A Doubter's Almanac: A Novel / Ethan Canin

An Amazon Best Book of February 2016: If your father was never like other fathers, if he never tossed the ball with you, if he never talked with you about your day at school while you walked the dog together in the evenings, if he never brought you to a hockey game was always late when he picked you up if he swore when he tripped on curbs and stumbled when he got out of cars then you had a father like poor Hans Andret, the narrator of this sad but surprisingly buoyant novel about a family of brainiacs who are particularly good at math-- and self-destruction. The patriarch, Milo Andret, is a drinker with a nasty demeanor that gets him booted out of both Princeton and the arms of his one true love (who marries his rival); a generation later, his son Hans, a hedge-fund billionaire by the age of 20 (his field was applied mathematics which to his purist father might as well have been Himalayan transcentalist studies ) seems headed down the same path. But Hans tries to understand history as well as math, and manages, sort of, to come to terms with his father, his legacy and himself. This novel is the kind of epic story we ve read before--it s almost Biblical--and yet Canin makes it all seem new. Maybe it s the discussions about math, which are less off-putting than I at first feared they would be, and maybe it s the way he makes these superbly flawed characters seem well, if not likable, then at least recognizable. (Personally, I credit the female characters, the ex-girlfriend, the mother, the sister--helpmeets, all--who are nonetheless both the backbone and the heart of the book.) Canin will surely catch some flak for some overlong passages and some scenes of very obvious Freudianness, but they re buffeted by beautiful writing and a story line that, for all its tragic familiarity, never gets old. --Sara Nelson
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