‘A stunning new talent, announcing itself fully formed’ – Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
Julius Taranto’s wickedly satirical and refreshingly irreverent debut novel, a young physicist finds herself exiled to an island research institute that gives safe harbour to ‘cancelled’ artists and academics
Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable.
As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement. As the rift between them deepens, they both face major – and potentially world-altering – choices.
Hilarious, provocative and thought-provoking, How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches our moral confusion in a genuine and fresh way, examining the price we’re willing to pay for progress and what it means, in the end, to be a good person.
Release date:
September 12, 2023
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
304
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
The Rubin Institute had nothing to do with high-temperature superconductors, so I cannot say I had spent much time thinking about it.
Hew explained the whole drama: We thought we had purged our moral grotesques—the harassers, racists, bigots, zealots. The problem was these people technically had contracts. They held equity, tenure, real estate. They were hanging around the universities we thought we had shooed them from. Important conferences on graph theory and seventeenth-century Welsh agriculture were being derailed by disconcerted whispers that he had showed up and had the temerity to ask a question of the panel.
So there was some appeal to the idea that these people would now go live on an island in the North Atlantic. This new Institute said: Give me your cancellees and deplorables, your preeminent deviants, we’ll take them! The popular vision, at the beginning, was of an academic prison colony where the worst-behaved of great minds would live out their days, closed off from the pleasures of civilized life.
We had not, Hew said, expected them to have such a good time. We had not expected the footage of one probable bigot and one confirmed groper strolling across lush seaside lawns, sitting on a slim white beach, clinking their Fields Medals in a taunting toast, it seemed, to every despicable act they had never paid for. It turned out the last thing these people wanted was our civilization. At the Rubin Institute Plymouth they had their own. It was a libertarian, libertine dream: bottomless funding, unencumbered by institutional regulations. They screwed students and eschewed trigger warnings. The enticing promise the Institute made to faculty was: No Code of Conduct, no Human Resources, only Your Work. The promise it made to students—wait, there would be students??—this promise was: Learn from geniuses, graduate sans debt, feel free to carry mace.
The Institute was shooting the moon, taking the human discards that no one else wanted, and winning. The place became a media fixation. Its faculty were enemies of the people—we had wanted them exiled—but then they had not been sent to Siberia! It was Sandals for scandals, with tax-exempt status.
The prior year 122 Presidential Merit Scholars had passed up Harvard to go there for free. It was an outrage. It could not go on.
Demonstrations ran perpetually on the New Haven pier. This was where the ferry departed for Plymouth Island, which the Institute had purchased entire. The pier was ground zero for all the wrong the Institute represented. It was a nuclear testing site, an oil pipeline on Indigenous land; now and then someone chained herself across the gangplank.
Hew and I watched the ferry’s burbling stern nudge into the dock.
Meanwhile thirty or forty protesters, probably Yale undergraduates, waved signs along the lines of Benefit Is Complicity; Attendance Is Assent.
Hew clutched my hand. He smirked apologetically at no one in particular. This was an attempt to communicate that the situation was not how it appeared. It was not him, not the tall blondish man, but rather the small Jewish woman beside him who had compelled us to move to what several nearby signs called Rape Island.
3.
My subject was the Zhou-Eisenstadt-Smoot Theoretical Model. After college I had declined lucrative offers from Google and J.P. Morgan so that I might toil in graduate studies under the supervision of Smoot himself. Newton and Leibniz concurrently invented calculus; Smoot, concurrently and eventually in collaboration with Zhou and Eisenstadt, modeled the relation between pressure and superconductivity. Their theory’s predictions bore out, plotting the curve of experimentally measured electrical resistance almost exactly. ZEST was accurate to so many decimal places that Zhou, Eisenstadt, and Smoot were asked to meet the King of Sweden.
Still, the whole superconductivity phenomenon was barely understood. The ZEST model was the best that had been done, but it was hardly a comprehensive account. I was unusually promising. I had been told I might have the capacity to improve ZEST, even to render it general—the kind of thing that would mean a Nobel of my own. At the very least I could contribute to the field. Provided the right advisor would guide me. Zhou was in China. Eisenstadt: dead in a dreadful accelerator accident, particles everywhere. Perry Smoot and Cornell University: eager to take me on. He said we had the same kind of mind, which in retrospect should have concerned me.
