Where should we put the canceled? I’m talking about the comedians, academics, writers, and producers who were once on top of the world—or at least, their own little worlds—but now find themselves cultural undesirables, if not exactly criminals.
Imagine if they all lived on a little island off the coast of Connecticut with a perfect view of Yale. An island, naturally, where they work at a flagrantly anti-PC university lavishly funded by a master of the universe. Or he was, until he was canceled himself.
That’s the premise of Julius Taranto’s brilliant, satirical novel How I Won a Nobel Prize. In Taranto’s book, we see it all through the eyes of his physics prodigy protagonist, Helen, who follows her mentor, an eccentric gay genius who was ejected from Cornell for the #MeToo special: He slept with one of his male students while promising him a leg up in his career.
“There was the winner of the Bancroft Prize, who had, as a department chair, while drunk, felt up an untenured assistant professor. There was Blackface Metzger,” reads one passage where Helen is surveying the overwhelmingly white members of the institute with her new friend Leo Lens, a fictitious Philip Roth. “Over there—I pointed at the pursy Englishman who had once been the Great Investigator of The New Yorker—he used force, didn't he? And over there, of course, that’s R. Kelly.”
Helen may be politically apathetic but her boyfriend, Hew, is the kind of guy you might find protesting next week in front of the DNC: vegan, angry, obsessively online and ready to explode. . .
And that’s all I’m going to tell you! Because I want you to read this fantastic novel, which is our August book club pick. You can buy How I Won a Nobel Prize here.
I’ll be talking about How I Won a Nobel Prize with author Julius Taranto on August 29 from 7–9 p.m. at The Bench in downtown Manhattan.
Join us for discussion and drinks. Can’t wait to see you.
Tickets are free, but spots are limited to 100 people. Paid subscribers get a 24-hour-hour early access window for tickets HERE, using the code at the end of this email.
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