Coming from the Hat

Work, Life, Balance.

May you all be so blessed as to have a mother who sends you books. Mine sent me How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto, for no other reason than that it is really, really good. Most of what can be said about its major virtues has been said elsewhere: it’s an enviably deft first novel, assured in its tone and light of foot despite its politically charged subject matter. My favorite blurb from the jacket is by the author Tony Tulathimutte, who writes that “Taranto confidently grasps the third rail of cancel culture and ties it into a balloon animal.” It’s full of witty observations and mercifully free of heavy-handed moralizing—exactly what you want from a novel of ideas.

All I can add to this assessment is that for all the novel’s intellectual elegance, its emotional insight might be the thing about it that will stick with me the longest. The heart of the story is a marital situationship between Helen, a distracted young genius on the brink of modeling high-temperature superconductivity, and Hew, a devoted Fixer of Broken Things who evolves into a terminally online social justice activist.

Hew is the only partner who has stuck it out through Helen’s protracted fits of all-consuming research. He alone can both understand and accept her. “This drive you have, this relentlessness—I’ve never been able to compete with it,” he tells her. “And that’s because you can’t compete with it either.”

Earlier this week I shared the story of how I chose my career path—a good basic rule, I think, is to steer toward the thing you love doing while you’re absorbed in doing it, in the moments few people will ever know or care about. Helen has a form of that passion, though her drive has also gotten warped by personal tragedy into a defense mechanism against connection and pain.

Even in its healthy forms, though, loving what you do that intensely comes with a tradeoff: the part of the process that brings you the most joy is already over by the time any other human being can share the fruit of your labor.

When Helen achieves her greatest triumph she spends a few hours as “the sole human being in all of history” who understands what she has discovered. There’s undeniably something sublime in this but also, of course, something lonely. By the time the world watches the movie you made, or reads the book wrote, your heart has probably moved on to a new project—you’re off tinkering with clauses, framing shots. Humming away in your workshop.

It's like a form of time dilation. The people you share your work with delight in it, as you do, but at a stutter step’s remove, as if you’re looking at each other through the window of a train as it approaches the speed of light. The line that kept running through my head as I read Taranto’s book is from Sunday in the Park with George, another tender look into the love affairs of an obsessive genius—in this case the master painter Georges Seurat. When George can’t give his mistress Dot the kind of presence and attention she craves, he turns in anguish back to his painting and sings:

I had thought she understood.

They have never understood,

And no reason that they should.

But if anybody could...

Helen, unlike George, has someone who understands. And unlike George she learns to listen, as Hew invites her—patiently, patiently—to slow down her light-speed train at a few key junctures and face him on the platform. If there’s one thing I love most about How I Won a Nobel Prize, it’s how Taranto manages to suggest plausibly that such a thing is possible—that when the work is done you can find someone “waiting / to return you to the night / dizzy from the height.”

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Listen to the latest from Young Heretics: