How I Won a Nobel Prize
A Novel
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by VOGUE and VOX. The Free Press's August Book Club pick.
A "very funny, very good" (B. J. Novak) debut novel about a graduate student who follows her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage)
Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?
Helen decides she must go—her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives—and maybe the world.
Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple—if you could run the numbers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taranto stages a satiric morality tale at a Connecticut university in his knotty, entertaining debut. The Rubin Institute Plymouth is, depending on whom one asks, either a predator-filled cesspool or a utopia. An "academic prison colony where the worst-behaved of great minds would live out their days," RIP hosts events that are "flagrantly appropriative," and located at its "throbbing center" is a massive tower dubbed "The Endowment." Cornell professor Perry Smoot lands there after details about his affair with a student surface. Helen, a graduate student studying under Smoot, follows him to RIP, a decision that causes tension between she and her husband, Hew, whose contempt for the institute's policies pushes him into potentially violent activism. Helen soon develops an infatuation with an older famous novelist, Leo Lens, whose reputation as an arts devotee and seducer precedes him. Taranto handles the weighty rhetoric around cancel culture and academic freedom with a light touch, though RIP is depicted more as a provocative resort than a lifelike campus, and the relationship between Helen and Leo doesn't generate much erotic heat. Nonetheless, it's a beguiling story about the inevitable entanglement of professional, personal, and moral situations and feelings.
