Customer Reviews

The Mind-Body Problem (Contemporary American Fiction)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

How original! I loved this book with its vibrant language and intelligent, yet humorous, observations of human nature, science, religion, academia, love/lust etc...The main character, Renee Feuer - a beautiful philosophy graduate student drop-out and wife of a "certified" mathematical genius , is so elegantly presented with her conflicting self-perceptions, her existential struggles, her longing for roots and cultured heritage, and, of course, her battles with love versus lust. Tackles some heavy philosophical material without becoming lecturous and the descriptions of "super-math" seems believable. Also interesting in its dealings with traditional Jewish faith in relationship with the rational sciences and even philosophy - I learned more about Jewish customs from this book than from any religion class I ever took. The relationships between Renee and her husband, best friends, lovers and familiy members are richly presented in all their details and colorful descriptions. The end is lovely - except for the fact that the story is over...

On a hot summer day over a ramen lunch I've been talking with a friend about Barry Mazur's latest monograph, "Imagining Numbers (2002)," a non-fiction book about mathematical imagination. The talk naturally evolved to as of why there is so little fictional work that writes about what it is like to be doing mathematics. My friend referred me to this book, adding that, though not written by a mathematician, it depicts behaviors of characters working in the field quite nicely.

"The Mind-Body Problem" is in fact written by a philosopher, and really is not about mathematics. It is about an intelligent young lady, Renee Feuer, who marries a world-renown mathematician, Noam Himmel, out of her insecurity: "...In short I was floundering [at Princeton as a grad student], and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage. And, given the nature of my distress, no one could better play the part of my rescuing hero than the great Noam Himmel. For the man had an extravagance of what I was so agonizingly feeling the lack of: objective proof of one's own intellectual merit." Renee, born into an orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, is self-acknowledging beautiful, and perhaps can be best characterized in her own words: "I had always thought of intelligence as power, the supreme power. Understanding is not the means of mastery, but the end itself (Spinoza)...I am only attracted to men who I believe to be more intelligent than I am. A detected mistake in logic considerably cools my desire. They can be shorter, they can be weaker, they can be poorer, they can be meaner, but they must be smarter. For the smart are the masters in my mattering region. And if you gain power over them, then through the transivity of power you too are powerful."

Embedded throughout the novel were philosophical interpretations of mundane matters, reminiscent in style of Alain de Botton's bestseller "On Love (1995)." However Renee's descriptions didn't feel as slick or polished as the male protagonist of "On Love," and I wasn't so impressed uptil her honeymoon with Noam, which occupied roughly half of the book. Clever indeed, but her observations I felt too naked. I became engaged when Renee started to bare out the hardships -- the logical tyranny of Noam -- she had to face. There her "naked" remarks made her pain, and subsequently the sweetness of her affair with a physicist so palpable that I started wondering whether Renee's was really a story about the author herself. The finale was equally touching, but I choose not to reveal for your reading pleasure. I will simply add that it is about the difficulty of assessing others' hearts (the "Other's Mind" problem in philosophy).

Back to the original question as of why there are so few fictional work by mathematicians. According to Noam, "A mathematician with his powers doesn't have any interest or time to write a book like this [Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology"]!"

This is one of my favorite books of all time. Our heroine Renee struggles with the great philosophical questions of Cartesian Dualism and Metaphysics in a time where "the field had made a 'linguistic turn' and I . . . had not. The questions were now all of language. Instead of wrestling with large messy questions that have occupied previous centuries of ethicists, for example, one should examine the rules that govern words like 'good' and 'ought'. My very first seminar [. . .] was on adverbs. The metaphysics of adverbs? From Reality to . . . adverbs?"

While not struggling with the drabness of Linguistics Renee flounders with her own identity. Is she bright for a pretty girl? or merely nice-looking for such a clever girl? would either quality stand alone?

To further complicate her identity questions she marries a bumbling mathematical genius (think Paul Erdos): "I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius. The question used to please me -- as an affirmation of my place, of my counting for something (if only through marriage) in the only world that counted for anything. But even back then [. . .] I was uncertain how to answer. "wife of genius" does not in itself define a distinct personality. The description, and my own fluid nature left me the burden of choice. And I found it hard to choose. I could never even decide how I should arrange my face when I answered. Should I radiate the faintly dazed glow of one who stands within sweating distance of the raging fires of creativity? Or should my features exhibit the sharp practicality of managing the mundane affairs of an intellectual demigod? I could never decide, and usually ended up trying to look both dazed and practical, to look a logical contradiction, which is, I suppose, to look a fool. And that, of course, is the very, very last thing I have ever wanted to look."

I have reread this book three times in this decade. I don't loan my copy out to anyone. I highly recommend it to anyone, but particularly to pretty and intelligent philosophy students.

Some readers of Rebecca Goldstein's THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM will find it "a very funny novel" (NEWSWEEK) or "clever and funny" (THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS). Perhaps. While there is a scintilla of humor in this brain-teaser of a novel, the risible may, whether it is a mother's misogyny, a husband's egomania, unrequitted love, the perseverance of ancient tribal rites, the dilemma of marriage v. career or historic atrocity, grab you and as likely make you wince. Goldstein herself, with a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton and a MacArthur "genius award", lived out the writing of this first novel in more profound terms:

"To me the process is still mysterious. I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. In the course of grieving for my father and glorifying my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren't gripping me the way they once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most 'unprofessional' sorts of questions...such as how does all this philosophy I've studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life?...I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert 'real life' intimately into the intellectual struggle."

