This book was published about 17 months ago and I received it as a Christmas gift about 15 months ago. It was from my friend David, who previously gifted me Aliss at the Fire. That book was quite short and took me 71 days to read and I did not get it. This ended up taking me about 420 days to read and I loved it.
Technically I didn't start reading it until about January 16 this year, so it actually took about 50 days. And it was slow going at the beginning. David did not gift me with Solenoid, but he suggested we both read and review it, and I had taken it with me to Mexico in 2023. I got about 100 pages into it and while slow, seemed to be building towards something potentially great. We ultimately abandoned the dueling review idea, perhaps because this was too hard for me after seeing Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for Literature and not properly loving Aliss. Thus on my second trip to Mexico, a little less than 2 years later, I brought The MANIAC and had early misgivings. Because this isn't a traditional book.
At first blush, I feel driven to compare it to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (a review from the early days!) and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry (a "short form" review, 10 years after the former and 6 years ago now, which did it no justice whatsoever, despite the 8/10 rating). This is merely due to the structure of the book. These are all "tripartite novels." They flow together by different degrees. This is my favorite of the three, and the other two are quite good.
The other obvious referent here is Oppenheimer. And while I don't want to spoil what's going on in this novel, or the unsettling reading experience it offers, that feels impossible to avoid. I simply could not tell which parts of the story were real, and I did not look up anything about it online, and when it was ultimately disclosed, it felt like the last revelation after many others in the preceding pages. Perhaps I can try to hide the ball.
***
This is a book about mathematics. Because I have led a foolish life, I have always considered mathematics to be boring. I did not understand anyone that wanted to be a math major unless they wanted to go into engineering or computer science or programming. I was quite good at math, but I stopped after high school, and did not take any coursework that included it until Corporate Finance. All of that math was done over MS Excel, so it was not even supposed to be difficult, but after getting straight A's in high school math, I got a C+ in that. Still, I can appreciate the elegance of the formulas, proofs, solutions, and profound applications inherent in the discipline. Even if you do not, this book still has the capacity to instill such admiration.
This focuses on three distinct characters in each of its three parts: Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol. The middle part is further broken up into three parts itself, and as the centerpiece to the book, it is probably the strongest section. It is when the book hits its stride and begins to make more sense to the reader.
[It's worth noting, perhaps, that I just did the annual Oscars write-up, and this year was aided by Letterboxd. I have also been doing Goodreads for a couple years now. Each requires rating on a scale of 5 stars. I prefer 4 stars for movies, and I had gotten used to giving basically everything 4 stars on Goodreads. 5 star ratings are reserved for books I would deem Best Books reviewed on this blog. In any case, Letterboxd allows for 1/2 star ratings. Goodreads should as well. I would give this 4.5 stars. Ultimately, this is rounded up to 5 stars (Grade: A), and now will be included in the Best Books category.]
It goes beyond 4 star territory because of this elegant structure, which is disorienting at first and perfectly appropriate in the end. The second part of this book could be seen as "experimental fiction," and the very best sort of it. This originality sets it apart.
***
Chapter 1, or Book One, is titled "PAUL or The Discovery of the Irrational." It is 23 pages long and sketches out the final days of a pioneering physicist that end in tragedy (the lede is not buried, the horrible fate is blankly stated in the opening paragraph). This is not a bad short story, but it left me wondering where else the novel could go, and if it might return to this character's earlier life and depict in finer detail what led to his madness.
Instead, it jumps to something completely different, and yet not totally dissimilar--Chapter 2, or Book Two, "JOHN or The Mad Dreams of Reason." It introduces itself in ostentatious fashion, in terms of literary fiction. A few pages with nothing but a few words on each ("He was the smartest human being of the 20th century," (33); "An alien among us," (35)), followed by the announcement that we have entered Part I: "The Limits of Logic."
By this point, at page 47, after a good 21 pages of non-standard prose, or at least non-standard layout, we have Eugene Wigner's entry, "Only he was fully awake," which shifts the third-person perspective of Chapter/Book One to first person. After a couple dozen pages of Chapter/Book Two, the reader should find their footing and be able to enjoy the novel for what it is. At least for the next 220 pages.