I should have known something was amiss when Perry was in his office on a Friday. This had never happened in over four years. Then one Friday he was at his desk, on the phone, a nod to me as I passed on my way to lab. Curious! I thought. But there was code to write, test, rewrite. At this point Perry did not trust anyone besides me to write his code. Our model was an attempt to simulate the flow of electricity through candidate high-temp superconductors. We passed the model back and forth like a relay baton, and I felt we were making progress almost daily; I was alive with it. So I was not thinking about how it must have taken something dire for Perry to be on campus on Friday. I was not thinking that the target of an internal investigation does not generally select the date of his administrative hearing.
When he was again in his office on Saturday, I should have thought: This is a five-alarm fire. Instead I was thinking that there was obviously a better way to sum interlayer Josephson interactions, but could it be done without iterating the Markov-chain quantum Monte Carlo algorithm (which would of course create insurmountable computing problems)?
The following Wednesday, Perry was again in his office and I was beckoned to enter.
Perry appeared as usual. He tilted back in his immense executive desk chair, draped in a seersucker sports coat, miles of starched fabric spanning his huge stomach, fingers clasped across a wide tie speckled with tiny equestrians. He was a big brilliant queer of the Oxbridge style. He had clean round jowls and wide round eyes beneath a clean wide round bald head. A geologically bald head.
Perry said, You and I will be moving to the Rubin Institute.
Why? I said.
Devlin, he said.
Really.
Devlin was one of my peers, nominally. But his code was clunky and inefficient, his models sadly lacking in physical intuition. Whether he completed his degree or not, Devlin was destined to thrive at J.P. Morgan.
Perry said, The rule these days, apparently, is that Nobel Prize winners may fuck only other Nobel Prize winners. Perry’s insistent round eyes waited for me to laugh.
I don’t want to go to the Rubin Institute, I said.
I was not as intensely Online as Hew, did not yet know all of the historical particulars, but I knew generally why one went to the Rubin Institute and who one’s company there would be.
Perry said, Do you intend to learn Mandarin?
Hew will not want to go to the Rubin Institute, I said.
Unless you intend to work with Zhou, there is no one for you besides me, and I am going to the Rubin Institute. It is all arranged. We have funding. Your credits will transfer.
I massaged my temples with my fingers.
We need each other, Helen.
How could you have—?
It is for the best, said Perry, imperturbable.
It won’t be your ass getting pinched.
Oh please.
I stood and said: Zai jian.
4.
Hew had sufficient outrage for the both of us. So reckless! Even setting aside Devlin—poor Devlin!—doesn’t Perry see how it hurts others? Affects us! We hitched our wagon!
I thought: Yes, and what about disrupting delicate daily progress on high-temperature superconductivity??
Perry had almost unprecedented ability to diagonalize a matrix but was as dumb as anyone, apparently, when it came to sex. Probably he did not have much of it. Devlin on the other hand was handsome and he knew it. He was confident, toned, sensual. We had known each other pretty well at the beginning of grad school, but within a couple of years we’d diverged onto different tracks. Devlin skipped conferences to hang out in the city. I could not say it aloud, even to Hew, but I thought if I had to place bets on who started it, who was really in control…
So it was hard to be mad about the sex. What I was mad about was that according to Devlin, according to the Times, Perry had said he would recommend Devlin to Caltech. Such a recommendation was a career guarantee. You could accomplish nothing for the rest of your life and still you would be considered brilliant, promising, someone whom Perry Smoot had recommended to Caltech. Meanwhile Devlin was not even allowed to touch Perry’s code! Perhaps Devlin had discerned that Perry would not, could not, really follow through vis-à-vis Caltech? Anyway there was hard evidence, emails, texts. Devlin showed these to the university’s Title IX Coordinator. The hearing was a formality. Perry admitted responsibility.
