It was Plato who claimed Sappho, the great lyric poet, as the 10th muse, joining her in sisterhood with the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who bestowed divine inspiration across the arts and sciences. In The Tenth Muse, the US novelist Catherine Chung favours a different version of the myth. In her telling, equal parts Brothers Grimm and feminist call to arms, there were not nine daughters born to Mnemosyne but 10. The first nine came of age and duly assumed their gifts but, when it was her turn, the youngest refused. “She did not wish to sing in the voices of men, telling only the stories they wished to tell. She preferred to sing her songs herself.” Her weeping sisters implored her to change her mind, but the 10th muse would not budge. She chose instead to live as a mortal, free to use her voice as she chose.
Since then, Chung writes, she has been “born again in every generation”. A few of her lives are remembered and celebrated, many more have been forgotten, but all have been dearly paid for. In this novel, Chung’s second and her first to be published in the UK, she is Katherine, the daughter of a white American war veteran and his Chinese wife. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in a small town in Michigan, Katherine battles to fit in: her precocious aptitude for mathematics as much as her ethnicity and her awkwardness sets her apart, alienating teachers as well as classmates. But it is not until her mother suddenly leaves home when Katherine is 15, giving no forwarding address, that the certainties on which her life is built begin inexorably to crumble.
What follows is a tale of twin and interlocking fixations: Katherine’s determination to stake her rightful place in the misogynist world of mathematics, and her equal and often opposite hunger to discover the truth of her origins.
The first half of the novel follows Katherine through college, where a male friend passes off her work as his own, to graduate school, where she struggles to escape the shadow of her eminent lover. It is a masterful evocation of the relentless, exhausting effort to be taken seriously at a time when women were supposed to content themselves with being wives and secretaries. “If you were a man,” one of her professors tells her, “you’d have a brilliant future ahead of you.” Little surprise, then, that Katherine finds comfort in science, with “its fixed rules that never changed and never lied”. One of the joys of the novel is the skill with which Chung, a maths graduate herself, evokes the beauty of mathematics, the exhilarating grace and precision of its patterns.
Another is its easy scholarship. At times, the book reads like a memoir or the best kind of essay, ranging from Hypatia of Alexandria, the mathematician and philosopher murdered as a witch, to Emmy Noether, who resolved a nagging problem in Einstein’s general theory of relativity but was disparaged by her male peers, and in due course her obituarists, for lacking feminine charm. There is a cameo appearance by the nuclear physicist Maria Mayer, whose local paper in 1963 marked her greatest achievement with the headline: “San Diego housewife wins Nobel prize”.
But Chung is also careful to explore the personal cost of her protagonist’s struggle. Little by little, Katherine hardens. Her stubborn resolve, so necessary to her work, solidifies into inflexibility, an unflinching adherence to principle that will rob her of her best chances of happiness. “All my life I’d been forced to fight my way through,” she admits, “and I no longer knew how to stop.”
The novel is less successful in its second half, when it moves away from the campus and Katherine’s academic work to pursue the unanswered questions about her family. Katherine’s most precious possession is a brown leather notebook, apparently brought back from the war by her father as a souvenir. The notebook, filled with formulae and equations, has the initials SM scrawled on the flyleaf, and beneath them “Universität Göttingen, 1935”. As Katherine travels to Germany to unravel its secrets, Chung’s seductively cool acuity gives way to a quest-based plot that contrives to be both overcooked and predictable. The stories and digressions, so satisfyingly folded into the narrative in the earlier parts of the book, feel strained. The more Chung focuses on Katherine’s search for answers, the less she reveals of Katherine herself.
The considerable rewards of this intelligent novel are to be found instead in the ordinary struggles of Katherine’s lived present, in the impossible choices she and other gifted women of her generation were forced to make, the concessions she had no option but to accept. And in the bitter realisation that in life, unlike mathematics, the only solutions were both messy and approximate.
• The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung is published by Little, Brown (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
