The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Something changed in Jansci before the end.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, his head began to explode with ideas of a kind he had never entertained before, and in such copious quantities that I came to fear that, if the disease did not kill him, mental overexertion surely would. This sudden, formidable fecundity was, of course, nothing new in him, it was as if he had recovered, seemingly overnight, the same zeal that he lost after Godel thwarted his attempts at entangling the entire world in a web of logic. Much more curious still was the fact that he also developed (though perhaps it would be more precise to say that he was beset by, as it was a violent and abrupt transformation) feelings that he had no prior experience with: spells of almost overwhelming empathy and a deep concern about the general destiny of humanity. These anxieties, which he could neither contain nor deny, would at first send him into flights of blind panic, though later, when he became more accustomed to the invasion of his psyche by all that he had previously chosen to ignore, he learned to channel these thoughts into himself, where they became the source of a fantastic thirst, an unquenchable curiosity regarding all matters of the spirit.

Perhaps it's because Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann dabbled in so much that he is rarely remembered today: he was an instrumental part of the Manhattan Project, and later basically invented game theory, before turning his attention to the self-reproducing "automata" that are the basis of today's artificial intelligence programs. He would fit in nicely among the mad geniuses of Benjamin Labatut's previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World: a brilliant man who outpaces all his rivals, caught up in the whirl of wartime, and then suffers a breakdown of the psyche and spirit. Labatut's von Neumann is a dangerous man, whose intelligence allows him to be cruel to his wives and collaborators, and who expresses little interest in the deadly consequences of his work. In his last days, riddled with cancer, he is struck by a sudden attack of empathy, but at the same time his brilliance has been dulled: his daughter describes leaving his sick room in tears, as he struggles with adding together single-digit numbers. Von Neumann dies relatively young, but his legacy is profound. How much of his cruelty is contained within the ideas and systems he bequeathed the world? How much empathy? How much madness?

The Maniac is bookended by two sections only tangentially related to von Neumann's life. The first is about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who killed his disabled son in 1933 before turning the gun on himself. Ehrenfest knew what the ascendant Nazis would do to his son if they were able; he so no future either for his son's disability or his own genius. Among other things, this section roots von Neumann's story in the grand political struggle of World War II, which evolves into the Cold War conflict of mutually assured destruction--a concept born not just from von Neumann's work with the Manhattan Project but his invention of game theory--and the destabilizing affects of modern AI. But it also introduces a question about the mental processes that animate men like Ehrenfest and von Neumann--is madness the handmaiden of genius? Or are they a single creature with two faces? The later bookend is a short history of AlphaGo, the AI program that defeated the world Go grandmaster.

In between, Labatut chooses to tell von Neumann's story through the first-person voices of his friends, family, and colleagues. Some of these are wildly entertaining--the whole book, I think, would have been better if it had been narrated by Labatut's version of Richard Feynman--but this strategy ultimately struck me as a mistake. The voices feel false as often as they are convincing, and are inherently less interesting and engaging than Labatut's own erudite voice that begins and closes the novel.

It's the last section, actually, about AlphaGo, that struck me as the best part of the novel. Labatut explains that Go is not like chess; whereas a chess board begins with a large but limited number of possible future configurations, a Go board is a blank space on which the pieces unfold. The number of possible Go boards dwarfs the number of chess boards by many degrees of magnitude; many believed even after Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov that such a program for Go was nearly impossible. But the AlphaGo program takes down the braggadocious Go champion, Lee Sedol, down four games to one, a moment Labatut literally describes as epoch-making. It's funny, actually, to read this section at the moment, where intelligent people (as far as I can tell) are rather down on the power of AI. The language learning models that can't draw hands, or count to ten, are a far cry from the artificial intelligences that Labatut finds frightening, and which men like von Neumann and Turing thought had the power to outstrip their human creators. But perhaps those LLMs are not the same thing as programs like AlphaGo, which have no root or interest in language or art, only the cold purity of mathematics.

But it's not the four AlphaGo wins that make this section fascinating--it's AlphaGo's single loss. Beaten and discouraged, Sedol manages to find a move that baffles AlphaGo so badly it essentially begins making random, desperate moves with no strategy whatsoever. Spectators, having seen the program bait Sedol into mistakes before, assume that the machine is thinking a thousand steps ahead, but the programmers know the truth, because they have seen this before, the program descend into a kind of madness. In this, the program comes to resembles its godfather von Neumann in the most frightening way: it, too, has exploded genius to madness. In this way Labatut suggests that artificial intelligence may resemble our own in ways more frightening than we conceive; they, too, may be prone to psychic unraveling. 

