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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2016, 576 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2016, 592 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Donna Chavez
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In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the New York Times bestselling author of America America and other acclaimed works of fiction, explores the nature of genius, jealousy, ambition, and love in several 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, Milo gives little thought to his talent, and not until his acceptance at U.C. Berkeley does he realize the extent, and the risks, of his singular gifts. California in the seventies is an initiation and 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, and the rival, he meets there will haunt him always. For Milo's brilliance is inextricably linked to a dark side that ultimately threatens to unravel his work, his son and daughter, and his life.
Moving from California to Princeton to the Midwest and to New York, A Doubter's Almanac explores Milo's complex legacy for the next generations in his family. Spanning several decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, A Doubter's Almanac is a suspenseful, surprising, and deeply moving novel, written in stunning prose and with superb storytelling magic.
Even at a young age, Milo understood that he was in large part a replica of his father, this solitary, middle-aged man who shared their house with them but who appeared to will himself away from anyone even when he was at home. When Mr. Andret wasn't grading schoolwork, he was walking unceasingly through his dominion, mending all sorts of breakage and deterioration that were apparent only to him.
Like his father, Milo himself learned at a young age to carve wood. Very fine objects, in fact. But also like his father, he never showed anyone what he'd made. He whittled ornate whistles that he rarely blew, detailed animal figurines that he abandoned in the undergrowth, and intricate talismans of celestial design, which he hid in
the dimples of maple burls or inside the crevices of the twisted roots that emerged from the forest's peat like tangles of surfacing snakes. For his finer work, he used a magnifying glass.
One day while whittling a whistle from a tiny piece of tamarack, ...
What sets Canin’s story apart from other dysfunctional family novels is the awesome writing, the mid-plot switch of narrator augmented by the juxtaposition of Milo’s superhuman intelligence and his addiction. It is indicative of Canin’s own genius that he makes all that – plus mathematics references that sent me to Google more than once – work superbly...continued
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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
Pat Conroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini
This is the story of a family that falls to pieces under the pressure of living with an abundantly gifted tyrant. 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.In A Doubter's Almanac, Hans Andret, a mathematical genius, checks into a rehab facility, seeking treatment for his addiction. In a counseling session, his therapist, Matthew, asks Hans why he suddenly brought his addiction out in the open and suggests that Hans wished to be caught.
When Hans protests that such a notion would be ludicrous, Matthew says: "Genius is a degenerative psychosis…belonging to the group of moral insanity." He then explains this is a quote from: "Cesare Lombroso. A criminologist. He died a hundred years ago, but now psychologists are starting to agree with him. Fewer dopamine receptors or something like that. Psychosis and inventiveness seem to run along a kind of continuum."
Indeed, Lombroso did write ...
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