In Roger Ebert’s review of Robert Altman’s 1975 film “Nashville,” he praises the movie’s ability to effortlessly capture the zeitgeist of the 1970s. “(Altman) does it all so easily, or seems to, that watching ‘Nashville’ is as easy as breathing and as hard to stop,” he writes.
I came upon Ebert’s review as I was finishing Joshua Cohen’s ambitious new novel, “Book of Numbers,” which aims to capture the zeitgeist of the digital now. Ebert put his finger on what worked in Altman’s film, and what did and did not in Cohen’s book. When “Book of Numbers” feels as “easy as breathing” to read, it achieves brilliance. When it feels like work — for Cohen and the reader — it is a slog.
The book revolves around an author named, like the author of the book, Joshua Cohen. The narrator of the story, Cohen is a failed author at the end of a failed marriage. He makes ends meet writing fake reviews on social media sites and ghost-writing. He also shares a name with “the genius, googolionaire, Founder and CEO of Tetration.com,” a Google-Apple-Facebook-like megacorporation.
Tetration.com’s Joshua Cohen hires the narrator to ghost-write his biography, dragging the author Cohen around the globe as he recounts his life and unveils the inner workings of his company. “Book of Numbers” is a mash-up of that partially written biography, plus transcriptions of the two Cohens’ conversations and the lesser-known Cohen’s recounting of his own life.
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“Book of Numbers” cruises during Cohen’s recountings of his travels with his “googolionaire” sponsor, known as “Principal” throughout the book. In these passages, Cohen is a witty Marco Polo in Kublai Khan’s court, an astute foreign observer. Here is Cohen at an over-the-top Silicon Valley birthday party for Principal:
I waited for my hooch behind a pornstached chillionaire and his two brogrammer friends, by which I mean his coworkers at #Summersize, according to their shirts and shorts and hats.
One said, “You can’t change the scale without scaling the change.”
Another said, “Evoke transcendence.”
The chillionaire said, “Will you stop reading that neurolinguistic reinforcement pickup artist (stuff)?”
This is fun. The work that went into writing those sentences is invisible. As Cohen put it, “all books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.” In these passages, and many more like it, he succeeds. These hum along, filled with wry observations and inventive wordplay.
But about a third of the way through, Cohen launches into a 250-page biography of Principal and the work, submerged until now, surfaces. This seems to be deliberate, in part, as Cohen shows us edits, in the form of crossed-out passages and all-caps author’s notes. This is Cohen’s attempt to reveal the effort, something missing, he says, from the digital page. “Screens preserve no blemishes or failures. Screens preserve nothing human… Only a page can register the sorrows of the crossings, bad word choice, good word choice gone bad, the gradual dulling of pencil lead, which is graphite.”
And yet these reflections of effort are speed bumps for the reader. These passages are dense. Many involve long side trips. There is a long exposition of the development of the remote control (“Now initially the way the unimote business went was custom, bespoke, and so never very profitable.”) There is a multipage explanation — with diagrams — of Principal’s invented language (“The letter he needed had to have a shape that allowed for representational or symbolic variance — many points, many limbs.”) There are lines of programming code. There is a heaviness here that doesn’t exist in the first third or last third of “Book of Numbers.”
These bookending sections save the work and make it worth the effort of wading through the middle. These sections manage the difficult task of making our familiar digital world seem foreign and strange. “Book of Numbers” author Cohen, a digital native, writes as if he is Marco Polo. This is a great feat, and a gift to us, allowing us to see ourselves from afar.
This digital life is a source of great connection and information and convenience, but also anxiety, loneliness and loss. The migration of the world online feels like a profound, even epic, shift in the way life is lived. Whether this is true or not will be clear many years from now. In the meantime, Cohen offers us, in sections of “Book of Numbers,” a sketch of some part of now that feels effortlessly true.
Trine Tsouderos is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.
“Book of Numbers”
By Joshua Cohen, Random House, 592 pages, $28