I am sure plenty of other novels have done it, but my mind first floats to The Rules of Attraction as a similar example of literary technique. Or perhaps various oral histories, whether true or fictional. It is not as risky a proposition as 2nd-person narrative, and while it is technically first-person, it has a 3rd-person veneer to it, since the speakers or contributors are not writing about themselves, but someone important that they knew. Perhaps the layout of the book is more experimental than this shifting of perspective, but whatever the case, despite the less immediately dramatic subject matter of Chapter/Book One, it is more engaging.
The literary flourishes on the nature of mathematics and technology make this book particularly brilliant, and this is what sets it apart. We don't often equate art with science or math, but those separate wings of "useful" and "useless" study are beautifully harmonized in the text. There are many such passages here that could be excerpted, to the point that, by the end of the book, it almost gets repetitive. This is why I would rate it 4.5 stars rather than 5, if I could.
It is probably not a spoiler to say that this is likely the Great Novel about the Formation of Artificial Intelligence:
"Jansci thought that if our species was to survive the twentieth century, we needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods, and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology; our ever-expanding technical knowledge was the only thing that separated us from our forefathers, since in morals, philosophy, and general thought, we were no better (indeed, we were much, much worse) than the Greeks, the Vedic people, or the small nomadic tribes that still clung to nature as the sole granter of grace and the true measure of existence. We had stagnated in every other sense. We were stunted in all arts except for one, techne, where our wisdom had become so profound and dangerous that it would have made the Titans that terrorized the Earth cower in fear, and the ancient lords of the woods seem as puny as sprites and as quaint as pixies. Their world was gone. So now science and technology would have to provide us with a higher version of ourselves, an image of what we could become. Civilization had progressed to a point where the affairs of our species could no longer be entrusted safely to our own hands; we needed something other, something more. In the long run, for us to have the slimmest chance, we had to find some way of reaching beyond us, looking past the limits of our logic, language, and thought, to find solutions to the many problems that we would undoubtedly face as our dominion spread over the entire planet, and, soon enough, much farther still, all the way to the stars." (222)
This is not the greatest excerpt I could have found, but it will have to do. It should at least illustrate the quality of the prose. I had not heard of Benjamin Labatut prior to reading this, but he is only a few years older than me. This appears to be his 2nd novel, and from what I can tell, it falls along similar lines to his first, in terms of genre. I do not see how this could not eclipse the quality of its predecessor. It reaches for heights that some of the most profound literature in the history of our world can sometimes attain. It's far from perfect, and I did find the very end to be "basic," but by that I mean the book's final lines.
***
Chapter/Book 3, "LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence," is 84 pages long and jumps forward into very recent history. And the game of Go.
Now. I have not played Go. I have never seen a board. No one has challenged me to it. My familiarity with the game is limited to a couple references in A Beautiful Mind, which yes, could also be seen as an "influence" (since the release of Oppenheimer post-dated this)--if mental illness drove the plot of The MANIAC. As such, it does not, though PAUL and JOHN certainly feature mental illness as a major factor in their work. If it is not already clear, MANIAC works on two levels--both the name of the computer that John creates, and as an adjective for his being. And Paul's, too. But not exactly Lee's.
To be sure, there is mental illness in LEE, but it does not arise out of the tireless pursuit of technological breakthroughs--just the disappointment of defeat, the humbling of no longer being considered the best. At Go.
It's not a bad ending to the book at all, but the A.I. is arguably more developed than Lee as a character. The chapter is named for Lee, but it may just as well be named for AlphaGo.
If anything, this ending is most interesting for its depiction of the Go tournament Lee plays against AlphaGo, for Americans and others unfamiliar with the grasp this game has in China, Japan and Korea. It is probably still a bit of a "sub-feature" of the region, and one does not imagine it being played as often as chess, but I am sure I would be more familiar if fate had dropped me there rather than here in the Midwest. People here in my milieu were raised on Michael Jordan, and if you go anywhere in the world, he is still synonymous with the area. Of course, I only mention that because winning is all that mattered to him, and winning is all that matters to Lee. These are people that retire when they know they cannot continue to win every single time.
There is a certain pride that comes with the greatest of all time being from your area, and Lee is a similar type of hero to South Korea. I do not want to spoil what happens in his match with AlphaGo. Suffice to say, AlphaGo is the apotheosis of Paul's and John's work. Chat GPT feels like a rudimentary form of A.I. in comparison, yet we are in a time when this is developing rapidly. In a year or two, it will likely be even more ubiquitous, and though many of us are assured that our jobs are not in jeopardy, we fear we cannot rely on such present understandings.
