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.
