Ethan Canin. Photo by Nina Subin/courtesy of Random House
Ethan Canin is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels. His most recent, A Doubter's Almanac, is about a mathematical genius named Milo Andret, and the ways his genius becomes a liability, scorching Milo and the people close to him.
Canin was my thesis advisor at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I liked and admired him because he was intelligent, articulate, and generous with his criticism. He wasn't afraid of offering too much guidance, causing someone to feel something, or seeming proscriptive. He was a great teacher, trained at Iowa during its heyday and immersed in story ever since. I wasn't a part of this, but I heard that during my second year, the first-years started calling him "Dad." This annoyed me a little, because I felt kind of like—well, I felt there was something a little possessive about it. (Of course, I only felt that way because I, too, was possessive.) But I digress. The point is, Ethan Canin is kind of the dad that 21st-century American letters never had.
—Amie Barrodale, fiction editor
Singularity Theory
One Saturday in June, his mother banged the garbage-can lid at dinnertime, but when he came in from the woods he found his parents sitting in the Plymouth. His father beckoned him into the backseat. As soon as he got in, they drove away. His father was dressed in a flannel shirt and a fedora. When they stopped, they were in downtown Cheboygan. The Andrets rarely came here. His father paid to park at the pier, even though it would have cost nothing to park a block away. Already this was strange. So was the fedora. The day was warm. Along the boardwalk, a bicycle cab was bumping across the planks and a cotton-candy salesman was spinning cones. The sun was low already, and where the dark lake was disturbed by watercraft it winked with painful brightness, as though the moving vessels were sprinkling glass behind them. Today was his parents' anniversary, he discovered. He could see that there had been some kind of disagreement, though. His mother fidgeted with a picnic basket.
At the public pier, they rented a boat. Now, this was stupendous. A bright blue wooden dinghy, 15 or 16 feet long, with a plank seat at the oarlocks and a high-backed bench in the rear, shaded by a canopy. It looked like the king's skiff in a royal amusement ride. Warily, his father examined it. Then he took off his hat, held it to the side, and jumped down into the hull. The vessel shifted, its keel striking the still surface with a sound like a pan slapping a table, before it steadied against the dock. He took his position at the oars, then waited with a hard expression while Milo and his mother climbed in under the canopy. The picnic basket was placed on the floor. In a moment they'd set out for the northern point of the harbor, a short distance across the inlet, his father's rhythmic stroke swiftly shortening the stretch of water that had now begun to reflect the purplish gold of the sunset. The oarlocks creaked, and the slatted seatback pressed and eased against Milo's spine. Beyond the breakwater lay open lake. As they crossed the far end of the timber-roofed pier, the church bells chimed eight o'clock.
Almost 15 years later, at his interview for graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, the famous Dr. Hans Borland, of the Borland invariant, asked Milo how he'd first become interested in mathematics.
"I was out on the water with my parents," Milo began. Something had changed in him, and he'd found in his 20s that he could tell stories, even long ones, with surprising ease. Nonetheless, he'd remained as alone in the world as he'd always been and could still neither predict nor understand the behavior of others. He remembered Dr. Borland leaning forward. A glimpse of shrewd irises above gold-stemmed trifocals.
"It was evening," Milo said. "We'd gotten a late start. This was in Lake Huron. The northern part."
"Lake Huron," said Dr. Borland, peering over his spectacles. "An underappreciated body of water."
Someone laughed.
"My father took no pleasure in boats," said Milo.
"A disadvantage on the Great Lakes, is it not?"
"He had his reasons."
Milo waited for something more. If they asked, he would tell the story about the Solomon Sea.
"Go on with what you were saying, young man," said another professor, from the back of the room. "What happened on the lake?"
"It was mid-November," said Milo. "Practically winter in our part of the state. My father had rowed us out past the harbor, but he hadn't accounted for the currents or the dark." He paused now, enjoying the quiet. "By the time the sun set, we were still a good ways out. Then the wind came up. It built a sea. Three- or four-foot swells. It was a small boat. We were coming down pretty hard into the troughs. My father's left arm is stronger than his right—we're a family of lefties—and we got turned around."
"Ah," said Professor Borland. "Interesting—and you too are a lefty?"
"Yes, I am."
"Go on."
"So, in the dark, he began rowing us"—here he paused—"away from land. The hills north of town block the light, so when you're out that deep you can't really see much. Lake Huron might as well be an ocean. My father's a good navigator, but he must have been keeping track by some other landmark—maybe the lights from the salmon boats up to the northeast. I figured he knew he was rowing us deeper, so I didn't say anything. Not for a while, anyway. But eventually I realized he didn't know that he was bringing us the wrong way—out to sea."
