‘How I Won a Nobel Prize’ by Julius Taranto

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‘How I Won a Nobel Prize’ by Julius Taranto       (2023) – 292 pages

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In ‘How I Won a Nobel Prize’, the young woman physicist Helen tells her saga of working on a project to find a substance which will allow high temperature superconductivity of electricity. Some substances have been found that are superconductors at extremely low temperatures near absolute zero, but it is impractical to build entire electrical systems at these extremely low temperatures. Imagine how much cheaper and beneficial it would be if there were superconductors at higher temperatures. Thus the search among physicists for high temperature conductivity.

Helen works as an assistant at Cornell University for Perry Smoot who is already a Nobel Prize winner. However Smoot gets into trouble for sexual misbehavior (with another male) and loses his position at Cornell. Smoot decides to join the faculty at Rubin Institute – Plymouth which was founded by a right-wing billionaire, the “King of all Billionaire Smucks”. The Institute “did not care at all about personal behavior, only about whether you operated in your vocation with excellence”. At the center of the Rubin Institute is The Endowment, an extremely tall building that looks down on Yale University and is shaped like a giant penis. It was built with “the robber-baron personal wealth that made the place possible”.

Helen, despite her misgivings and especially those of her woke boyfriend Hew, follows Perry Smoot to the Rubin Institute. Helen and Hew make a deal. She will follow her adviser Perry Smoot to the Rubin Institute, but she will become a vegan like Hew.

OK, this is a broad satire. One does not expect the same level of credibility one gets from more realistic novels. However I did not find the woman first-person narrator, Helen, at all convincing as a real live person. It is always difficult, an added challenge, for a writer to create a first-person narrator of the opposite sex and make him or her believable. Actually none of the characters in ‘How I Won a Nobel Prize’ were convincing to me. They all came across like one-dimensional cardboard cutouts rather than like real people. I suppose this novel is a farce rather than a human drama, but it still would have been nice if the characters seemed like real people.

But my main problem with ‘How I Won a Nobel Prize’ is that it lets these right wingers off way too easy. For most of the novel, the author through first-person narrator Helen disparages the woke characters including Helen’s boyfriend Hew at least as much as the anti-woke. Only near the end do we find out the evil that is the Rubin Institute. The right-wingers at the Rubin Institute probably never would have hired the gay Perry Smoot despite their claptrap about freedom of behavior.

Now this academic satire has been outpaced by the sordid reality here in the United States, the wicked tragic farce of this far right-wing fool running for President again who has previously been found guilty of financial fraud for $22 million dollars at his Trump University, has now been indicted for 91 other felony crimes, has been investigated and found complicit for massive tax fraud, and has been accused by over a dozen women of sexual assault and/or rape. Even the satirists could not dream up such a outrageous dangerous off-kilter situation.

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Grade :    B-

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