Shortly thereafter—perhaps the same day?—Perry made arrangements with the Rubin Institute. Nobel laureate, canceled for a noncriminal infraction, working on high-temp superconductors. Fellows like Perry were RIP’s very raison. They said, When can you get here?
Anyway Hew persuaded me that we could absolutely not go to the Rubin Institute.
For a semester we tried not going to the Rubin Institute.
But only one man is the S in ZEST. There is one Large Hadron Collider; the rest of physics is human capital. Perry was unique. Without him the model stalled. I was writing code that might be mistaken for Devlin’s—mired in bugs and bad assumptions that Perry would have seen around. Our simulation seemed suddenly far too big for me to attempt alone. I could not demonstrate even incremental progress when no one besides Perry and myself, and sometimes not even us, had any clue what the end state might look like. The department tried to step in, to help Perry’s orphans. But no one else had been so tightly linked to him. I was helpless even to articulate the problems I was up against.
Ithaca is a particularly dreary place to lack purpose. I wrote pleading 2 a.m. emails to Zhou using automated translation. When these proved indecipherable, I audited Mandarin 101 for a few months and finally lost Zhou altogether after pasting 1200 lines of code into an email. Subject: PLEASE QING BANG WO!!
July, I called Perry.
August, I told Hew I had called Perry.
Hew admitted that he had never seen me so miserable. Yet the Rubin Institute, Cancel U—just impossible! Hew asked: Really, how hard is Mandarin? Really, would it be the worst to work at J.P. Morgan?
I said, You are a socialist.
Better than RIP.
So would I have to go alone?
Now he understood the gravity of the situation.
5.
It was a matter of some uncertainty whether Hew and I were married.
Well, we unquestionably were married, from a legal standpoint, as we had at one point early on required a marriage license to share subsidized graduate housing. At issue was whether we had ever transformed this technicality into a proper marriage through simultaneous shared intention, a meeting of the minds, a synchronized mutual commitment.
At one point I had been sure we really were married, but then Hew said something like, When we get married properly…So then I was sure we were not. Then a few months later I might say, in passing, When we get married properly…and Hew would look up and ask: Do you think we’re not married yet?? The condition was unstable, evading description. It was Schrödinger’s wedlock; we were both hitched and not.
Soon it became a game. One of us might assert, for instance: We will be spending the rest of our lives together, so we really should be in agreement about X. The other was then obliged to say: We will? Or, another instance, Hew might introduce me to a new acquaintance as: My spouse, Helen. To which I would say: I am??
Any failure from Partner B to deny the marriage asserted by Partner A would, it was understood, result in the end of the game: matrimony.
So I now said to Hew: I can’t believe you would want me to go to the Rubin Institute alone. You’re my husband.
Am I?
A school of chauvinists, harassers, genuine rapists, Hew—not to mention racists, anti-Semites. You are saying I should go there, to this island, nowhere to run, without my spouse.
I am saying, said Hew, that you should not go at all. You can do without Perry. I believe in you. Also, who’s your spouse?
I don’t know.
You don’t know that I believe in you?
I don’t know that I can do it without Perry—or that he can do it without me. I doubt anyone could build this model alone. Probably we need a whole firm of engineers, an Army corps.
Except for how you don’t trust other people.
A clone army then. Myself multiplied tenfold and Perry multiplied…maybe twice?
If cloning Perry were required to save the world, it might not be worth it.
I said: You think you’re joking, but that actually gets to the heart of it. I don’t understand why you get so caught up in the means of things. Have you never encountered a hard choice? Are all good things done only by irreproachably good people?
Hew glowered. He said, I don’t understand why you don’t just do something else. There are hundreds of very smart people working on high-temperature superconductivity. I believe you could solve it but do you really think you are essential? Let Zhou generalize ZEST. He’ll figure it out.
Hew was trying to make me mad and had succeeded. I said: This is—this is the point of me. This is my problem. For forty years no one has been able to solve this and I really might solve it if I can work with Perry again. Yes he is a schmuck and he put us in a bad spot but for god’s sake have a little perspective.
Hew said Okay, then stood and left the apartment.