"And how did you know that?" said Dr. Borland, leaning forward now.
"I've always been able to do it."
"Do what?"
"Maintain awareness of my coordinates. Know where I am."
"Day or night?"
"Either one. Doesn't matter. I don't think it depends on sight."
"And what does your father do?"
"He rowed us a quarter mile further out—"
"I mean, what's his job? What does he do for work? I assume he's still living."
"He teaches high school. At the school I went to. Chemistry and physics."
"Which might explain such a skill in the boy," said Dr. Borland, briefly turning to the other faculty. A couple of them nodded. "Although you might have expected the old man himself to have positional aptitude. Which he obviously hasn't."
Milo could see that the story had impressed his questioners, and he decided not to offer anything more. He chose not to mention his mother, for example, who could always give directions in the car without consulting a map. Or her brother, who made a living in Las Vegas playing blackjack from a memory system.
There were other problems with the story, as well. The November part of it, for one. This was far from the truth. As was the wind. They'd indeed gotten lost in the moonless night, but it had been in June, in warm weather, on a calm lake. In fact, the summertime wind on that part of Lake Huron almost always calmed at dusk, rather than grew stronger. And by November, when the salmon were in the rivers, the fishing boats were in dry dock. But he was sure that none of these men would know such facts. The water in reality had been as smooth as oil, and the air had been a warmish, comforting presence on his skin. His mother had nonetheless grown worried as dark fell over the shore, and his father had responded with grimness and silence, pulling strenuously at the oars until, by Milo's estimation, they were a half mile out to sea, under a black planetarium sky. That's when Milo had finally led them home.
"In actual fact," said Dr. Borland, turning his head again to the others, "very few can do this sort of intrinsic, spatial mapping." There were murmurs, and he returned his gaze to Milo. "And this marked the beginning of your interest in mathematics?"
"I suppose it did."
"And you led your parents home that night because you could picture the plane of the earth and had accounted for all your movements on it."
"I could, Professor. I did."
In fact, he'd long been able to picture the world, all of its six directions, his exact place in any three-dimensional topography. Perhaps the skill had evolved from his years in the pathless woods. For as long as he could remember, his surroundings had been forming themselves into an inverted, low-sloping bowl, a hemisphere of smoothly shifting coordinates in which his position at the center was continually being recalibrated. That part was true. The other details just made the story more memorable.
"Amazing," said Dr. Borland, peering at him again over the tops of his glasses.
"I would call it the bowl of the earth, actually, Professor Borland. Not a plane. An upside-down bowl. A spherical cap, as one of you might say."
"I stand corrected."
Now there was laughter. Borland silenced it with a finger. "Tell us, young man," he said, "how do you pronounce your name?"
"Milo, sir. Like silo."
"And the surname?"
"Andret," he said. He glanced down. "Like bandit, but with the r there."
"Ah," said the professor, turning briefly to his colleagues. "The Midwest."
There was laughter again, looser this time, but Borland once more silenced it with a finger. He turned to the room. "Some of you might have noticed," he said drily, "that this candidate did not take the usual exams. On the recommendation of a colleague from the great state of Michigan"—here he bowed, slightly mockingly, in Milo's direction—"I had him sent a few problems instead, which I chose myself." He turned to the audience. "Let me tell you, gentlemen, these were not your standard questions from the graduate record exam." Now he turned to Milo. "Do you know how you did on them, young man?"
"No, sir, I don't."
"Suffice it to say—" Now he removed his glasses. "Suffice it to say, I see a great deal of potential in you." He looked up. "This is a name, gentlemen—Milo Andret—that you'll all be wise to remember."
There was some coughing. Then silence. Milo could discern little meaning from it. Almost a decade before, as a freshman at Michigan State, he'd earned a perfect score in linear algebra, better than all of the graduate students in the class, without doing a single evening of homework. But for the five years since his degree, he'd been working at a Gulf station in Lansing.
"Young man," said Dr. Borland, "your qualification exam was remarkable." He removed his glasses and peered down at him. "Truly remarkable."
Milo was silent. He'd had a smattering of Cs in the humanities and one D, in sociology.
"And you spent your 20s working in a filling station?"
"It was a service station, really. I did plenty of engine work. I wanted to get a little experience." His father had suggested he might be asked such a question.
"Well, you've had an exceptional, if not a bit erratic, record in college," Professor Borland said. "Let us hope the experience has matured you." He quieted the murmuring. "Let us also hope that we haven't wasted too much time in finding you. I'm sure you'll fit in very well with the mathematics program at the University of California, Berkeley. Which we consider, by the way"—here he snapped away his gaze—"to be the best on the planet."
Excerpted from A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin by arrangement with Penguin Random House.
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