest towards his grisly fate, but the force that is pushing him is Labatut’s insistence that quantum physics and fascism are essentially and fatally coterminous. Aspiring novelists take note – why not give Walter Benjamin this same treatment? He’s got a whole raft of theories about the end of history that you could graft to the tragedy of errors that led to his suicide.
After Ehrenfest’s gruesome end, we come to the meat of the book, the main section, “JOHN, or, The Mad Dreams of Reason”, which begins with yet another epigraph (this one from Adam Curtis, another artist who specializes in somewhat tenuous connections in the schema of history) and then some pages laid out like:
This.
With lots of negative space and only one or two sentences on them, all in italics.
The text offers no reason for this besides ‘it looks cool.’
“His name was Nuemann Janos Lajos.” That’s a full page.
“A.k.a Johnny von Neumann.” That’s the next one.
I think the use of negative space and formatting can be interesting in a work if it means something to the text; this is most often seen in poetry, and I would put Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems or Anne Carson’s Nox up as exemplars of negative space work. The restriction felt by the narrator of Webb’s poems is reflected in the spare stanzas of the poem, which are nearly wiped away by all the white space around them; Carson will put a phrase like “I have never known a closeness like that” all by itself on a page to underline the essential solitude of grief. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work in a novel, though, and Labatut’s never feels like anything besides an unnecessary flourish. It repeats a couple more times throughout the novel, boosting the book’s page count. Look, it’s even stretched out this newsletter!
Once we get past those, the chorus of voices on the physicist / mathematician / computer scientist (‘polymath’) John von Neumann begins. In general, I’m happy to see a novelist attempt something as ambitious as this construction; we’ve had enough Sebald imitators and not enough Bolaño ones. Labatut, however, is not nearly as skilled a literary ventriloquist as Bolaño was. One of the sections of Savage Detectives was compelling and distinctively narrated enough to be expanded into a pretty good standalone novel (Amulet), and even if many of the rest of the narrators of The Savage Detectives seem to have Bolaño’s fingerprints all over them, he at least makes the effort to give each of his narrators a sense of individuality. Labatut’s narrators, on the other hand, too often sound just like the un-narrator of The MANIAC’s first section and of When We Cease to Understand the World. A chapter will begin in the personal voice of a character before transitioning into long explanatory bits of history, as when Theodore von Kármán switches from a remembrance of von Neumann as a young student to a long section on, you guessed it, the mathematician Georg Cantor losing his mind because of his studies on the concept of infinity. Why would von Kármán sound like this?
During the periods between breakdowns, he continued to teach mathematics and kept toiling away at his infinities, but he was haunted by his own results, and became caught in a strange loop from which he could not extricate himself: he would first prove that the grand hypothesis that he was chasing after – the now infamous continuum hypothesis – was true, and then, a couple months or even just weeks later, he would prove it was false. The vicious cycle of truth and falsehood, truth and falsehood, truth and falsehood repeated again and again, compounding the misery that became the hallmark of his later years. Finally, on January 6, 1918, after suffering the death of his youngest son, numerous illnesses, bankruptcy, and severe malnutrition during the First World War, Cantor died from a heart attack in the Halle Nervenklinik, a university psychiatric institution where he had spent the last seven months of his life.
Every piece of multivocal fiction depends on a suspension of disbelief; one must feel that they’re actually being granted access to multiple interiorities, whether in a faux oral-history or the titled chapters of something like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The MANIAC changes the names at the top of the chapters (and gives each of them a precious subtitle taken from the ‘speech’), but the song remains the same: it’s Labatut all the way down. His forays into throwing his voice produce clunky anachronistic phrasing like “I rode into his life on a tricycle when I was just two and a half years old” (why would a woman of the midcentury use that idiom) or the choice to have the computer engineer Julian Bigelow narrate his section only in poetically structured sentence-long paragraphs.
