Virtuosic ... Most critics tasked with rendering Labatut recognizable liken him to the melancholic German writer W.G. Sebald, whose gently meandering novels contain long, dreamy meditations on destruction and decay ... A work of dark, eerie and singular beauty. It can also be difficult to read. The book is narrated by a cluttered polyphony of characters, among them both of von Neumann’s wives and a number of his teachers and colleagues. But there is a reason for this mad mumble of voices ... A dark tale.
Sets out to penetrate this mystery with imaginary testimonies by real people—siblings and teachers, colleagues and lovers—who knew von Neumann at different stages of his life. Labatut mingles biographical facts with fictional episodes and details to take us through each stage ... Labatut is intent on casting von Neumann as a Faustian figure, a man who transgressed the limits of knowledge to become something more and less than human. This idea may be Labatut’s greatest departure from biographical fact ... He skillfully distorts von Neumann’s biography to communicate...darkness ... Feels like a more accessible and conventional treatment of its predecessor’s basic idea—the moral corruption at the core of modern science. This is partly because Labatut has set himself a more difficult narrative challenge by focusing on a single life at greater length.
The Maniac does, by and large, assume the guise of fiction...but I did find myself wondering what it gained from this that a (minor and essentially rhetorical) tweak into long-form journalism would retract ... At its best...you just throw up your hands and think, Who cares what discourse label we assign this stuff? It’s great ... If there is a critique to be leveled at Labatut, it falls in the realm not of genre but of gender. Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac, women function as bit players ... To be fair, Labatut’s not unaware of this. If he can’t retro-populate White Sands with female leads, he at least grants his women broader, more incisive wisdom.
Labatut submerges you in the mind of real-life scientists and thinkers who were ill equipped to deal with the consequences of what they discovered ... Labatut has an uncanny ability to inhabit the psyche of these subjects — even though he’s conjuring up their recollections, they still come across as wholly reliable narrators.
I don’t think Labatut would mind if his books were perceived as a part of the chaotic demotic: loving, unruly, and speculative ... Almost all tell without show. The various von Neumann sections are attributed to characters, as if told in their voices, but other than Richard Feynman, who does get his own clipped cadence, everyone speaks in the run-ons that serve as Labatut’s default ... What we are left with is hundreds of pages of description, floating a few inches beyond the reader’s emotional grasp ... Sometimes, Labatut gets close to a thread that might land his balloon ... I do get swept away sometimes. I am happy that Labatut has no chill about the end of the world ... Ends up delivering the most Labatut feeling of all: complete defeat with a hint of almonds.
Darkly absorbing ... It all makes for a brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting and, at times, somewhat troublingly unreliable ... While the streamlined story arc he fashions...makes The MANIAC highly readable, it brooks very little uncertainty or nuance. A bit of a Dr. Frankenstein himself, Mr. Labatut arrogates the power to imagine the innermost thoughts of real people, and he has shaped those thoughts to conform to a portentous vision of spiritual terror. The science and biography lend a veneer of factual validity to what is really a work of fantasy. Certainly read this gripping, provocative novel—but read it with utmost skepticism.
The bulk of The MANIAC, after the opening with Ehrenfest, is a would-be oral history of John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath who worked on the Manhattan Project ... The attempt at polyphony is sometimes strained, but the anecdotal approach helps to revive a man often reduced to an encyclopedia entry.
Darkly fascinating ... Riveting ... Labatut handles all of this with impressive dexterity, unpicking complex ideas in long, elegant sentences that propel us forward at speed (this is his first book written in English). Even in the more feverish passages, when yet another great mind succumbs to madness, haunted by the spectres they’ve helped unleash on the world, he feels in full control of his material.
