The opening chapter of Benjamín Labatut’s second novel is such a perfect distillation of his technique that it could serve as a manifesto. One morning in 1933, Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest pays a visit to his disabled child, Vassily. Ehrenfest has enjoyed a dazzling career, but recently has been seized by despair. Nazism is the most urgent threat, but Ehrenfest is troubled too by a less tangible development: the quantum revolution, most notably the work of Hungarian wunderkind John von Neumann. Ehrenfest experiences this new theoretical direction as a kind of unravelling, a fog of “logical contradictions, uncertainties, and indeterminacies” he feels entirely unable to penetrate. Having moved his son to Amsterdam, Ehrenfest has shielded him from the horrors of the Nazi regime. What he cannot protect him from, though, is the quantum world to come – a world defined by “a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence … completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs”. Appalled by a future he regards as inevitable, Ehrenfest shoots his son, then himself.
Ehrenfest is an avatar for The Maniac’s true focus – the trail of Von Neumann’s ideas through game theory, the nuclear bomb, microprocessing and, ultimately, artificial intelligence (the “Maniac” of the title is a mammoth computer). Unfolding largely as a semi-fictional oral history, The Maniac attempts an intellectual portrait not only of Von Neumann the man, but of his thought as a force in the world. Through a cascade of staccato chapters, an ensemble of narrators offer their piecemeal insights. From Von Neumann’s mother we learn what he was like as a baby. From his two wives we learn what he was like at home. And through a procession of colleagues and peers we gather the deep significance (and obvious novelistic appeal) of his discoveries.
Readers familiar with Labatut’s previous novel, 2020’s wildly successful When We Cease to Understand the World, will recognise the sense of breathlessness his best writing can evoke. Seemingly loosened from the laws of physics they describe, his sentences range freely through time and space, connecting not only characters and events, but the delicate tissue of intellectual history, often with a lightness of touch that belies their underlying complexity: “In his personal life he could not escape the slow and constant advance of his mental disorder, which seemed, like the entropy of the universe he had so wonderfully captured in his equation, to be constantly and irreversibly increasing, leading to inevitable randomness and decay.” Rare indeed is the writer whose style can expand in this way: establishing itself in the physiological, swelling to touch on the cosmic, finding an uneasy communion between the two. Rarer still is the writer who can do it in a second language: unlike in his first novel, the Chilean Labatut is working here directly into English.
All that a brilliant novel requires, then – talent, ambition, skill, intelligence – is present in abundance. And yet, somehow, a brilliant novel is not quite what we end up with. It’s a thermodynamic conundrum. With this much creative energy invested, why does the result feel underpowered?
The problem is one of diffusion. Labatut simply spreads himself too thin. Too many years in too few pages; too many voices with far too little to distinguish them. Initially intriguing, the bite-size monologues quickly come to feel inadequate. One depersonalised Middle European monologue blurs into another. Only a few are given the space to take on life. At regular intervals the rigidity of Labatut’s design forces from the mouths of his narrators a kind of Wikipedic exposition, void of the liveliness of true human speech. (“The philosophical implications of Gödel’s logic were astonishing, and his incompleteness theorems, as they later came to be known, are now considered a fundamental discovery”; “Industrialisation was exploding all around us”.) Had the polyphonic narration been matched by a more radical temporal structure, the novel might have felt more pleasingly unpredictable. Labatut, though, seems afraid of even the slightest chaos. Clinging doggedly to chronology, he throws his pacing askew. Von Neumann’s childhood and early adulthood occupy too much space; his time in the New Mexico desert, building the first nuclear bomb alongside an all but absent Oppenheimer, too little.
One of the strongest voices in the book belongs to the physicist Richard Feynman, who renders the first test detonation in language appropriately akin to divine revelation: “The flash was unlike anything. When it hit me, I was sure that I’d been blinded. In that first fraction of a second, I could see nothing but light, solid white light filling my eyes and obliterating my mind, a terrible opaque brightness that had erased the entire world.”
Passages such as these are doubly revealing: they show us what Labatut can do, but remind us how rarely he allows himself to do it. Here, as in that brilliant opening, and again at the novel’s conclusion during a surprisingly gripping account of a game of Go, Labatut reaps the rewards of a closer focus, a fixed moment in which his talents and themes can cohere. There is a reason the epigraph for this novel comes from a mystic and not from a scientist. Labatut is drawn to the far edge of knowledge and inquiry, where science bleeds chaotically into faith and madness. The moments in which these ways of knowing collide should comprise his strongest territory, and yet he rushes on, years still to cover, moving at a panicked sprint, as if afraid his readers will desert him. It is a self-defeating strategy: heat at the expense of illumination. At the moments we need him to linger, Labatut is already gone.
“I wonder,” remarks one narrator, late in the novel, as he considers the dying Von Neumann, “what we would have seen had we looked inside Von Neumann’s head.” We should not be left to wonder; it is to the novelist we look for insight. In offering too much to our attention, Labatut denies us the intimacy we seek. Ultimately, it’s a distance even talent cannot bridge.
• The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut is published by Pushkin (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