If you can get past all the gilded and ostentatious scaffolding, Labatut’s choice of von Neumann as subject in the middle section at least gives him a lot to work with. Von Neumann was a prodigious thinker with an outsize personality; nearly every correspondent reports fear at not only von Neumann’s ability but also his lack of moral boundaries. (He remarks to Richard Feynman: “You don’t have to be responsible for the world you’re in, you know?”) He manages to get out of Germany as the Nazis come to power and, as a man without qualities and without scruples, he becomes a perfect American and a perfect tool for his new countrymen. As a “mind for hire,” he consults for the government and corporations alike, lending his brain to whoever will write him an exorbitant check, before a higher duty calls: time to build a mass killing machine. It’s von Neumann who has the bright idea, working on the Manhattan Project, to detonate the nuclear bomb in the atmosphere rather than on the ground for even more destructive potential. Von Neumann’s time in Los Alamos is a too-brief highlight of the novel, with the section on the Trinity test, as narrated by Feynman, a particular high point. Labatut actually gives Feynman a distinctive voice – even if it’s just him informally saying “gonna” and “‘cause” here and there – as he describes “all the mountain ridges illuminated in searing colors, gold, purple, violet, gray, and blue, every peak and crevasse… lit up with a clarity that had to be seen” and “a heat like the midday sun shining on my entire body.”
It’s von Neumann’s interest in the even more destructive fission bomb – with hydrodynamic computations “too complex for an individual to handle” – that gets him obsessed with the power of computers, leading to the creation of the titular MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I) at Los Alamos. After a brief foray into inventing game theory and the concept of mutually assured destruction – did somebody say polymath? – von Neumann focuses nearly all his attention on the computer, which spends the day calculating the necessary equations for thermonuclear detonation, and, by night, is his to play with. His fixation becomes the possibility of new life within the machine, laying the groundwork for what we now know as artificial intelligence.
Unlike the rest of Labatut’s gallery of braniac suicides, von Neumann is driven by a fierce desire to live, or, more accurately, to have his ferocious intelligence live on. His notion of artificial intelligence was a machine (or program) that could perpetuate itself and evolve over time, programmed with a baroque code of “[g]orgeous filigrees of dots and lines that intermingled, fused, and then tore apart like the teeth of a broken zipper, leaving vast swaths of negative space surrounded by intricate lattices.” The project is mostly unsuccessful – or it’s so ahead of its time that it can’t really succeed, given that von Neumann is trying to “create an all-encompassing scheme of self-replication that would unite biology, technology, and computer theory, and would be applicable to life of any kind, both in the physical and in the digital realm, on this planet or on any other” – but von Neumann does tangentially hit on the fundamental structure of human replication (RNA and DNA) as he theorizes his computer program, before speculating that future programs, in order to truly evolve, would have to learn to read, write, think, and play – and that might remind you of something that’s going on now, no? Before moving onto to that, though, Labatut has a final flourish. In case you were concerned that the subtext of von Neumann trying to extend his life through a machine would go unnoticed, Labatut makes sure to underline it as von Neumann suffers through his death from pancreatic cancer: “It was the Professor’s voice, but it didn’t sound like a human screaming… I saw that his skin had turned black, with dime-sized white spots all over it, as if they had covered his body with electrodes and burned him to a crisp.” The man who tried to bring his consciousness into computers… becomes a burned out machine in the end. Now That’s What I Call Irony!
Sam Sacks, in The Wall Street Journal, fretted about the mix of fact and fiction within The MANIAC, writing that “Mr. Labatut arrogates the power to imagine the innermost thoughts of real people, and he has shaped those thoughts to conform to a portentous vision of spiritual terror. The science and biography lend a veneer of factual validity to what is really a work of fantasy. Certainly read this gripping, provocative novel—but read it with utmost skepticism.” Ruth Franklin, in her New Yorker piece on When We Cease to Understand the World, also worried about Labatut’s blend of fact and fiction: “There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true?” While both of them make some good points about the deceptive power of fiction – and how it might be misused – they have made a real emperor with no clothes out of Labatut, whose fictions are so highly constructed to reach points of seemingly ‘devastating irony’ that they tip all the way into the laughably unreal. The math is advanced, the lives are distressingly linear, from birth to obsession to a perfectly tied bow upon death. We tell ourselves stories to live, and Labatut’s scientists live to make his stories, without any of those pesky particularities that make up actual life. On to the virtual life, then!
