Doubt battles with certainty throughout the engrossing seventh book from US novelist and short-story writer Ethan Canin, which explores the tortured mind of a mathematical genius and the blessing and burden of being gifted. “If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things,” wrote Descartes. Doubting makes Milo Andret an excellent mathematician, adept at questioning received wisdom, but we read in horror as he becomes consumed by crippling self-doubt.
How do you solve a problem like Malosz? That question keeps our obsessive protagonist awake at night as a graduate student at Berkeley, California, where he is striving to solve the Malosz mathematical conjecture. To do so, he believes that “the parts of him that were Milo Andret needed to go away”. Solving the Malosz brings him renown and a prestigious professorship at Princeton, but he cannot escape his self-destructive proclivities, and now we wonder: how do you solve a problem like Milo?
Dysfunctional families abound in fiction, and at the heart of this book is an “extravagantly sad family”. The fractures deepen in the novel’s second part, narrated by Milo’s son, who chronicles his parents’ disintegrating marriage and his father’s devastating descent into alcoholism and violence: he hits his wife, threatens his daughter and smashes up the house with a crowbar. (“My parents were not affectionate people,” explains Milo’s son with a dark, deadpan humour that infuses the novel.)
Here, as in all his fiction, Canin is adroit in conjuring a sense of place, from the “fathomless and dark” lake in northern Michigan, where Milo spent his solitary 1950s childhood, to California’s “ocean light billowing all the time in the sky like a sheet snapping on a line”.
Just as vivid is the evocation of “interior geography”, as the novel ventures into the murkiest corners of Milo’s mind. While Descartes advocated doubting all things at least once in your life, Milo’s problem is that he is “stricken all the time with doubt”. His early success is followed by personal and professional failures; he finds himself “careening” and laments a wasted decade struggling to solve another mathematical problem only to be beaten by a teenage rival.
Milo is more often pathetic than sympathetic but is nevertheless an absorbing character. The more he doubts himself, the more believable he becomes. The minor characters, though, are less credible, and the portrayals of Milo’s blushing female flatterers and calculating colleagues at times verge on cliche. Much like its protagonist, A Doubter’s Almanac is variously brilliant, flawed and frustrating.
Although Milo once “solved a problem that was thought to be unsolvable”, the poignant and seemingly unfathomable question haunting him is: “What was it like to have someone in the world who loved you?” The pathos is powerful as we see him hurting those who love him most. Canin compellingly explores characters grappling not only with mathematical problems but, most movingly, with the complexities of the human heart.
A Doubter’s Almanac is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.57