Unusual ... It would be an error, however, to read The MANIAC as merely the Chilean novelist’s indictment of the gringo military-industrial complex, as embodied by von Neumann, because Labatut’s critique drives deeper, indicting the United States’ antinomian rationalism ... Labatut’s novel is a sweeping condemnation of the cult of rationality, an acknowledgment that logic pushed to its extreme transforms into madness—an insanity like the nuclear deterrence method called mutually assured destruction, for which von Neumann advocated, convincing military brass that it was nothing but the clearest of clear thinking.
Labatut’s decision to structure von Neumann’s story this way is what provides the novel with its true crime feel; taken together, these short first-person chapters give the impression that we are hearing witness testimony ... Even the ostensibly humanizing anecdotes do little to help von Neumann’s case.
Readers familiar with Labatut’s previous novel...will recognise the sense of breathlessness his best writing can evoke. Seemingly loosened from the laws of physics they describe, his sentences range freely through time and space, connecting not only characters and events, but the delicate tissue of intellectual history, often with a lightness of touch that belies their underlying complexity ... All that a brilliant novel requires, then – talent, ambition, skill, intelligence – is present in abundance. And yet, somehow, a brilliant novel is not quite what we end up with. It’s a thermodynamic conundrum. With this much creative energy invested, why does the result feel underpowered? ... At the moments we need him to linger, Labatut is already gone.
Some might wonder whether the author could have let his imagination run a little more freely by daring to take on von Neumann’s perspective, by diving into just a couple of his closest relationships, instead of following a predominantly male ensemble of fifteen ... Others might argue that the author’s focus on the danger that AI will supplant us in the future ignores the problems of implicit bias, copyright violation and accountability that we already have – a move that could play into the hands of technologists keen to avoid the more inconvenient matter of regulation in the here and now by playing up talk of approaching existential risk. Such an instrumental view of fiction seems churlish when faced with a novel that both entertains and provokes.
A novel, but one that feels more like a blend of history, biography and popular science ... These narrators, who monologue like talking heads in a documentary, include von Neumann’s mother, daughter, two wives and numerous colleagues. Despite many of them sounding alike, their story is compelling ... Despite all this, von Neumann remains largely unknowable, a negative space at the book’s heart. This could be seen as a failure of the novelist’s gift, but given that even von Neumann’s wife described him as 'an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved', perhaps Labatut’s restraint should be admired ... Disquieting.
A measured descent into years of research and invention, with little sense of what’s to come beyond a pervasive, unnameable dread ... For readers who come with curiosity and skepticism—the very mindset that has brought about our most disruptive evolutions in tech—Labatut’s book will provoke and inform, leaving us no more sure-footed in our nascent age of AI but certainly more aware.
Labatut has created his own genre: fictionalized accounts of great minds in the history of science, whose genius drives them to madness ... Labatut’s prose is lucid and compelling, drawing readers on a frightening but fascinating journey; even the most right-brained among them will gain insight into the power and potential dangers of AI. Highly recommended.
Faced with such exceptional rationality, Labatut chooses indirection. Although he relates von Neumann’s life from beginning to end, he tells it through onlookers. The literary ventriloquism of von Neumann’s peers George Pólya and Richard Feynman, and the discord between their accounts, give a showcase to the novelist’s ingenuity ... The Maniac has been laying down counters that seem unrelated at first, then suddenly, brilliantly, align.
If this polyvocal structure sounds reminiscent of another great Chilean author, it’s for good reason. Labatut writes about scientists the way Roberto Bolaño writes about poets. They are near mythical figures, captured at the corner of the novel’s eye. They become historical in the most fraught sense of the term: subject to rumor and speculation and, eventually, the novel’s form inflates their personas into something so large they can only be understood as narrative, never known in any objective capacity. Perhaps this is the reason why part three of The MANIAC falls flat when compared to the first two parts of the triptych ... Thankfully, the uncertainty surrounding The MANIAC’s final subject doesn’t obscure Labatut’s own brilliance. His prose is crisp, and he is able to render momentum where many writers might fail. Unfortunately, the uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence persists in no shortage of hand-wringing, some fictionalized, some very real.