With the suggestive thread of artificial intelligence offered up by von Neumann’s work, Labatut ends the novel with a last section on the leaps and bounds AI has made in the intervening sixty years. After scientists were able to build a computer in the late 90s that could beat anyone in chess – a fixed game with a finite amount of permutations – the next challenge was to build a computer that could play Go, the ancient Chinese game of black and white tiles and shifting territories. As a game played on a bigger board and without fixed positions, Go is many times more complicated than chess, and requires years of practice to even philosophically understand before competitive play is possible. After Deep Blue mastered chess, mastering Go became the Holy Grail of computing: “The game was considered to be too profound, too complex and labyrinthine to ever yield to a computational approach.” “LEE, of, The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence" follows the Go master Lee Sedol as he takes on the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo, and is written like a particularly compelling sports/tech piece of longform journalism, one you’d read in the New York Times Magazine or, back in the better days of the internet, on Grantland.3 Sedol is the best player in the world, known for his aggressive and daring play, as well as his cocky demeanor. Even with such a real-life character, Labatut can’t help but give Sedol a physical trait that not-so-surprisingly matches an inner feeling – “he bore the consequences of [bronchial inflammation and paralyzed vocal cords] forever onward, since the disease (if indeed it was a disease and not merely the outward sign of a profound inner turmoil) left his bronchial nerves permanently paralyzed, so that to this day he speaks in an odd, shrill, wheezy, almost toylike voice” – but he is sketched as a worthy hero for humanity, a brash competitor with the skills to match his pregame talk. AlphaGo, on the other hand, is a computer designed by DeepMind, a tech company backed by the combined dollars of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Google. I won’t give away who wins the set of five matches between Sedol and the computer, but, if you know the way the world’s turning, and how ungodly rich those two people and one company are, you can probably guess how it goes. It’s not perhaps the most stirring outcome for the good ol’ forces of humanity, but Labatut does give the matches a propulsive narrative energy, with the computer’s moves and style of play changing humankind’s conception of the game itself. Because the section takes place in the near-present day, Labatut’s instinct to stretch the boundaries of historical connection are curbed, and more time can be spent on the complex details of the subject he’s chosen.
The end of the novel’s impact will really depend on how you feel about AI, whether you believe it’s going to change the world or whether, like NFTs and cryptocurrency, you think it’s another overhyped tech scam. It’s clear that Labatut, in bookending his novel with Ehrenfest and AlphaGo, wants to suggest that we may be headed towards a profound destabilization because of the untamed march of science’s progress. Even the defense we might have against computers – that they can’t predict human irrationality and the way we are “driven by [our] emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions” – is countered by AlphaGo playing a move against Sedol that defies all logical comprehension, and is in fact so unthinkable and irrational that it unnerves Sedol and helps it win the game. We’ve even taught human irrationality to machines; what hope is there left?
But that’s a game of Go, which, despite its many outcomes, can still be forecast and played by computation. AI becomes much less scary when it leaves the set rules of games and puzzles, and instead ventures into the real world, into the world of art, which cannot be broken down into any equation. Aesthetic quality is indefinable, and no matter how many skeezy entrepreneurs try to scrape the entire corpus of human text into their computers, AI cannot transmute that history of text into something indefinably original. It’s a bad copy of thousands of copies. And perhaps the disembodied quality of all AI writing is what unnerves me about Labatut’s novels, which take historical events and people across time and work backwards to make the dots and also connect them, as if programatically. A Labatutian irony: his big novel on AI and the uncertain progress of science feels, at many times, plucked from a book-writing machine, a grand computer of uncertain design that produces middlebrow fiction with the veneer of intellectual heft. Call it the NOVELIST – New and Obvious Volumes with Excessive Lyricism and Insipid Storytelling Tropes – and weep for the future.
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Another choice line from the pan: “So much loosely connected information clogs the mind rather than opening it up.”
I say guy because no women scientists or mathematicians are profiled; they’re mostly there to poke their head into some geniuses office and worry about the strain of his work or to be ignored (alongside the children) as a great discovery is made. Only fellas can get so close to the bleeding edge of reason and insanity!
Grantland’s offspring, The Ringer, would not publish this.
Is The NOVELIST available for download yet?