The Infinities by John Banville

John Banville’s new novel, The Infinities, is a maddening book with much to admire and much to scratch one’s head over. We know that Banville is a master; he is the author of more than a dozen novels, two detective novels (under the name Benjamin Black), and winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005, among many other awards. He is a prominent critic whose book reviews and essays are among the most literate and thoughtful being published today.

The Infinities is an interesting, often beautifully written exploration of the impact that the life of the mind can have on an individual and his family, but it hits a couple of false notes which detract from its overall quality.

Here, Banville tells the story of a mathematician, Adam Godley and his family: his second wife Ursula, son Adam and his wife Helen, daughter Petra, Petra’s friend Roddy, and a couple of servants. Young Adam and his wife have come to the family home because Adam Sr. is dying. This is not a happy family. Adam Jr. is “condemned . . . to a life into which he does not properly fit.” His younger sister, Petra, “is tiny and thin with a heart-shaped face and haunted eyes.” She gives off a “musty grayish smell, like the bed of an invalid.” “Her mother says she despairs of her.” Petra cuts herself on her arms with her father’s old straight razor. Ursula, Adam Sr.’s second wife, drinks on the sly. Again, this is an unhappy family.

Though on his deathbed, Adam Sr., is nevertheless the most interesting character in the book. We know what he is thinking and remembering, which is pretty much all one needs to know about Adam Sr. because his life is all in his head; he cannot speak to his family. A whiz at mathematics – his “final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time” and made him world-famous – Adam is not so skilled with life in the real world. “Doing, doing, is living, as my mother, my poor failed unhappy mother, among others, tried her best to din into me. I see now, while all along I thought thinking was the thing.” As for being a father, “children were a surprise to me,” he says, “surely on both occasions that unignorably accumulating bulge in my wife’s middle region should have cushioned me from the shock of the inevitable issue. But not a bit of it, the thing sent me stumbling in a daze, not once but twice.” But did Adam love his children? He believes that love requires “superhuman” self-sacrifice that he is not capable of; “perhaps my standards are too high,” he thinks.

And yet perhaps I do love, without knowing it; could such a thing be possible, an unwilled, and unconscious, loving? On occasion when I think of this or that person, my wife, say, my son or daughter . . . my heart is filled, what we call the heart, with an involuntary surge of something, glutinous and hot, like grief, but a happy grief, and so strong that I stagger inwardly and my throat thickens and tears, real tears, press into my eyes.

With the singular phrase “happy grief” Banville has nailed the oddness of Adam Sr.

Banville is wonderfully capable of bending language and plot to express the unique intricacies of life as he sees it. As Adam Sr. assesses his life’s work and realizes the world he discovered does not match the one we live in.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal; there you have the crux of it, the cross to which I was nailed from the start. Difference: the very term is redundant, a nonce-word coined to comfort and deceive. Oh, I told myself, that to say equal to is not to say identical with, but does it signify, does it placate? My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate world order. Perhaps there is such a world but if there is we do not live in it and cannot know how things would be there.

This is a knock-out paragraph, imbuing ordinary arithmetic terms with unusual and highly expressive meaning.

Unfortunately, the full effect of Banville’s extraordinary writing is blunted by an unfortunate conceit: much of the novel is narrated by Hermes, the messenger and guide to the underworld. Hermes describes how he and his father, Zeus, dart in and out of our lives, observing, helping, and hindering. He says at one point about Zeus: “He comes to [women] in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him – him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them.” This silly idea may be used merely for comic relief; the trouble is, it isn’t funny.

In the end, The Infinities disappoints as much as it exhilarates. For several pages we are excited by Banville’s powerful prose only to be forced to endure the loopy antics of Hermes and Zeus. Banville’s wonderful writing does not deserve to be diminished by harebrained ideas.

Reviewed by Stan Izen

The Infinities by John Banville
Knopf, 2010
Cloth, 288 pp, $25.95
ISBN-13: 9780307272799