Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the author of America America and The Palace Thief, explores the nature of genius, rivalry, ambition, and love among multiple generations of a gifted family.
Milo Andret is born with an unusual mind. A lonely child growing up in the woods of northern Michigan in the 1950s, he gives little thought to his own talent. But with his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley he realizes the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is a seduction, opening Milo's eyes to the allure of both ambition and indulgence. The research he begins there will make him a legend; the woman he meets there--and the rival he meets alongside her--will haunt him for the rest of his life. For Milo's brilliance is entwined with a dark need that soon grows to threaten his work, his family, even his existence.
Spanning seven decades as it moves from California to Princeton to the Midwest to New York, A Doubter's Almanac tells the story of a family as it explores the way ambition lives alongside destructiveness, obsession alongside torment, love alongside grief. It is a story of how the flame of genius both lights and scorches every generation it touches. Graced by stunning prose and brilliant storytelling, A Doubter's Almanac is a surprising, suspenseful, and deeply moving novel, a major work by a writer who has been hailed as "the most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation."
Praise for A Doubter's Almanac
"[Canin] is at the top of his form, fluent, immersive, confident. You might not know where he's taking you, but the characters are so vivid, Hans's voice rendered so precisely, that it's impossible not to trust in the story. . . . The delicate networks of emotion and connection that make up a family are illuminated, as if by magic, via his prose." -- Slate
"Alternately explosive and deeply interior." -- New York ("Eight Books You Need to Read")
"A blazingly intelligent novel." --Los Angeles Times
"Math made beautiful . . . Canin writes with such luxuriant beauty and tender sympathy that even victims of Algebra II will follow his calculations of the heart with rapt comprehension." -- The Washington Post
"A masterful writer at his transcendent best." --BBC
"Elegant and devastating . . . A Doubter's Almanac is exquisitely crafted. Canin takes us readers deep into the strange world of his troubled characters without ever making us aware of the effort involved. . . . An odd and completely captivating novel." --NPR's Fresh Air
"There is a shimmering loveliness to Canin's glimpses of higher mathematics. . . . A Doubter's Almanac is a novel whose achievement is fully equal to the . . . tragedy it portrays. Ethan Canin understands both the allure of great intellectual accomplishment and the price it exacts from those who pursue it. Unlike his protagonist, his own prodigious effort has produced a work of exquisite and enduring beauty." -- Bookreporter
"Ethan Canin writes about mathematics as brilliantly as T. S. Eliot writes about poetry. With this extraordinary novel, Ethan Canin now takes his place on the high wire with the best writers of his time." --Pat Conroy
"A book that raises the bar for novelists." --Literary Hub
"Staggeringly ambitious . . . a story of majestic sweep." --Paste
"Milo Andret, the genius who solved the Malosz Conjecture and won the Fields Medal for mathematics, had an unusual, even eerie mind from birth, but not until he moves to Berkeley in the 1970s to pursue a Ph. D. does he realize the extent of his singular talents. From the drug-soaked enclaves of beatnik California to the verdant lawns of Princeton University, from turbo-charged Wall Street to the quiet woods of Michigan, his reputation as one of the century's most brilliant thinkers forms the backbone of a sweeping, epic story about family, love, passion, and Milo's fraught relationship with his son."-- Provided by publisher.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Taking place over decades, this latest novel from Canin (America America), an accomplished author and professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a compelling family saga that follows troubled math genius Milo -Andret from birth to death. Milo goes from inauspicious beginnings in rural Michigan to solving a decades-old mathematical problem and teaching at Princeton. We are with him when he impresses his first teacher and takes his first drink. He becomes his own worst enemy, cutting short a promising career because of his alcoholism and womanizing. The second half of the novel is told by his son, who inherits many of the same skills and problems. In addition to the involving narrative, the novel is a subtle meditation on creativity, happiness, and fate, and Canin's ability to explain complex mathematics is nothing short of miraculous. VERDICT A moving, spiritual journey, this poetic novel clocks in at well over 500 pages but begs to be read in one sitting. It will delight literary fiction readers of all stripes with its diverse themes, from coming of age to love, grief, and addiction. But a warning; it's tough to keep a dry eye through this one. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]-Kate Gray, Boston P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
