Book of Numbers

Summary

Book is divided into three sections, one with Joshua Cohen the author being introduced to Joshua Cohen the tech billionaire (heretofore as “Principal”). Principal is asking for Joshua Cohen to ghost write a novel, and is bringing him on a whirlwind tour of the Middle East to conduct interviews.

Second section is a run-of-the-mill rise of a tech company type story, first rendered in sincere prose by presumably Joshua Cohen’s hand, then narrated by Principal himself, who tells the story of Tetrate, the company Principal founded, and their improbable but inevitable rise to success.

The final section shifts back to Joshua Cohen’s vantage after the revelation by Principal that Tetrate is being paid by the government to spy on its users. Principal is dying of cancer, and wants this truth to be unveiled. He wants Joshua Cohen to write his memoir and pass on all audio tapes to the wiki leaks analog in this universe.

Quotes

Im not sure how to write about this, not sure whether to still be writing at all—I’ve been trying to screen and block so much out, so many confidences throughout, classified stuff, government stuff, might even get me imprisoned stuff, that it’s become systemic with me, to the point that I find myself trying to withhold on this confession even. Principal’s mouth wired to my ears, his eyes becoming mine, a monitor, a common prompt between us blinking, unblinking, at this sense of having become so irrecordably joined that the only way not to write about him is not to write about myself. I’ll have to spread and type around. Furl and reach between Del and Esc. (133)

The thread then split into two, one a discussion of Nixon, the other a discussion of the history of data manipulation, beginning with the punchcard and its tabulator and ending, as like all discussions end, with the Holocaust. (216)

But imagine if everything was the reverse and you had to invent a clincher before inventing the equipment to sew an animal skin before even inventing the animal. That was search invented by how to search. Invented by how to tailor the results to the user. Not to mention that “button,” in another context, could refer not to a clothes clasp but to a key pressed to launch a weapon. Not to mention that in still other contexts “needle” could mean “annoy,” or “bother,” and “thread” might not be a literal string or twine but figurative as like a “drift” or “stream” whose speed is measured in “knots,” “a train of thought” just “flowing,” until it was “brought to heel.” The choice was to both needle the thread and thread the needle. Through its eye. In one ear, out the other. To know the polysemy of tongues. We had to code a searchengine to check our own code for a searchengine. That should tell you everything. (228)

The Story wasn’t everything, of course, but its telling had to convince editors that it was, or at least had to convince readers that it was—had to story its way into obliterating any intimations of alternative or individual experience. This was the worst of journalism—the realization that no matter how diligently you worked to be impartial, your presence alone was the slant, the tilt, and that even transcendence would have to become narrated, narratized, plotted. (523)

But the for serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die, and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail. (378)

Themes

Style

Section headings begin with “/”, like a URL, and end in ://, which is like the end of a domain, e.g., https://this-is-website/sub-page1.

There are long sections that are cross-out, presumably mimicking Cohen the narrator’s writing process, which makes the text palimpsestic, serving the larger theme of polysemy.

There are several types of narratives going on here, where you have dictations of interviews, stream-of-consciousness babble, dictations of interviews, a standard historical recounting of a tech company start-up, emails, letters, and a few other things in between. Again, all serving a principal theme of the speed and medium of information delivery blurring lines of meaning.

Cohen (the author), invents many new words, sometimes from whole cloth, sometimes shifting a noun into an adjective or a verb into an adverb – standard fare for the Pynchon/Wallace/postmodern fare. Language can be adapted and shifted for purpose and most prescriptivist arguments are exclusionary at best, actively prejudiced at worst.

Mirrors/Polysemy

The main characters and main tech companies are clear mirrors of reality (to tetrate is this novel’s version of to google, sharing the same sort of “very large number” connotations as a googolplex – tetration is the mathematical operation of double exponents, as exponents are to multiplication). There are two Joshua Cohens in the novel, and a third lurking in the margins in authorial shadows. The novel shares it’s name with the 4th book of the Torah (Joshua is the successor to Moses in that book and does lead his people to the promised land, a reward denied to Moses because he refused to talk to a rock or something).

There is a Julian Assange character, called Thor Balk, who is also similarly accused of some sexual impropriety, and who is also ensconced in a Russian embassy in hiding from the powers that be.

The novel is layered, where at the center you have a story about the creation of search engine and the business scaffolding all around it, and that is largely what this book thematically settles upon – how to categorize information, especially as the trickle grows into a deluge with the widespread adoption of the Internet as an ocean of data. Beyond that, Cohen (the narrator), is still trying to deliver his people into the promised land, and like most Jewish male authors of the 20th and 21st century, trying to figure out the overlap of the various Venn diagrammed circles of America’s past, present, and future, his masculinity, his broken marriage and the historical place of Jews. Cohen is a womanizer, and if we believe Rachel’s sections of the novel (her stream of consciousness blog), a miscarriage and subsequent aloofness is what prompts the demise of their relationship.

Beyond that, you have a novel (like many postmodern novels) about writing in and of itself. The novel starts with a protestation: “If you are reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with two hands”, and ends with the author at a publishing conference and his publisher friend having died somewhere over Reykjavik, Iceland while flying there. The irony, if you can call it that, is that Cohen, the narrator, knows he has no control over the medium after he publishes, and like Moses launching his people into the promised land, he is destined to remain stranded beyond his novel’s borders.

Thoughts

I love a well constructed sentence, the verbs and nouns hung together in some novel orientation that speaks to a beauty all it’s own, to the power of the expression of language. Joshua Cohen can craft those sentences, same way that David Foster Wallace or Pynchon could. They march across the page like a regiment of infantry, or unfurl like a bedsheet out to dry on a spring day. I knew this from reading the Netanyahus, and I see this for his Book of Numbers. But thematically, I just don’t think this one hung together as well as Netanyahus. In a lot of ways, I think there is an analogue with Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and V, and Cohen’s Netanyahus and Book of Numbers. Both books (CoL49 and N) are shorter, coming later in a career than their sprawling, swollen predecessors, and reveal authors at the height of their expressive powers. Both (V and BoN) are painfully boring books, but showcase the buds of a burgeoning virtuosity. These authors will be important, their early books say, if not yet.

Maybe it’s the fact that the Internet has caused things to move so quickly, that a novel published in 2015 can feel so dated. Cohen gets the tech mostly right, but it feels like the impact is just felt in traditional terms: a Jewish man wondering about how to be a man in an indifferent, and often hostile, American landscape. Bloom, the critic, calls this one of the finest Jewish books of the century (I’ve never read the other three he mentions), and while I immensely respect Bloom, this one just didn’t bring me to the promised land, but, after wandering through the desert of prose for the literary equivalent of 40 years, did gesture toward the milk and honeyed future.