January/February 2010
Tumbling into the Heart of Genius
Dani shapiro
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction Pantheon |
For years, I’ve been telling my creative writing graduate students
that there’s such a thing as “too smart” to be a first-rate writer of
fiction. A certain kind of penetrating, analytical intelligence, at
home in the world of ideas and abstractions, often comes off as lost
and flat-footed when entering the realm of human feelings—love, grief,
longing, despair, hope, desire—like a brilliant, nebbishy teenager
sitting in a corner at the dance. Fiction writers are sensory
creatures, I tell my students. We sniff as we go, alert and watchful,
grounded in the here and now, attuned to the subtleties of our
characters’ emotional lives. We need to be smart, yes. But not too
smart—not so smart that we think ourselves right out of the picture.
I found myself thinking about this while reading Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. Goldstein is wicked smart. She wrote her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem,
as a young professor at Barnard, after earning a Ph.D. in philosophy
from Princeton. The novel is a penetrating exploration of the ways in
which philosophy prepares—or fails to prepare—us for the difficulties
inherent in being human. It is, as well, a poignant and provocative
coming-of-age story in which the heroine struggles with her Orthodox
background. The novel quickly separated Goldstein from the pack of that
era’s first novelists. She was a thoroughbred—her literary adroitness
so suffused with heart and soul that she simply seemed to have arrived
fully formed, already at the top of her game. Goldstein continued to
teach philosophy while steadily bringing out a series of fine works of
fiction and non-fiction set largely in the university world.
The recent Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity,
part memoir, part intellectual biography of the philosopher, solidified
her reputation as a writer who can move effortlessly between forms,
doing both equally well. She playfully titled another work of fiction Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics.
Along the way, she has collected a trophy case of grants and awards: a
Whiting, several National Jewish Book Awards, a Guggenheim, and most
notably a MacArthur, otherwise known as the “genius grant.”
It is genius itself that is one of Goldstein’s central preoccupations. When 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
opens, we meet Cass Seltzer, professor of science and religion at the
fictional Frankfurter University, a small, primarily Jewish bastion of
the liberal arts outside Boston, a school shivering slightly in the
imposing shadow cast by Harvard just 12 miles away. (When it comes to
names of characters and institutions, Goldstein likes to have fun. Pop
quiz: Can you name another small Jewish-leaning liberal arts university
near Boston named after a Supreme Court Justice?)
It’s four o’clock in the morning, and Cass is standing on the Weeks
Bridge overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, contemplating his
future. “His life has become strange to him. He feels as if he’s
wearing somebody else’s coat, grabbed in a hurry from the bed in the
spare bedroom after a boozy party. He’s walking around in somebody
else’s bespoke cashmere while that guy’s got Cass’ hooded parka, and
only Cass himself seems to have noticed the switch.” The catalyst for
this late night reverie is folded neatly in Cass’ coat pocket—a letter
from Harvard, that Frankfurther nemesis, making him an offer he can’t
refuse. His new book, The Varieties of Religious Illusions,
has turned him into an improbable international superstar, soaring to
the top of bestseller lists, and has been translated into 27 languages,
including Latvian. He has become an intellectual pin-up—his boyish good
looks and ability, according to Time Magazine, “to write of
religious illusions from the standpoint of the regretfully
disillusioned” has earned him the nickname of “the atheist with a
soul.”
That letter from Harvard represents a pinnacle of sorts for Cass and a
point of departure for Goldstein, who uses it as the place from which
to spin this tale forward and backward and every which way. Take, for
instance, Cass’ romantic life. Divorced from a mercurial poet named
Pascale (“Her brilliant words, counter, original, spare, and strange,
had entranced him, but also distracted him, distanced him even as they
pulled him in.”), Cass is besotted with his live-in girlfriend, Lucinda
Mandelbaum, a mathematical genius, author of the Mandelbaum
Equilibrium, and known in academic circles as “the Goddess of Game
Theory.” Lucinda is off presenting a paper at a conference in Santa
Barbara, which conveniently allows for a surprise visit from Roz
Margolis, Cass’ sexy old girlfriend from the days when he was a
student—two decades earlier—of the esteemed professor Jonas Elias
Klapper, who comprised the entire Department of Faith, Literature and
Values at Frankfurter University.
It can be a risky proposition for a novelist to move around freely in
time—odds are that the reader may prefer the past to the present, or
the distant past to the past—but here, Goldstein shows her great
strength as a storyteller, as entertaining as she is erudite. The
backstory of Cass’ complicated relationship with Klapper isn’t just an
academic send-up (none of Klapper’s graduate students ever completes a
doctorate) but a deeply moving story of the professor’s slow descent
into madness.
Cass was Klapper’s prize student, not necessarily because of erudition
or academic promise but due to a quirk of genetics and fate. Klapper
became enamored of Cass’ background—a background Cass himself
rejected—as a descendant of the Valdener Hasidim, a fictional sect that
set down its American roots in a town off the Palisades Parkway that
they called New Valden, but in a clerical error was dubbed New Walden
instead. Cass’ mother was related to the Valdener Rebbe, which in turn
meant that Cass could trace his lineage back to the Ba’al Shem Tov, the
mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Klapper
insisted that Cass drive him to New Walden, and there they meet a
six-year-old boy—son of the Valdener Rebbe—who is a mathematical
prodigy beyond compare, who plays games with prime numbers in his head.
As the Valdener Rebbe tells Cass, the angels taught him. “The angels! Min ha-shamoyim—from
the heavens. This is nothing. He likes to play with numbers. For him
they’re toys, and we let him play. He can learn a page of Torah or
Talmud like lamdin—like scholars—three, four, five times his age. The way he learns now, at six years old, most men will never catch up.”
If books have hearts, this little boy, this genius with the burden of
an entire people on his shoulders, is the beating, thrumming heart of
Goldstein’s novel, his trajectory the most gripping and surprising.
What do we do with the blessings we are given? When the battle is
between the heart and the head, who wins? Who should win?
In a later scene, Cass witnesses the boy proving (in song, no less) an
infinitude of prime numbers during a wedding celebration: “The
Valedeners were deep into their ecstacy. They loved their Rebbe’s son,
the Dauphin of New Walden, heir to the most royal of all lineages,
necessary to the continuity that made their lives worth living, this
small, laughing boy who was bouncing on his dancing father’s back, with
the Valdeners kissing their prayer shawls and reaching out to touch him
as they do when the Torah scroll is paraded among them. The wonderful
child was proof more conclusive than Euclid’s of all that they
believed. They couldn’t know who it was they were loving. But Cass
knew, and his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance
as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance.”
Genius and faith. Genius and loyalty. Genius and ambition. Genius and
madness. Genius and the many varieties of love. Goldstein’s
preoccupations may be rarified, and her story may take place within
ivy-covered walls populated solely by members of Mensa, but she never
loses sight of the fact that one of her many jobs, as a novelist, is to
entertain. Just as the six-year old Valdener math prodigy does mental
cartwheels and backflips just for the sheer joy of sharing all he
knows, Goldstein leaves nothing out. Here, she has taken on some of the
deepest, philosophical questions of human existence and shaped them
into a page-turner at once funny and heartbreaking and challenging
and—yes—proves that there’s no such thing as “too smart” to write a
terrifically engaging novel.
Dani Shapiro’s most recent books include the novels Black and White and Family History and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion. Her new memoir, Devotion, is out in February.
