True Enough

When We Cease to Understand the World, the first of Benjamín Labatut’s works to be published in English, ends with a discussion of how to assess the age of a lemon tree, to know how long it has left to live. “He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk,” Labatut’s narrator reports. “But, really, who would want to do that?” The preceding pages of the “nonfiction novel”—a fiction that draws extensively on real people and events, so much so that it’s unclear where the fiction actually begins—document the lives of scientists and mathematicians like Werner Heisenberg and Alexander Grothendieck who, with their revolutionary theories of the logic (or illogic) undergirding matter and reality, attempt to cut through the world’s trunk and are haunted by what they find inside. Labatut’s latest, The MANIAC, is another nonfiction novel, its source material the life and work of John von Neumann, the twentieth-century mathematician and scientist who lived hatchet in hand and whose unceasing hacks gave us, among many other things, digital computers, game theory, and Mutually Assured Destruction, and led us to our nascent, ominous age of artificial intelligence.