How I Won a Nobel Prize

by Julius Taranto

Overview

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by VOGUE and VOX. The Free Press's August Book Club pick.

A "very funny, very good" (B. J. Novak) debut novel about a graduate student who follows her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage)

Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?
 
Helen decides she must go—her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives—and maybe the world.
 
Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple—if you could run the numbers.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316513074
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Julius Taranto's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Phoebe. He attended Yale Law School and Pomona College. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

08/14/2023

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"An indisputably brilliant comic novel of ideas, a feat of deep research and Olympian satire worthy of Don DeLillo. Julius Taranto confidently grasps the third rail of cancel culture and ties it into a balloon animal, with great nerve and heart (to say nothing of phlegm, bile, and blood—in other words, humor). Reading this book is like doing a whippit that makes you smarter."—TONY TULATHIMUTTE, author of Private Citizens

"Very funny. Very good."—B. J. NOVAK, author of One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

"A stunning new talent, announcing itself fully formed."—JONATHAN LETHEM, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"Julius Taranto achieves the near-impossible: a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive, less about culture wars than the never-ending battle of being human. A novel of ideas in the tradition of, Norman Rush's Mating, How I Won a Nobel Prize is one of the best new novels I've read in years."—TARA ISABELLA BURTON, author of Self Made and Strange Rites

"Such a delightful surprise! A refreshing literary cocktail that takes the right kinds of chances at this chancy moment."—KURT ANDERSEN, New York Times Bestselling author of Evil Geniuses and Heyday

"This is serious fiction of the least self-serious kind. A brilliantly executed, uproarious, and unabashedly precise exploration of ambition, power, love, and the painful art of balancing what we owe one another and ourselves."—LINDSAY STERN, author of The Study of Animal Languages

"Playful, taunting, and incisive, How I Won A Nobel Prize is a feat of wit, toying with the systems and classifications of our times to arrive at something brilliantly uncategorizable."—CHARMAINE CRAIG, bestselling author of Miss Burma and My Nemesis

"Nail-bitingly tense...bracingly clever...a funny page-turner with plenty of surprises up its sleeve." —Liam Hess, VOGUE

"[A] wildly original debut...propulsive, smart, funny."—Louisa Ermelino, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Taranto expertly explores the messy discussions around cancel culture and how much geniuses might be forgiven inappropriate conduct…A bright, well-turned satirical debut.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS

"It’s Taranto’s humor, especially his sentence-level wordplay, that keeps this book from collapsing under the weight of its high-concept, high-stakes 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."—Brendan Driscoll, BOOKLIST, Starred Review

“A very funny, very contemporary fable…The crisp intelligence of Mr. Taranto’s writing eases the way toward a zany, cinematic finale. In the end, How I Won a Nobel Prize offers a baffled endorsement of disorder, of the chaos of argumentation itself.”—Sam Sacks, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“[A] very funny debut…there’s something to be said for a novel that validates the messiness of the battles and doesn’t try so strenuously to resolve them. Which, to render a moral judgment, ought to be the mission of the novel in the first place.”—Mark Athitakis, LOS ANGELES TIMES

“I extracted layers of meaning in this comic tale…often hilarious…the absurdity is striking, but the ethical cost of doing business with compromised individuals is never far from Taranto's mind. Is the outcome worth that cost? It's no surprise the book was originally titled ‘The Moral Offset’ and that the conclusions drawn are literally explosive.”—Maren Longbella, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

“Taranto’s sharp debut is set at the Rubin Institute, an East Coast think tank that’s one part MIT, two parts Elon Musk’s Twitter feed: Its faculty of cancelees crows about finding a safe haven from woke culture. Helen, the narrator, is a brilliant scientist who’s grudgingly followed her advisor there, generating all manner of crises for her marriage, research and sense of ethics. It’s a fine launchpad for a satire of the culture wars.”—LOS ANGELES TIMES, Most Anticipated Book of Fall

"Taranto performs a high-wire act, balancing savvy political satire with brilliant character development and prose that sings and guffaws with nuance. . . Taranto gives the characters enough heart and zest that readers will want to go along for the ride, accepting the wildness that comes with an earnestness not often found in debuts."—Dominic Charles Howarth, SHELF AWARENESS

“[How I Won a Nobel Prize] answers the question: What if there were a university just for canceled people? … It's a very good satire, especially for a debut writer, especially for a male lawyer, writing in the voice of a woman. It's a high degree of difficulty. And it bites into a lot of meaty subjects that we're always arguing about and yelling about on both sides. But it's not a down-the-middle-of-the-road kind of satire, either. Essentially, the original title was ‘The Offset.’ And ultimately, that's what Helen has to cope with. … If you weigh your actions, what's enough of an offset? How much good you do in the world versus how much bad you do in the world?”—Boris Kachka, NPR, Press Play with Madeleine Brand

"This funny, provocative academic satire asks what demands genius makes on one’s attention, and which values can be sacrificed to advance art and science."—Kenneth Dillon, PUBLIC BOOKS

"Julius Taranto does an incredible job crafting an ambitious and nuanced narrative about ‘cancel culture’ that’ll keep you laughing from start to finish."—Ama Kwarteng, COVETEUR

“Has all the hallmarks of a book that will set sparks flying, an of-the-moment campus novel that deftly explores moral relativism…Enjoy the fascinating and surprisingly accessible dive into theoretical physics, appreciate the accumulating tension of the psychological drama, and laugh out loud at the one-liners.”—VOGUE, Best Book Club Books

From the Publisher

2023-07-13
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.

Kirkus Reviews