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Kid turned and faced him.

What you want me to believe, said Western, is that you came here to help her in some way.

Help her in what way? She's dead.

When she was alive.

Jesus. How do I know? You see a figure drifting off the screen and you pick up the phone. How do you know that the call of the coletit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of thing that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

What did she know?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get a hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing. Jesus.

Bobby Western has been a lot of things. Right now he's a salvage diver, plumbing the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to ransack wrecks and tinker with pipelines. Once upon a time he was a student of physics, a mathematical whizkid who received his genius from his father, a Manhattan Project engineer, and who was yet in the shadow of his even more brilliant sister, Alicia. After that, he was a race car driver, a profession that put him in a coma. When he emerged from this coma, Bobby discovered that Alicia--his greatest love, his soulmate in perhaps the most literal sense--had committed suicide. The Passenger's companion novel, Stella Maris, is her story; this is Bobby's, although Alicia is here too, in the form of italicized flashbacks in which she faces her own hallucinatory attendants: a crude, disfigured figure called the Thalidomide Kid and a troop of Vaudevillean goblins.

When The Passenger begins, Bobby has been sent to scout a plane crash in the Gulf, the kind with moldering corpses inside. There's no sign of entry on the plane, but the black box is missing, and one of the passengers seems to be, too. Bobby makes a few quick investigations, finding little; but shortly after he finds himself the subject of a mysterious investigation: he's menaced by agents of unknown affiliation, his apartment is ransacked, his car and bank account are seized with no explanation, his fellow diver is killed under mysterious circumstances. Are Bobby's pursuers connected with the crashed plane? Or are their interests related to Bobby's father, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, helping to usher the world into an age of atomic cataclysm?

The Passenger's refusal to bring these mysteries to a satisfying conclusion seemed like an affront to me personally. Maybe there are answers in Stella Maris, but I doubt it. So one must think of the plane crash as a symbol: a symbol, perhaps, of Bobby, who survives his wreck and his coma but emerges into a world that is missing its most important soul, and which refuses now to make any sense. Alicia, perhaps, is the passenger of the title, whose significance is reduced in death to a mere absence, and whom Bobby spends the entire book fretting that he will forget. (For what its worth, in the post-Game of Thrones era, sibling incest seems too anodyne to be shocking, even a kind of literary cliche.) Amd the forces of grief and despair that pursue him can not even be named, much less mollified.

And yet, I found Bobby's dives to be some of the most interesting and engrossing parts of the novel. Much has been made of McCarthy's newfound interest in physics and mathematics, apparently gathered from his friendship with quark-discoverer Murry Gell-Mann and a connection with the research department at the University of New Mexico. But McCarthy's interests haven't changed, it seems to me; he's still the Gnostic, terrified by the world's indifference and unknowability. Mathematics is, like diving, another way of plumbing the deaths, searching for a truth that will not be made known. As the Thalidomide Kid tells Bobby--who sees him also, like a kind of dispensation--"Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing."

The Passenger is an awfully strange book, even for McCarthy. On one level it's sort of an espionage novel, a classic noir of the man who got into deep. But in practice it's mostly talky, composed of a dozen or so lengthy conversations: with down-and-outs from New Orleans to Knoxville, with Bobby's shrewd private investigator, with his fellow divers, with a friend of Alicia's from the period of her commitment. One of Bobby's interlocutors is a trans escort named Debussy Fields (LOL) who is touchingly and sympathetically drawn in a way I really would not have expected McCarthy to have in him. But all these conversations, all these parts--diver driver mathematician apparition--have difficulty cohering. The Paassenger could only be a late period work. It reminds me of those late Shakespeare plays in which he stopped bothering trying to make sense to anybody but himself.

But it's a Cormac book, no doubt, and who else is going to give you a book like that? Who else is going to give you those sentences? The language is plainspoken and hushed, with fewer forays into the OED, but the rhythm of those words is unmistakable, inimitable. And though the mathematics, it seems to me, betrays a dilettante's eye, they give a new language, perhaps even a better one, to ideas that have troubled McCarthy's books for a long time. We've had a long time to live with books like Blood Meridian, even The Road. Something tells me that we'll have to live with this one a little longer to really see it as it is.