A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Damn shame about Janna Levin's new novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.

It could've been great. It has such an enticing premise. The book juxtaposes the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Levin’s first-person narrator (a clear stand-in for Levin herself) describes why the real-life geniuses are worth exploration in the first chapter.

"These two people converge in history and diverge in belief. They act out lives that are only tangentially related and deaths that were written for each other, inverted reflections. They are both brilliantly original and outsiders. They are both loyal to reason and to truth. They are both besotted by mathematics. But for all their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unaltered by any of their dramas—Gödel’s psychotic delusions, Turing’s sexuality. …. Their broken lives are mere anecdotes in the margins of their discoveries. ... Against indifference, I want to tell their stories. (3-4)"

And so Levin, a scientist herself, chose the novel form to “tell their stories”—such an admission hints at what I contend is the book’s fatal flaw: Levin’s text does not elevate past a dramatic anecdote.

Here’s why.

On a micro level, Levin settles too comfortably trivia. For example, towards the end of the novel, she inserts a nudging aside about Gödel’s friendship with Albert Einstein in his dialogue.

“’If Einstein were here, I might still go to the institute.’
‘Yes,’ she says…’But he’s been gone twenty years. You still have Oskar…’” (188)

In this scene between Gödel and his wife, Einstein’s name—appearing in the novel only here—hits like a weighty thud. There’s no good textual reason for alluding to Einstein and Gödel’s friendship; it’s merely a curiosity. Levin’s notes at the end of the novel indicate that she couldn’t resist the name-drop, even though it adds nothing to the scene at hand.

“…there are many omissions of the fascinating particulars of Gödel’s and Turing’s lives that are beyond the scope of this book. A list of such particulars includes Gödel’s friendship with Einstein…” (224)

Just as Levin steps outside of her fictional story to give a nod to the admittedly intriguing true-story, she also steps aside of her characters to indulge in lyricism. This is evident in one of the versions of Turing’s letter to Joan, intended to explain his arrest. Turing writes:

“’The wind off the ocean was terribly fierce and we had to lean forward so that everyone looked like they were frozen in a head-first dive into the sand…I took a minute to visit the Gypsy. As you well know I think psychics are complete rubbish but I still find myself drawn to the performance. It’s like that beautiful animated film we saw together, Snow White. Of course I know it’s not real, but I still love to see it…. The reflection of her eyes was smeared around the glass into huge fish orbs…” (181-2)

Turing's letter is thick with metaphors, similes, and double-voiced allusions. And this comes after 180 pages of convincing us readers that Turing’s autism renders him oddly literal, that the meaning of what is not plainly present is lost on him! As our narrator told us early on:

“He means no irony … He neither uses or understands metaphors. He means literally. There is a precedent for this miscomprehension” (14).

AH! The betrayal!

We see the consequences of Turing’s autism throughout the text, which makes his sudden lyricism all the more startling and out-of-place. I can’t help but suspect that Levin interjects such metaphors and similes in Turing’s mouth because she herself likes the sound of them, ultimately choosing her ‘little darlings’ over her character.

Levin’s linguistic tendernesses undercut the whole text. As is evident from the first excerpt above, Levin uses a prominent first-person narrator. The “I” is clearly Levin herself, the one who is ‘telling their stories.’

And while the first-person appears in the chapters that follow Gödel and Turing respectively, it also has four chapters to itself, set in modern-day New York City and explicitly echoing the syntax and images of the Gödel and Turing chapters. I believe Levin means to reveal the continuation of the patterns present for the two geniuses, to characterize herself—and by extension, us—as the inheritor of their ideas. She is also characterizing herself as the Liar of the Liar’s Paradox that plays such a prominent part in the story (“This statement is false,’ says the Liar”)—speaking truths and lies at once in this history-turned-novel.

This may all be worthwhile, but on the book’s own terms, it’s redundant. Moving through Gödel and Turing’s stories in the first-person present tense, consistent flash-forwards, jumping around in time and place, irregularly moving between the two subjects—these devices succeed in themselves in carrying out Levin’s intention. When she breaks into herself on the New York City streets, echoing the language of her own story, it’s too much. These individuated chapters add nothing new.

Ultimately, Levin’s text doesn’t cohere as a novel. It’s closer to a string of related fascinating anecdotes. It is well-narrated history with a bit of fudging to connect the dots. It seems to me that by choosing the form of the novel, Levin committed herself to saying something else, something that history couldn’t say itself in its strict chronology and facticity.

But the point Levin portends to unite the anecdotes into a greater whole would be obvious by simply juxtaposing the two men (and their ideas and fates) in a context outside of the novel form. This could’ve been a very interesting long essay, where Levin pinned the pair together and explored their implications.

Levin’s explanatory historical notes at the end of Madman did nothing but add to my angst. If she’d used this story and this form for all its worth, then the notes shouldn’t matter in the slightest.

Levin chose the wrong form for this particular story. This is a case of mismatch of forms.

Damn shame.

For other opinions, read reviews at The New York Times, The Decatur Daily, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.