Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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Also, while I am not familiar with most experimental philosophy and it was interesting to learn about many ideas through this novel, there was one thought experiment drawn from game theory that I was familiar with, The Prisoner’s Dilemma (ch. 2), often used in social sciences. It was rather incorrectly “applied”, starting with the conflation between strategies (cooperation or defection) and outcomes (defeat) in presenting 3 scenarios. More egregiously, it focuses only on one person (Ali) while the preferences and motivations of the second person (Damon) were only tangential whereas the very nature of the game is that it is interdependent, i.e., dependent on the choices and motivations of both sides. The scenario of mutual cooperation is also presented as the best scenario when in fact it’s the second best outcome for each person in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (sorry if this sounds too technical: the entire paradox of the PD game is that this is a Pareto optimal outcome but not a Nash equilibrium, that is, there is the tension between collective and individual rationality), etc. That said, the chapter itself was interesting in presenting different consequences of one boy’s dilemmas in general, which will be weaved seamlessly into later chapters. Oh, mum, just say I’m a lesbian,’ Rachel told her when Elizabeth asked what she should tell the hairdresser who wanted to know why she hadn’t seen Rachel for so long.

She leant against the doorway as Rachel’s hand scratched under the hat. Was the ant moving around in Rachel’s dreams? The thought stopped Eliza’s breath. Since Rachel’s diagnosis Eliza couldn’t look at her wife without seeing the ant as well. The insect was part of their lives, a force within their relationship, a reason behind their family. If you love me, you will trust me, Rachel had said, and Eliza did. After all this time, she believed in the ant. For me, the most powerful chapters are the fourth and fifth, which compose a kind of central diptych: the narrative from the ant’s viewpoint, followed by Rachel’s meditation, in extremity, on her “partnership” with the creature, which had “crawled in to her eye one night and changed her life”. The first is a dark divertimento in which Ward exercises gifts of bravura wit and imagination. The sagacious ant, drawn by the scent of decay, in feeding on Rachel’s tumour exercises – against readerly expectation – a benign function. Its mind, invading Rachel’s, is at the mercy of her experience, knows her intimately, receiving her brain’s flood of “colour and sensation”. It digests as much of the tumour as it can, extending her life. The ant becomes Rachel, who absorbs it into the colour of her deepest self: “We are one.” This is a figure for the terrifying but ultimately benign power of empathy itself. If it cannot cure mortality, it can die trying.

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We also meet Rachel’s parents, who have tried to escape their mundane life by moving to Brazil. In later chapters we follow Rachel’s fight against cancer and the way it affects the people around her, including Arthur’s biological father Hal and his partner Greg.

She kept her hands on Rachel’s face and the two women sat for a long while on the bench with the clouds shifting above and their son beside. Eliza continued to see Sondra Marshall on her own. Once a week, she left Rachel and Arthur curled up together on the sofa and rode her bicycle to the house with the door on the side. Each time, while she waited for the therapist, she looked at the bell marked ‘House’ and thought of Rachel.

Rachel laughed and wiped at the wetness that had pooled around her nose and mouth. ‘You! You can do anything. You’d rule the world if you wanted to. With those legs.’ This was their first visit although they had spoken to Dr Marshall on the phone. As they walked into the consulting room, Eliza searched for clues to the personality of the doctor in whom she had placed her trust. She glanced at the bookshelves and framed certificates on the wall, and noted the way the therapist walked to the best chair and waited for her clients to sit across from her. Eliza saw she had entered a temple to which she did not belong. My favorite character in this entire novel was by far the ant that crawled into Rachel’s eye that night. This is not an attempt at making a cute joke; the chapter that is narrated by the ant that supposedly has taken residence in Rachel’s head was the most lyrical and genuinely gorgeous part of this novel. The ant’s narrative describes how its reality intertwined with the host it has infiltrated, about how it begins to feel human emotion as its consciousness begins to meld with Rachel’s. For instance, the ant, new to human feelings, describes what he feels when Rachel discloses her cancer diagnosis to her mother, saying the “burden of this disguise has worn us both down, wrapped, it seems, in hope and desire, bitter memories and the almond tang of sugar and death.” Take, too, this portion of the chapter that is my favorite part of the entire novel: The book was written as an extension of a post graduate student project (at Goldsmiths College, London), and I think it reflects that, with its academic and highly formalised creative writing construct. If I were a thought experiment,’ Rachel asked Eliza as they got into bed that night, ‘What one would I be?’

I was drawn to the book as a consequence of its surprise inclusion on the Booker 2020 longlist. That’s some accolade for a debut novelist. Eat up.’ Eliza spooned out the pasta, and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s open that test and get to the fun stuff.’

There is a comprehensive source list at the end of the novel, but some of the influences are more opaque to me, for example Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, which seems to be key but I’m unclear why. The boy inched the wheel and when he felt the cup respond he redoubled his efforts, throwing his whole body in the direction of the spin. Eliza saw her own determined frown on his face as he held fast. Rachel told you she thinks something is living inside her head and for some time you went along with this belief.’ Dr Marshall wrote in her notepad and returned to the two women. ‘What’s changed?’ But we have got ants, Els. I’m not imagining them.’ Eliza brought Rachel’s hand to her lips. ‘I know, my darling.’ She kissed each of Rachel’s plump fingers just below the nail and grazed the tip of the thumb with her teeth. Ward’s prose strikes me as flat and cold, focused more on concepts- which she does deliver well. The book builds a network of affection connecting all of these characters, and then seems to assume that the existence of the network is enough to engage the reader’s emotions without doing any more work to actually endear the characters to the reader. It all felt very empty and mathematical to me, and while I appreciated the way it all fell into place from a tactical perspective, the fact that the plot does revolve around this circle of love makes the emotional distance a real detriment to overall enjoyment. I simply didn’t care what happened to any of the characters beyond the boy swimming out to sea, and even there the effect might have been more attributable to the simple presentation of an innocent child suddenly in grave danger rather than any particularly deft wording on Ward’s part.



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