The mysteries of higher mathematics and the even deeper mysteries of the human heart are the unlikely themes of Canin's (America America) novel. With stunning assurance and elegant, resonant prose, Canin follows the life of Milo Andret, who is both blessed and afflicted with mathematical genius. Milo's aspirations take him from a lonely boyhood in northern Michigan to Berkeley, Princeton, the hinterlands of Ohio, and, finally, to a defeated return to the rural Midwest. Essentially asocial and so unworldly that he didn't taste alcohol until graduate school, Milo is gradually embittered by his failures at love and his jealous relationships with his colleagues. Meanwhile, he pursues the exquisitely arduous process of constructing complex mathematical theorems in his mind. When, at age 32, Milo proves one of the greatest theorems in the history of mathematics, he becomes a scientific superstar. But by then he is an alcoholic, and he destroys his career in acts of reckless abandon. Fascinating in its character portrayal and psychological insights, the novel becomes even more mesmerizing in its second half, which is narrated by Milo's son, Hans (the first half features close third-person narration on Milo). Hans also has a brilliant mathematical mind but is scarred by his father's cantankerous, often vicious behavior and poisonous disillusionment with ambition and higher knowledge. Hans's exorbitantly lucrative career as a high-frequency futures trader founders when he becomes addicted to drugs, but his redemption comes through marital and familial love. Though the book is occasionally repetitive, Canin's accomplishments are many, not least of which is his ability to lucidly explain the field of algebraic topology. But it is his superb storytelling that makes this novel a tremendous literary achievement. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In his thoroughly absorbing new novel, Canin (America, America, 2008) gives readers a nuanced, heartbreaking portrait of a tortured mathematician, throwing in a lucid, riveting explication of algebraic topology for good measure. Milo Andret spends a lonely childhood in the woods of northern Michigan, which serve to calm his racing thoughts. Upon acceptance to Berkeley, he feels the pressure to produce great work and is made aware of his awkwardness in social interactions. It's there that he first begins to drink and to lash out at his fellow students, feeling both a burning ambition and an overwhelming jealousy. When he discovers the proof to a longstanding problem, he becomes a superstar and is hired by Princeton, but his drinking and his arrogance sabotage his career, leaving him disillusioned. The second half of the book, narrated by his son, Hans, who is also a brilliant mathematician plagued by addiction, details the great cost of Milo's genius to his family but also points the way out for Hans, who finds solace in his supportive family and a means to avoid his father's fate. Canin, in translucent prose, elucidates the way a mathematician sees the world and humanity's own insignificance within it. A harrowing, poignant read about the blessing and curse of genius. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Canin, the New York Times best-selling author who has achieved both critical and commercial success, is sure to garner plenty of attention for this epic novel, which will be backed up by national promotion and an author tour.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Book Review
This complex portrait of a troubled math genius and the effect his gift has on those close to him combines a strong narrative and bumper crop of themes. For his seventh work of fiction, Canin (America America, 2008, etc.) first presents some 200 third-person pages focused on Milo Andret, an only child whose aloof parents give him a freedom he exercises in the Michigan woods. There, he discovers unusual talents as a whittler who carves a wooden chain more than 25 feet long from a beech stump. A late-blooming math whiz, at Berkeley grad school in the 1970s, he specializes in topology, whose practitioners "built undrawable figures in their imaginations, then twisted and folded them." He also discovers LSD, sex, and academic competition, laying the groundwork for long-term addictions. He gains fame in math and a job at Princeton, but heavy drinking, sex, and the drive for another milestone undo him. Canin then switches to the voice of Milo's son, Hans, who reveals he has been the quasi-omniscient narrator of the first section, based on stories told to him by his ailing father. It's an awkward, risky shift that pulls the story away from its focus on a deeply intriguing character (though perhaps a useful lesson in unreliable narrators for the author's classes at the Iowa Writer's Workshop). Hans gives his boyhood observations of Milo's "Olympian drinking" and is surprised to realize how "normal" his own childhood seemed. Yet he also struggles with addiction, from an Ecstasy precursor to cocaine as well as the high of a quant's wins on Wall Street, which is where Hans uses his own considerable math skills. Ultimately a nice guy, he pales beside the fiercely irascible, hurtful patriarch. Book clubs may dig into the many interesting veins herefamily, ambition, addiction, lustbut Mean Dad was the motherlode, and it's not clear that Canin's easing of the darkness makes for a better novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.