Review by Booklist Review
To solve a physics problem (and maybe save the world), a grad student follows her adviser to an island sanctuary for problematic men. "Give me your cancellees and deplorables," invites the Rubin Institute, a tech-bro incubator and libertarian fantasy camp a short ferry ride from New Haven. A phallic tower, nicknamed the Endowment, looms over a campus of handsy professors and toxic jerks. For Helen, it's all about the superconductor research--the institute has a 522-petaflop mega-computer--but her husband, Hew, is wary and increasingly drawn into anti-institute activism. The stakes rise when Helen befriends an exiled writer and draws the unwelcome attention of the institute's creepy founder. Lampooning both the denizens of Rape Island (as the protesters call it) and the sociocultural climate against which the institute revolts, debut novelist Taranto walks a tightrope and risks alienating portions of his audience. But it's Taranto's humor, especially his sentence-level wordplay, that keeps this book from collapsing under the weight of its high-concept, highstakes premise. And if absurdist flourishes, centrist moral sensibilities, and superconductor tech-jargon anchor the book's aesthetics in the late 1990s, the love story at its core feels raw and tech-laden in a uniquely contemporary way.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A physicist's dream lab proves to be a not-so-safe space. Helen, the narrator of Taranto's smart and funny debut, has made a devil's bargain. She's a rising researcher in the field of superconductors, addressing knotty quantum-mechanics problems that might resolve the climate crisis. Her adviser is Perry, a Nobel Prize--winning genius. But staying with Perry means joining him at the Rubin Institute, a billionaire-funded and defiantly un-PC think tank on an island off the Eastern Seaboard that's determined to provide a haven for academics and artists dubbed "cancellees and deplorables." (Protesters have dubbed it "Rape Island.") Helen's partner, Hew, grudgingly tags along but attends anti-Rubin protests; Helen, meanwhile, is determined to sidestep politics and not scrutinize Perry's cancellation too closely. (It involves a sexual indiscretion, but details are withheld for a clever late plot twist.) Taranto initially plays this setup for laughs; the Institute is centered in an overtly phallic tower named the Endowment, R. Kelly is among the attendees at get-togethers, and the spreads include "ostentaciously problematic meat: foie gras, roast suckling pig, octopus, horse." But in time Helen becomes more enmeshed in the Institute's politics, complicating her relationships with Hew and Perry and her sense of the world. (The scientist in her assembles a spreadsheet to clarify Hew's place in her life, but life isn't so tidy.) Taranto expertly explores the messy discussions around cancel culture and how much geniuses might be forgiven inappropriate conduct--a dilemma personified by a louche, Philip Roth--like writer Helen befriends at the Institute. That subplot clangs a little against the main narrative, and Taranto's climax is over-the-top. But it's a fine study of the idea that, for all the complaints about the culture wars, nobody can pretend they're not implicated in them. A bright, well-turned satirical debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
