Ideas matter; behavior doesn’t. That could be the motto for The Rubin Institute, a university with “bottomless funding, unencumbered by institutional regulations.” The Institute’s enticing promise to faculty: “No Code of Conduct, no Human Resources, only your work.” It’s a libertarian, libertine dream.
The Rubin Institute – and the goings on there – is the setting for Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize. Tara Isabella Burton says Taranto has written “a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive…it’s a novel of ideas in the tradition of Norman Rush’s Mating.” And B J Novak observes that the novel is “very smart and very funny.”
Taranto is a former lawyer armed with an intellect that can argue both sides of any issue, attributes that are evident in his debut novel. Here, a billionaire opens a college for canceled and exiled professors without strings. Our hero is a woman who must make a choice: follow her disgraced professor (he does something bad) and continue her work on high-temperature superconductivity, or give up on her dream of solving climate change. The book is about the choices we make in life and speaks to this moment of moral equivalence we live in (you need a peg – pick up the newspaper!)
Publishers Weekly, in a pre-publication story about the novel, asked, “Can a high-powered male lawyer write a propulsive, smart, funny novel about science, cancel culture, and #MeToo with a female protagonist? Absolutely. It’s exactly what Julius Taranto has done in his debut, How I Won a Nobel Prize.”
Praise for How I Won a Nobel Prize:
“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
“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 Social Creature and Self Made
“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 Geniusesand Heyday
“Playful, taunting, and incisive — a feat of wit, toying with the systems and classifications of our times to arrive at something brilliantly uncategorizable.” – CHARMAINE CRAIG, national bestselling author of Miss Burma and My Nemesis
“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
“Smart and funny…Taranto expertly explores the messy discussions around cancel culture and how much geniuses might be forgiven for inappropriate conduct…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
Tony Tulathimutte is the author of the affordable novel Private Citizens, and his new book Rejection will be out next year. He teaches the writing class CRIT in Crown Heights; you can apply at crit.works.