Book Review: The MANIAC, A Book About the Extremes of Reason by Benjamin Labatut

Book Review: The MANIAC, A Book About the Extremes of Reason by Benjamin Labatut

By Don Curren

                                                        

I’d been reading raves about this novel since it was published last September. I finally had a chance to read it earlier this month, and I’d have to say it lives up to the high expectations those raves engendered.

The MANIAC, published last year, is a sui generis kind of book. It’s mostly a fictional retelling of the extraordinary life and times of John Von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician and scientist. 

A child prodigy who could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and converse in Ancient Greek at age six, Von Neumann went on to apply his intellect to an astonishing array of subjects, and made pivotal contributions to quantum physics, economics, fluid dynamics, set theory, the development of the atomic bomb, and perhaps most importantly computer science, among other things.

(The MANIAC referred to in the title is the acronym for a pioneering computer that Von Neumann helped create, the “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer.”)

The account of Von Neumann’s singular life is bookended by a brief but riveting account of the life and death of the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, and a retelling of the 2015 confrontation between the AI AlphaGo and South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol.

The MANIAC is Labatut’s first book in English, and on that level alone it’s a remarkable achievement. It’s beautifully written, featuring some sentences that last for dozens of words but nonetheless hang together elegantly.

Structurally, it’s also remarkable. Labatut chooses to tell Von Neumann’s life chronologically, but as a polyphonous sequence of first-person narratives told by the people who interacted with Von Neumann throughout his short but dramatic life – boyhood friends, colleagues and rivals in Europe and the U.S., his two wives and daughter.

It's an interesting choice. It’s effective – I came away from the book feeling like I had some sense of Von Neumann as a human being, and of the dramatic and pivotal times he lived in.

But it also means Von Neumann is seen at two removes. Instead of encountering him directly as a character, as we might in a more conventional piece of historical or biographical fiction, we see him through the eyes of Labatut’s fictional recreations of the people who interacted with him.

As much as we learn about Von Neumann in the course of The Maniac, he necessarily remains a distant and somewhat abstract figure.

Labatut’s approach captures an essential truth: ultimately our knowledge of other human beings is always perspectival. We know them only from the outside, and from our own point of view.

But the creative imagination of an author can offer us something more: through the use of first-person narratives, novelists and other fiction writers can offer at least a speculative version of their characters’ lives from the inside looking out.

Providing that perspective is beyond Labatut’s self-imposed mandate, but his book left me wondering at times what it was like to be like Von Neumann, to see the world and its denizens from his utterly unique perspective.

It’s almost as if the reader would be best served by two books: Labatut’s externalized account and a subjective, first-person version.

His approach also left me with some uncertainty about ultimately how compatible Labatut’s version is the historical record.

Although Labatut does provide a short note about his sources, it’s not enough to clarify how historically informed some of the episodes in The MANIAC are.

For instance, one of the last reflections on Von Neumann’s life is from the perspective of a long-term friend and colleague Eugene Wigner, a Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist who first met Von Neumann when they were schoolboys.

In it, Labatut has Wigner quoting from the final letter sent to him by Von Neumann which describes technology as seeming to be approaching some “essential singularity.”

It’s a fascinating prospect, that Von Neumann may have anticipated the idea of the “singularity” popularized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it’s not clear from the book the letter actually existed, and an hour or so of searching on the internet didn’t prove sufficient to confirm its existence.

There were other episodes in the book like that, and, overall, they left me with a rather unsettled feeling about how it relates to the historical record.

I don’t object to novelists dramatizing or even imaging episodes from the lives of people who actually existed. But I like to come away from historically inspired novels with a fairly clear sense of the broad historical accuracy of the main points, and I didn’t always have that with The MANIAC.

I don’t believe Labatut was intentionally misleading, though. In fact, I believe that a sincere desire to explore the mysteries of the one of the foundational intellects of the modern world was behind this fascinating book.

The glimpse it provides into Von Neumann’s extraordinary mind – and into the modern world it played a pivotal role in creating – makes it a riveting, illuminating and worthwhile read.