The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

All the World’s A Pulpit

Catherine Chung has issues. Many, many issues. All packed tightly into this sardine tin-like novel of academic mathematics: misogyny and male cruelty of almost every sort to women, casual racism, inter-generational miscommunication, parental abandonment and lone parenting, warfare on two continents, international child smuggling, American academic politics, absence of sisterhood in science, the sad biographies of a number of important mathematicians ancient and modern (most ending badly), personal betrayal, sexual harassment, family deceit, PTSD, some not very subtle didacticism about number theory, and... oh yes, the frustrations of research into the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Chung has just too many axes to grind, so many that none are made very sharp at all. I get it that most men are dicks and that women suffer terribly as a consequence. But this is hardly a revelation. That racism is endemic in small town America is also not a surprise. That families have secrets, lovers irritate one another, and life is often complicated and disappointing are not terribly newsworthy (or fiction worthy) topics unless some other literary purpose is served. Even the quite valid point that injustice reigns in a supposedly civilised world is on its own nothing more than a trite observation. Chung’s appreciation of the aesthetics of mathematics is clear, but her skill in communicating that appreciation is far less so. And the narrative glue, the central mystery of the piece, is so unlikely that it verges on literary criminality. The whole leads nowhere, at least nowhere interesting, certainly not a destination.

I think the takeaway from this book is that if an author intends to preach, he or she really has to decide what they want to preach about. The sin and its source have to be made explicit. Universal evil doesn’t have much credibility, even among hardened Gnostics. Serious writers then must ensure that no one knows they’re preaching if they’re doing so outside a church, synagogue, or mosque. Preaching reaches only as far as the choir in any case, and often not even that far. Much better to let moral outrage emerge through subtle insight than to have one’s protagonists agonise continuously about it. And if you’re describing bad behaviour, it helps to suggest a way such behaviour might be mitigated other than by the wholesale incarceration of those bearing the XY chromosomal infirmity. Otherwise even your fans might abandon the cheap seats for a more entertaining venue.

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