The narrator of Janna Levin’s novel can’t stop thinking about Turing and Gödel — “my two mad treasures” — and what their lives have to say about genius, human fragility and abstract truth. This narrator, it should be noted, is a somewhat spectral presence in the book. Although there are few textual clues, we are meant to guess (so says the dust jacket) that it is a woman and a scientist who is addressing us — rather like the author, who teaches physics and astronomy at Columbia University. At a few points in the book, the narrator briefly pops up to tell us that she’s crossing a New York City street, that she’s headed for a subway entrance and that the story she’s relating is a lie. Yet that “story” consists of alternating scenes from the lives of Turing and Gödel — scenes that, though imaginatively filled out, are based on fact and drawn from published biographies. Which raises the question: is this really a novel? Well, if you accept Randall Jarrell’s famous definition of a novel — “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it” — Levin’s book certainly qualifies. In fact, it fits squarely in the subgenre of the novel of ideas. The big idea associated with Gödel is “incompleteness”: no logical system, he proved, can possibly encompass all the truths of mathematics. The big idea associated with Turing is “undecidability”: no purely mechanical method, he showed, can reliably decide what is and what is not a logical truth. Both incompleteness and undecidability are technical notions. Yet they sound existentially fraught, and so (up to a point) they are. Brood on them a bit and you may be led to think about free will, the limits of understanding, the nature of truth, the existence of God. As it happens, both Gödel and Turing exploited the ancient paradox of the liar. This paradox can be succinctly captured in the statement “I am lying,” which is true if it’s false and false if it’s true. So when Levin’s narrator says that she is lying, one should not be too hasty to dismiss this as a cheap metafictional trick.
NYT seems unimpressed, as does Publishers Weekly, but the book earned praise from Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, and Alan Lightman. 'A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,' by Janna Levin |