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM engagingly weaves the tortured choice out of Plato's cave, the tangled skein of Leibnitzian monadology (the novel's antagonist is a card-carrying Platonist and Fields Medal mathematician), Cartesian dualism (the novel's heroine is aptly named Renee) and Shroedinger's positivism (What, after all, is life?), into the bits and pieces of everyday perception, belied by its uncommonplace ivy-walled setting. But, not to worry, if you have never taken a course in philosophy. At one level or another, RASHOMON-like, you will probably find yourself and others you know in the novel's moving pace and surprising denouement. If you are ignorant of geometry, you may also enter, read, and enjoy.

I read this years ago when I was a math student dreaming of maths fame. Now I'm a philosophy graduate student. I am, however, neither beautiful nor a woman. This tale is enchanting, tragic, well told and wistful. I loved it and think it should be compulsory reading for all philosophy students (along with others in this tiny genre: especially Duffy's 'The World As I Found It' on Wittgenstein). Let your (Kantian) imaginations run riot and Dream On!

The protagonist's Jewish identity is more important than the other reviews reveal. She was brought up fully observant of kashrus and Shabbos, attending a Jewish day school. The moment she turns eighteen she goes off to a fine university and studies philosophy--the ultimate rebellious course of study, designed to cast doubt on everything. She rebels against kashrut, going out of her way to eat bacon and lobster and to combine meat with dairy products (all forbidden by her upbringing) and repeatedly telling the other characters, and the reader, that she gets a wicked thrill every time she eats them. Indeed, this reader, who keeps kosher, feels a tinge of sadness at these rocks flung in the face of Gd. That is what she is doing: expressing her atheism. That atheism (along with her admirable intellect) lies at the heart of her love of philosophy.
Throughout the novel, she speaks of her affection for people whose mattering map resembles her own, people who agree with her on what matters, and who achieve things which matter. Since intellect (the mind) matters to her, she seeks a degree in philosophy, but her brand of philosophy asks questions which don't matter to the fashionable philosophers at her university, and she soon finds that she therefore doesn't matter either. If she didn't mind, it wouldn't matter, but she does, so when the genius mathematician of the century asks her to marry him, she leaps at the chance, deciding that if she doesn't matter to the philosophy department, then she can matter to her husband's mind, and that will compensate nicely.

Alas, her mattering strategy fails. The novelist takes the protagonist through the mathematical capitals of Europe, reminds us of the Shoah, scans the skies of reincarnation (he believes, she doesn't) and takes the protagonist through a delicious year-long affair with a man whose appreciation of her body matters (may I say it?) to her mind. At the end, alas, she learns she had made a terrible error, and then learns of yet another error, a happy error which I cannot tell without spoiling the story. I will reveal that, as in many novels, her mattering map goes upside down and inside out, as she experiences a situation whereby what really matters totally differs from all that she had minded before.

I largely enjoyed this novel. It is witty and strong-minded, although the prose style itself is perhaps unremarkable. Its main virtue is in questioning assumptions about who and what matters, and why. However, the story attempts to lay claims on our sympathies for its characters, whose tragedies include the narrator's dilemma of being beautiful but (self-confessedly) a bit thick -headed (despite getting into the best philosophy Ph.D program in the country), and her genius-mathematician-husband who *gasp* no longer feels himself to be a genius. I'm sorry, but my sympathies are not aroused by those 'dumb' philosophers at Princeton and their grumbling has-been genius husbands who didn't solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Still, it's worth a read.

Plot Kernel: A female graduate student of philosophy at Princeton, of Jewish heritage but not practicing Judaism since adulthood, now dedicated to an intellectual, self-examined life but out of step with the viewpoint and reigning methods of analytic philosophy and thus of middling achievement within the department, meets and marries a mathematical genius of the highest order, himself of Jewish biological heritage but with no past or present relation to Judaism. This woman finds her identity and value through her public association via marriage with this man of Olympian rank among intellectuals. He is the fully rational man, dedicated to logic, the a priori and pure mathematics; she is the philosophical female struggling emotionally and intellectually with the question of mind's relation to body, and body's place in the life of the mind. Her religious past and her parents' dedication to Judaism are ever present commentaries upon her life and her musings about where the value and meaning of one's life arises or resides.

The narrative is written as an introspective meditation on the lead character's past, not as a script-like text of prolonged dialogue with short simple descriptive passages between.

"And where was I now? I had hoped, like the good fairy tale taught, to save myself by marrying Noam. My mattering to him, who himself mattered so much, was going to do the trick. It had always been a battle against self-hate, and that's a bloody battle. I certainly didn't have the stuff to stand up to Noam's attacks, his palpable contempt. If I have quaked before every idiot's judgment, if the shrug of the shoulders has always been a movement I'm incapable of executing, imagine how it was to be standing before the Highest Judge, the Genius, before whom no invalid inference could be hidden, and to hear the verdict delivered: You are damned, you are dumb." (191)

This novel is about an intellectually insecure grad student who marries a famous genius mathematician, feeling her worth affirmed by his love and by the status conferred (explicit and subtle)upon her by being married to him. The marriage goes quickly sour as she realizes that an expansive mind is not incompatible with pettiness of spirit and human frailty. She sees only the genius and not the man. This novel is funny, and well-written but at the same time, it poses real questions and I think evidences a genuine human warmth. I think that it would not be an exxageration to say that I learned much from this book. You may as well (if nothing else, it's a good read)!

I just finished reading this book & enjoyed it very much. It is smart, funny, thought-provoking & well written. You may identify with the subject matter if you are NY Jewish &/or familiar with with university society, but neither are necessary to enjoy this book. It is necessary to like to be made to think. I especially liked her concept of the "mattering map" and its implications for the subjective vs objective nature of social reality.