I haven't been as challenged by a novel since reading Ulysses at Columbia which turns out to be a fitting comparison: like James Joyce before him, Joshua Cohen, who likely will always be the smartest man in any room, has written a defining book for a new century partially inspired by the modernist classic. He even has transformed Molly's soliloquy, surely literature's most famous verbal orgasm, into a hard working professional woman's furious blogpost about her feckless, unfaithful husband.
A decade after its publication, The Book of Numbers still feels prescient about how the internet is changing humanity. Critics far more knowledgeable than I have noted that its structure follows that of the book with the same name in the Old Testament and Torah which was much redacted before taking its final form. I'm guessing that's behind Cohen's reason for using a great deal of struck-through text in transcribed passages to tell the story of the man responsible for creating the world's dominant search engine, here called Tetration, for reasons that don't become apparent until the end. He, the book's stream-of-consciousness narrator, and the author all share the same name, the primary reason that the tech visionary has hired the narrator, whose own authorial success has been thwarted by the 2001 terrorist attacks.
I took the title more literally, falling deep into the Cohen's fascinating rabbit holes which begin with a tutorial about the utilization of zeroes and ones in the creation of digital technology and include brilliant exegeses of the "random" draft lottery during the Viet Nam War and the impeding threat of Y2K, neither of which are what they have always seemed if the author is to be believed. But, as he might say, numbers don't lie but they certainly can be manipulated by human beings who are motivated as much by obfuscation and greed as by altruism no matter what their race or religion.
Cohen is no slouch in describing the benevolent origins of the internet, either, specifically in creating a transcendent Holocaust metaphor in anticipation of its creation when tracing the lineage of Tetration's founder whose grandfather Joseph fled Ukraine for America before the Nazis could tattoo a number on his forearm. Here's Joseph explaining to Joshua why he's asked him to pick a star out of the night sky as they walk on the beach in Far Rockaway one summer night (the colored background indicates the redactions the narrator has made in the transcript of the conversations he had with the man whose story he is under contract to tell):
But it was difficult to stay in touch with the rest of the family, Joseph said, especially given all the turmoil. It wasn’t like he could just pick up a telephone, or send a telegram so easily. Rather he could, Joseph said, but it wasn’t like the family was always available to pick up the other end, or reply. The post was unreliable too, especially for packages. Instead, Joseph said, we could only think certain thoughts, and they could only think certain thoughts and, but this was important, “Each half of the family had to know that’s what the other half of the family was doing.” Joseph said, “At least, that’s how my father explained it.”
“He told me he’d picked his own star,” Joseph said, “like Polaris—lots of people pick Polaris, especially if they’re young, especially if they live in the north, in the cold. And he told me that if he was in the mood to communicate with his family he faced this star, not at a certain time or from a certain place, but whenever, wherever, and he talked to that star, or he didn’t even talk, he told me, he just poured himself into it, all his life and frustrations, all his feelings, his dreams, he just poured all of himself into that fire.
“Then he told me,” Joseph said, “that I could do the same thing, that I could just find a star, any star—I could find my own or I could use his star, because any star has the capacity of all of them—and I could invest this star with my emotions, I could make this star the outside pocket for everything inside me, and that the family still over in Europe would have their own stars and would do this same thing too, all of them, all of us, sending and receiving.”
[REMOVE FROM DIRECT QUOTATION]
Joseph told Cohen that these communications would become stored in these stars, turning them into mutual archives, common caches, omnipresent and yet evanescent. From which they could be accessed, not at a certain time or from a certain place—“people have to work, after all”—but at any time, and from any place, and ultimately not just by the relations and friends they were intended for but also by anyone sensitive enough to go seeking. Anything ever communicated to a star, Joseph told Cohen, could be accessed even after the death of its transmitter, and, unlike with the spinning satellites and their transmissions, could be accessed and even altered by the dead themselves, and then he mentioned Oma Eve and encouraged Cohen to speak with her in this way, freely, and then he mentioned himself and encouraged Cohen to speak with him in this way too, freely, once he himself passed, to that light on the other side of the darkness.
Several years before Cohen was born in 1980, I worked in publishing and became close friends with an editor at Crown Publishers who lived in Prospect Park. Harriet and her husband joined the book group I organized which Dave (never a reader because of his dyslexia) christened the "Dilly Dally Tante Club" before making himself scarce. Unlike me, Harriet put out quite a spread when the group met at her house. As a joke, she once sketched the difference between meals prepared by Jews and goys, with the plates of the former piled abundantly with food and the latter with the bare minimum.
The Book of Numbers reminds me of her Jewish plate, definitely an OK boomer metaphor: so overstuffed that I had difficulty distinguishing among flavors and barely could finish. Among myriad other topics in his romance/thriller (“subject” and “genre” are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving) Gen X Cohen addresses friendship, publishing, code (so much about coding!), Judaism, surveillance, capitalism, loss, psychology and anthropology through a truly international cast of characters including Americans, Ashkenazi Jews, Pakistanis, Arabs, Koreans, Swedes and Russians, all of them compellingly drawn with convincing and culturally appropriate back stories.
That's not to say it isn't a brilliant, worthwhile book--Harold Bloom included it among the four best works by Jewish writers in America--but c'mon Josh: your vocabulary and penchant for customizing language consistently intimidated the dictionary that accompanies my e-reading app, forcing me--who scored much higher on his verbal than math SATs--to "tetrate" on dozens of occasions for the meaning of words such as “dimidiate." Why not simply describe the moon as half instead?
Cohen's not quite jokey response--absolutely reflective of his more than occasionally exasperating style--can be found buried in the text for the patient and attentive reader:
Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words! so much chancy chancery cursive! The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? the hairy truth?
The "hairy truth" in The Book of Numbers turned out to chime eerily with what was going in our brave new world just as Joshua Cohen was imagining it. His novel's denouement is so sympatico with what happened when whistleblower Edward Snowden uploaded National SecurityAdministration files to Wikileaks that Snowden asked his fellow Gen Xer to help write his memoir after defecting to Russia.
Add prophet to Cohen's incredible portfolio of diverse talents.
