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the complete review - fiction

Book of Numbers

by
Joshua Cohen

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : appealing world wide (web) sprawl, but can barely contain itself

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(I)t’s hard to quibble at the prose level with real-life Cohen’s monstrous talent and restive, roiling intellect. He’s swinging for the bleachers where, at the top of the stands, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, and Wallace hover above the field in their skybox. (...) High-concept fuzziness aside, Book of Numbers is dense with pithy, aphoristic observations (usually from the mouth of Principal) that map the post-Google/Facebook zeitgeist more accurately than anything else in contemporary fiction" - Andrew Hultkrans, Bookforum
  
  
• "Mr Cohen’s writing is sure and often deliriously entertaining. (...) (T)he plot is not the point. Mr Cohen is more interested in big ideas and punchy sentences than the mechanics of storytelling." - The Economist
  
  
• "Cohen’s latest project seems less a book, in fact, than a genizah: that room in a synagogue where worn-out Hebrew books are stored. The reader does not so much read as actively sift these fragments and uncompleted stories, co-creating a narrative that is voluble, inventive, often exasperating, sometimes rewarding. (...) At his best, Cohen fashions some beautiful poetry out of tech-soused outpourings. But a tendency to dazzle rather than illuminate sometimes makes his book’s humanity hard to discern." - Julius Purcell, Financial Times
  
  
• "(T)his is mainly the story of a procession of styles. (...) Yet periodically, just as you are writing the whole thing off, there is a flash of real mischief or sardonic humour. (...) Cohen certainly can write. And an editor who had the time might have found the decent shorter novel buried somewhere within these pages." - Steven Poole, The Guardian
  
  
• "Hyper-erudition doesn't always make for engaging fiction but Cohen is intensely perceptive and the scintillating music of his prose befits reading aloud. (...) (O)n the whole, I say: whatever you're reading this on, get yourself a copy of Book of Numbers and enjoy." - Max Liu, The Independent
  
  
• "Repurposing language is Joshua Cohen’s greatest strength. (...) 600 frequently maddening pages" - Philip Maughan, New Statesman
  
  
• "Alive with talk and dense with data, Joshua Cohen’s novel Book of Numbers reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider. The result is a mess, a debris field, an insult to the sublime. Yet the splintered intellection hums with the static of the cosmos. Book of Numbers, in its fractured way, is more impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade. (...) These horse latitudes, where Book of Numbers drifts for too long, prevent this from being a great novel. The book isn’t cold, yet it never finds an emotional tone to match its intellectual one." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "(I)ts breadth, the ambition of its ideas and devices, confounds standard book review responses. Trying to approach this ­demanding, overstuffed novel is a bit like hyperlinking one’s way around the Internet: It’s bigger, wilder and fuller than you imagined, and there’s always more where that came from. (...) Cohen takes obvious delight bending the language as far as it will go. Sometimes it breaks, but these are noble failures. (...) As God tests the endurance and faith of the Israelites, Cohen will test the commitment of his readers." - Mark Sarvas, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It is insanely self-indulgent but that is, of course, the point. (...) Ultimately, it is hard not to feel that the final product is less than the sum of its multilayered parts, and that this is little more than a retread of the works of Williams Gibson and Self. Still, for chutzpah alone, Cohen’s chaotic fantasia certainly impresses." - Alexander Larman, The Observer
  