The prospect of technology changing our lives (and possibly taking them over) is at the heart of this novel. It is important to maintain our essential humanity, which at least Paul and John seem to deride. They suffer accordingly in their personal lives for doing so. And there is the adage that on our death beds we won't wish we worked more, we will wish we spent more time with our families, and that is here, too. That may be an overly simplistic view of what this novel is meant to communicate, but nobody suggests we should aspire towards an artificial consciousness that discards our humanity. That may, however, just become another inevitable step down the line.
***
A Dizzying Dive into the Abyss: The MANIAC Review
The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is not a book you read—it’s a book you survive. It’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle while standing in the middle of a thunderstorm. From the very first page, Labatut drags you into a world of intellectual frenzy, where the boundaries between madness and genius blur in an all-consuming tango. The subject matter? The terrifying, thrilling, and often unfathomable evolution of artificial intelligence. The execution? Equal parts brilliant and bewildering.
Labatut’s storytelling—blending historical figures, philosophical musings, and speculative fiction—creates a narrative web so tightly wound that you almost feel like you're losing your grip on reality. There’s no comforting sense of control here. The MANIAC is like being thrown into the chaotic, unpredictable heart of a scientific revolution, where the very nature of what it means to be human is under siege. You’re given no roadmap to navigate, no map of the terrain—you’re simply told to follow the intellectual avalanche as it barrels down at you.
The book’s central figure, the MANIAC himself, is not a single person but a representation of the very forces driving humanity toward an unknown future. In these pages, you’ll encounter the eerie brilliance of minds like John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and others—titans whose discoveries laid the groundwork for our current technological landscape. But instead of portraying these intellectuals as mere historical figures, Labatut imbues them with a sense of manic obsession, as though the great minds of science are all teetering on the edge of madness, their inventions pushing them toward an abyss they cannot comprehend.
And then there's the unsettling question that pulses at the heart of the novel: What happens when we no longer understand the machines we create? Labatut doesn’t answer this question directly; instead, he drags you into the labyrinth of ideas that lead toward it, until you’re left unsure whether you should marvel at the brilliance of these innovations or tremble at the abyss they seem to be opening up. The narrative is less about clear answers and more about exploring the terrifying unknowns, the dizzying potential of artificial intelligence, and the human minds behind the algorithms.
Labatut’s prose is feverish, often elliptical, oscillating between clear, crystalline insights and maddening complexity. He writes as though he’s in a race against time, throwing ideas at you with such speed and intensity that you’re left gasping for air. And yet, amid the frenetic pace, there are moments of haunting clarity—fleeting glimpses of beauty amid the chaos—that make you pause and reconsider everything you thought you knew about technology, humanity, and consciousness.
The themes here are as vast and overwhelming as the subject itself. Artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool—it’s a force that forces us to confront the limits of our knowledge, our understanding, and even our humanity. It’s a reminder that we are, at times, as much at the mercy of our creations as they are at ours. As the book careens toward its final chapters, the sense of creeping dread becomes palpable. We’re all trapped in a race we may never fully understand, following a path that could lead to transcendence—or to a kind of self-destruction. Or, perhaps, to something even more unfathomable.
The MANIAC is not for those seeking a tidy, conventional narrative. This isn’t a story that progresses neatly; instead, it’s an experience, a visceral assault on the senses and intellect, a book that demands to be reckoned with. There are no comforting conclusions or neatly tied-up plot threads. Instead, you’re left with questions, feelings, and ideas that swirl in your head long after the final page is turned.
In the end, The MANIAC feels less like a book and more like a mind-altering journey—one that offers no clear destination, but leaves you irrevocably changed. It’s a disorienting, beautiful, and profoundly unsettling meditation on the intersection of human genius and the machines we create, and it’s a must-read for anyone daring enough to peer into the abyss of artificial intelligence.
*
Is what I do worthwhile? It's certainly never been necessary. There is no financial reward. The world has never needed me, but it needs me even less than before. We go on out of duty to others, to delay suffering, to forestall the pain of loss, to do what we can to provide comfort amidst the brutishness of the world.
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