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Helen, the narrator of Julius Taranto’s adept debut, is a physicist — a graduate student with a once-in-a-generation mind whose research might just possibly save us all. She works in high-temperature superconductivity, which (if it were proven to be feasible) would enable the free transfer of energy without loss or friction. Server farms wouldn’t need to be air-conditioned; fusion power would be possible; your mobile phone wouldn’t get hot when you charged it. Helen’s mother died when she was a girl; she lost herself in maths, and has never really emerged from the safe world of problems that can be solved by equations. Put the right numbers into the programme, and you’ll get the result you need.
Her supervisor, Perry Smoot, got his Nobel Prize for a theoretical model for superconductivity; if Helen sticks with him, she might win her own. Which is why, when Perry is forced out of his university post thanks to the revelation of a relationship with a grad student, she agrees to go with him to the Rubin Institute, a private institution just across the water from Yale, known drily by all as “RIP”. Its billionaire founder has made a home for the brilliant and disgraced, those whose gifts would otherwise be lost thanks to what has come to be called — by all of us, ad nauseam — cancellation. Pinched a bottom? Bullied a colleague? RIP will take you in. “The enticing promise the Institute made to faculty was: No Code of Conduct, no Human Resources, only Your Work.”
Alongside Smoot on faculty is the novelist Leopold Lens, a famous womaniser who bears a teasing resemblance to Philip Roth, plus other usual suspects: “There was the winner of the Bancroft Prize who had, as department chair, while drunk, felt up an untenured professor. There was Blackface Metzger . . . And over there, of course, that’s R Kelly.”
Taranto lines his story up neatly in the manner of one of Helen’s equations. Helen is married, in a sort of halfhearted way, to Hew, their union effected in order for them to share graduate housing. “The condition was unstable, evading description. It was Schrödinger’s wedlock: we were both hitched and not.”
There’s already a distance between them when Hew grudgingly agrees to go along with Helen to the institute. He swiftly becomes embroiled with the political factions who protest the very existence of the place, stretching the already frayed link between them.
How I Won a Nobel Prize examines such deals with the devil while asking — with wit and confidence — just who is the devil, really? How corrupted will Helen become by her association with the institute? What will this mean for her relationship with Hew and why does she become so obsessed with Lens, her father’s idol? Will she, in fact, find the freedom to do her work? The title tells us that she’s gained the world’s acclaim: but at what price?
This is certainly an entertaining and stylish tale, which grasps the nettle of cancel culture and refuses to flinch. It comes garlanded with the usual accolades (“razor-sharp”, “crisp intelligence”, “unabashedly precise”, you know the drill) and in many ways the praise is merited. And yet there is always a danger with satire that the structure and conceit overwhelm the truths of character and motive. Not for one moment did I believe that Helen and Hew would remain married, or that Hew would even be persuaded to go to the institute — but to serve the story he must. Helen’s studied affectlessness, her insistence that her work is paramount, means that there is very little at stake, emotionally. The challenges presented end up feeling somehow like technicalities.
This means the reader’s tolerance for some of the in-your-face satire — the unrelenting nefariousness of the institute’s founder, his construction of a massive phallic tower known to all as “the Endowment”, the telescope he keeps in his palatial study, pointed at Yale — can pall. When a student called Melissa accuses a professor of rape and Helen notes that her drama “played out as predictably as a procedural”, the phrase seems only too fitting. Melissa’s plight is entirely, well, academic.
There is no doubt that this is a book for the moment: in the wake of the resignation of Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania respectively; in the midst of an ongoing furore about what, precisely, “cancel culture” is and what it means for students, teachers, all of us. Taranto’s aim is explicitly to interrogate these issues, but satire works best when it is a little sidelong. Ironically perhaps, this means we’re left with a novel that is somehow frictionless. Superconductivity eliminates the resistance which gives matter heat. Fine for physics; less useful for storytelling, in the end.
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto Picador £16.99, 304 pages
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