  
• "A dense, thrilling, and occasionally perplexing work, Cohen's encyclopedic epic is about many things -- language, art, divinity, narrative, desire, global politics, surveillance, consumerism, genealogy -- but it is above all a standout novel about the Internet" - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "For all that Cohen demonstrates the threats now facing the novelist in Book of Numbers, he also responds triumphantly to these post- literate times, reiterating the novel’s capacity to absorb new technologies and counter the ways in which they externalize and alienate. (...) Yet it is in its fidelity to tradition that Book of Numbers poses its greatest challenge. " - , Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The novel’s main challenge and source of excitement can be found in its language. (...) (I)n a deeper sense this story reprises the rocky transformation of a small tribe of true believers into the compromised rulers of a mighty nation. It is resonantly fraught with idealism and betrayal, moral struggle, and the worship of the golden calf of commerce." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "Reading Book of Numbers is like trying to concentrate on an online article that keeps being interrupted by flashing ads, exhortations to click below the jump -- and then the Web browser freezes or you lose the thread because you’re distracted by a video about the touching rescue of a horribly abused pit bull. If you think this is an interesting reading experience -- that Cohen has replicated the manic confusion of trying to produce literature in the digital age -- then you may well enjoy Book of Numbers." - Lisa Zeidner, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Much of Book of Numbers is narrated by 'Joshua Cohen', a would-be author whose dreams were crushed by the events of 11 September 2001 -- "My book was destroyed -- my life has never recovered" -- as the inauspiciously-timed release date of his debut left it essentially unnoticed ("all of two reviews"), with even the planned 2002 paperback release canceled. [The book's Joshua Cohen is actually older than real-author Joshua Cohen (the former born 1971, the latter in 1980 -- too young for the necessary experience he's looking for in his novel (though a considerably more successful author, despite the later start)).] Completing the identity-confusion, the gist of Book of Numbers is that narrator-Jonathan Cohen is hired to ghost the memoir of one (other) Joshua Cohen -- who is the same age, but has achieved considerably more renown: "genius, googolionaire, Founder and CEO of Tetration.com". Helpfully, the memoir-subject is generally referred to as 'Principal', and speaks (of himself) distinguishingly in the first-person plural, so there's not much actual Joshua Cohen-identity-confusion in the book; nevertheless the three facets of the same name loom large over the novel.
       Tetration is a Google-like company, which developed much as (and when) Google did, complete with Stanford-connection and search-engine focus. Sure, in the present-day: "Tetration has 12 resident beekeepers, four affineurs, two ongoing emoji valency experiments, and a lab dedicated solely to honing a 3D printer that itself can be 3D printed", but it struggled in defining itself and attracting interest (and, especially, money) in the early days of the world wide web, when the near-universal reaction to their search-focused ambitions was: "Profitability implausible". Joshua Cohen/Principal relates much of the history of the company -- and the science and the business to it -- to Joshua Cohen/ghostwriter, the material from which he is to shape the memoir -- allowing for a sharp, fast overview of the changing web (and world) over the past two decades, from start-up stories to more sinister government surveillance infiltration of every- and anything moving that passes online.
       Joshua Cohen/Principal's is hardly a universal story, but in his insistence on telling his story in the first-person-plural both distances himself from himself -- it becomes a de-intimated confessional -- while inclusively (all this 'we') drawing his audience -- and specifically the other Joshua Cohen -- in. The ghostwriter doesn't come to inhabit Principal like some über- (or over-layered) alter ego, but Principal's account is also literally his own undoing, and by the end even his continued existence is in doubt (while the ghostwriter is still more than a shadow of himself, but not much). That the project didn't work out exactly as planned is clear also from the book in hand, an amalgam of the ghostwriter's notes, commentary, and draft-sections of this memoir work-for-hire, along with transcripts of Principal's life-story, as well as stray e-mails and other texts; what went wrong is part of the story -- with much (such as why Principal is incapable of writing his own memoir) only revealed well into the novel.
       Book of Numbers strives to convey a sense of authorial authenticity, vis-à-vis all its authors and voices, from the misspellings in the e-mails addressed to the ghostwriter to Principal's near-monologues of material that ghostwriter is then supposed to shape into memoir. And even some of that shaping is revealed both verbatim and in process -- ghostwriter's efforts presented, for example, as:

      To begin is how to begin, for the writer and reader both. The first sentence sets the rules, the laws, the measures, sentencing the second to its fate.

- M.A.Orthofer, 26 May 2015

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Links:

• Random House publicity page
• Harvill Secker publicity page
• Q & A at Bomb
• Q & A at The New Republic

• Bookforum
• Boston Globe
• Full Stop
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• The Jewish Week
• Kirkus Reviews
• New Statesman
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Paste
• Publishers Weekly
• The Register
• The Rumpus
• Scotland on Sunday
• The Skinny
• Slate
• Tablet
• The Washington Post

• Official site

• The Netanyahus
• [Witz]

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Joshua Cohen was born in 1980.

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© 2015-2022 the complete review

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