I disliked this book, which I feel bad about. It is fun and well-written, much more so than most books I read. It is at core a snobby intellectual book, and I am pro-snob – there are many benefits to having high standards you care about and the downsides are largely due to humans having a species-wide mental illness where they can’t stand being filtered out based on heuristics that others have developed so they can live better lives. But.
Here’s a summary of the novel:
Sibylla, a single mother of extraordinary intellectual gifts stuck in dead-end temp work in London, raises her son Ludo — who turns out to be a terrifying prodigy — while they watch Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai on loop, the film functioning as a kind of moral and aesthetic curriculum. Ludo teaches himself ancient Greek, Japanese, mathematics, and several other languages before he’s school-age.
The central tension arrives when Ludo, around eleven, decides he needs to find his biological father; Sibylla refuses to tell him who it is (because the father is a mediocre travel writer whom she slept with so that he would stop talking). Ludo independently seeks out a series of men he thinks might be his father, each of them exceptional in some domain — a pianist, an explorer, a painter, others — and each encounter is a short story where he tests whether the potential father is also excellent outside of the domain. The book has some formally weird parts: Greek and Japanese text, mathematical notation, all in service of its core preoccupation with what it means to give a gifted child a life worthy of their capacity when you’re broke, isolated, and surrounded by mediocrity.
It is ambitious, erudite, beautifully written, and it’s unfair that I find it somewhat repellent. I’m repelled because the book is about intellectuality, but I think it glorifies the aesthetics of intellectuality while stripping out the core. Another way to put it is that it glorifies the aesthetics of the gifted child, and not at all the aesthetic of the gifted adult.
The characters are eternal dilettantes. They’re not trying to solve problems (including their own pressing problem of having a soul-sucking job that doesn’t pay enough to be a single mother). They don’t have projects that are meant to enact any change in the world. Their hobbies are learning new languages and doing math for the sake of math. The kid learns Fourier transforms to try to impress one of his prospective dads and there’s no mention of anything interesting he could do in the real world with them. The book is big mad about normies who are surprised your child is reading Homer on the subway, and short on answers on why it is, exactly, that they are reading Homer. Why Homer? What do they get out of it? What question are they trying to answer? And it seems like, under the surface, the answer comes down to “because it’s on the default gifted kid syllabus”.
The characters learn a dozen languages, and the juxtaposition of the multilingual thing and their attitudes annoyed me because, you see: one uses language to communicate with other human beings.
Part of the test is to find your peers. One of the great uses of being a snob is that you can find people who meet your standards. The mother and son protagonists don’t share their enthusiasm with others. They don’t find peers or partners –they stay home and read. It’s hard to take the book seriously as a depiction of the pursuit of excellence when it implicitly claims all worthy intellectual collaborators are poets or filmmakers who are so safely entombed in history you cannot share anything of yourself with them.
If dozens of people worthy of dialogue existed a few hundred years ago, then hundreds of them must exist now due to population growth. Yet the book upholds isolation as a feature of intellectuality when, in the era the book takes place in, there is no excuse for not finding your equals.