He did not come back until pretty late. This gave the smog of my condescension some time to clear. Hew did remote IT support; actually he ran an IT team, was great at it. But, well, he was not at the vanguard of condensed-matter physics.
In the morning I tried a different pitch.
I said: Okay, think about it this way. Think about it like a sacrifice. The world cannot waste Perry. Who knows how much longer he will live?
I thought of the wheezing I could hear when Perry climbed the steps into the physics building; the arsenal of cardiovascular medications occupying half a cabinet in his kitchen.
Someone must make the next step, I said. It is too important to leave undone or even to delay. The ice caps are melting. We submerge into this strange dark world, RIP, but temporarily! Then we return like Prometheus, bearing gifts, knowledge, an unfathomable boon of superconductivity for all humanity. And if we go, if I can do it, no one else will have to go to Rape Island to solve HTS.
Hew said: Look, if you fail, we will never live it down. And if you succeed you will be validating the whole disgusting model of that place. You will make it so that awful backward men can forever claim that this perverse libertarian experiment is the success that gave us high-temperature superconductivity—and at a woman’s hands, no less.
So be it.
There was one other thing that Hew demanded.
I want a moral offset. If we are going to the fucking Rubin Institute, if we are going to be complicit, we have got to go vegan.
6.
The ferry churned forward. The protesters’ chants grew faint, vaguely pathetic, and soon disappeared behind us into the fog. We stood on the top deck facing into the chop of late-summer wind. I had been hungry for three weeks. I fantasized about cheeseburgers.
Hew tilted against the railing, swaying slightly with the boat’s motion, his lips and cheeks pink in the summer sun. He was exceptionally thin—narrow forehead, sharp cheeks and chin and nose, a stomach that often seemed concave. But also he was tall, with wide shoulders. The first time I’d seen him I’d thought of him not as a person I desired but as a wiry structure I wished to climb. Presently I took his hand, for I was not above gratitude, and he kissed the top of my frizzy head. Then he detached his arm to wipe sea-spray from his glasses.
We were about a week late to the start of term. Astonishingly this had been no problem from a bureaucratic standpoint. Perry told someone that we were coming and would need housing, identification cards. Allegedly these issues were sorted. There had been only one form to sign to see all my academic credits, years of graduate study, seamlessly transferred into this new institutional framework. Another omnibus form covered health care, taxes, employment, liability waivers. I signed both on my phone. The ease of the whole thing felt amazing, felt right. Even Hew admitted the user experience was top-notch.
No cars were permitted on the island. It was small, a few square miles, with much of the land—the beaches, the cliffs, the forest—set aside for conservation. Walking was encouraged. When necessary, automated electric golf carts could be summoned by app, gratis. Accordingly we had sold our Subaru.
Plymouth Island resolved into view. It seemed almost to glow. Moist morning light refracted off Great Cliff, the rocky beaches, the immaculate lawns. The little town was all white-painted clapboard, black trim, gray shingles, sooty brick. Boats jostled and clinked in the marina.
Hew said, Oh my god.
Now, we had heard about this, had seen photos, but we did not expect—
Above all the quaintness loomed the throbbing center of the Institute: an enormous, rounded, beige tower. Its long shadow fell in a bold line across the academic pastures, the beach, even reaching the water. In the tower were offices, labs, classrooms, libraries, theaters, housing. (Also—a key feature of Perry’s pitch—a 522-petaflop supercomputer on which we could preempt any project based outside the Institute. No more months wasted waiting to run the simulation!!) To build a tower so large on an island so small, to root it deep in the island’s brittle rock, this had taken marvelous and pricey engineering. It was unmistakably a phallus. It was known as the Endowment.
7.
Perry waited for us dockside. He was in fine form. Tan suit, straw trilby, Dr. Strangelove sunglasses, bow tie peppered with lacrosse sticks—his face beaming. He even embraced Hew, which must have been a first. For years they had been in a vaguely adversarial posture, each the other man in my life. Now I supposed Perry felt himself the gracious victor.
Perry set off striding through the cobblestoned town. It was picturesque, the shop windows manicured with bold-. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...