Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Azoy ir viln tsu vern a shreyber?
(So You Want To Be A Writer?)

It’s a bit like being a farmer (watch the analogies flow like rain here; or, better yet, like a never failing stream; much more biblical). You invest in your land and pick your crop. Then you work and re-work it until it’s ready to harvest. If you’re lucky, the rains hold off just long enough to get it undercover at the coop grain silo. After that, world affairs take over - if the harvest in Patagonia or Szechuan has been good (or some clown in the government pisses off some parallel foreign clown), selling prices drop through the floor, the mortgage goes unpaid, and you end up as a hired hand on someone’s else’s pig plantation or, worse, commuting to the city doing stuff you really hate.

For historical reasons (you know what they are), there aren’t a lot of Jewish farmers (or police detectives funny enough). But there are a not inconsiderable number of Jewish writers (maybe literature is the Jewish agriculture). Joshua Cohen, both the author of Book of Numbers and two of the book’s characters, is one such Jewish writer who knows the farmer’s angst. After finally getting into print with a notable publisher, his book launch gets gazumped by the 9/11 destruction. So no publicity, no reviews, and few sales. He ends up in a 20 foot by 20 foot unconverted loft under the BQE (downmarket even for a hometown Secaucus boy, not that New Yorkers would ever agree Jersey could be superior in anything, even slums), crafting (or maybe crofting) phoney travel brochures and right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. Gotta eat, no?

Not the end of the tsouris though (it never is). His mentor is killed in the grit-filled streets of lower Manhattan after the Towers collapsed; his agent, her wealthy brother, eventually drifts away from the literary sharecropper; and, oh yes, the missus kicks him out after Pesach Seder aggro, with the blessings of her mother. So he’s willing to take any bait that dangles itself into the watery depths of his misery (which are about as murky as the Gowanus Canal), specifically the biography of a tech mogul with the same name. The temptation to forgo his daily tuna on rye for some caviar blinis is irresistible. Of course there is no free lunch. But he can’t give up “that unshakeable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot…” Tradition is not to be scoffed, particularly in non-traditional prose.

The three JC’s make a formidable ensemble (I know, I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, do try to keep up). Clocking who’s playing what and why can be taxing but after the first few hundred pages you get that it doesn’t matter. There is a choice to be made though. Do you revel in the wordplay (I’m thinking J. Joyce here); try to catch the obscure references to religion, culture, and the inner workings of quantum computers (and about who’s screwing who in techno land); take time to appreciate the very weird psychology of the JC’s and everyone they come in contact with (manic, egotistical, uncivilised); or just go with the flow of the story and its possible significance in one’s life (guidance counsellors, read this before sending kids into the maw of The Industry)? Doing all these simultaneously is just not possible with an IQ less than Bobby Fisher (another notable local boy). Doing them sequentially is probably a doctoral dissertation, and these tend to have less success than asparagus farms in Alberta.


Postscript: To my dismay I discovered that many other GR readers unfavourably compare Book of Numbers to Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. While the subject, technological culture, is the same in both, and the shared style of wordiness approaching logorrhoea is obvious, each is of an entirely distinct genre. It is here that my agricultural (or horticultural, if you prefer) analogy shows its usefulness.

Literary soil, as it were, with the kind of nutrient base of the two books ranges from that of high-acidity sarcasm, to a more neutral irony, and thence to a low ph (that is to say, high alkalinity) satire.

Sarcasm rages, mocks, and corrodes, even while it pretends to do the opposite. Satire celebrates, exaggerates, and builds extravagantly in order to accomplish the same end. Pynchon is acidly sarcastic; Cohen is satirically alkaline.

QED it is improper as well as futile to compare the two works. They are meant for different crops entirely. I hope this clears matters up in a neutral, that is to say, ironic fashion.

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