Book of numbers by Joshua Cohen – review (2015)

It’s always the trouble with literary imitation: without a specific parodic target, a consistent performance of bad style is still just bad style, and a dedicated simulation of boredom is still boring. Pages upon pages of a marketing person’s blog, or the mistyped emails of a narcissistic actor, or the office-politics reminiscences of a tech billionaire – such efforts certainly convince the reader that the author has carefully catalogued the linguistic infelicities common to such forms and human stereotypes. But they’re still a slog to read.

Joshua Cohen’s novel is about a writer called Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. The last JC is the founder of Tetration, which is a search engine, and shares most of its barely fictionalised history with Google’s. Cohen is Gulfstreamed around with Cohen to exotic and decadent locales, and Cohen’s braindump about the history of his company is given as verbatim transcript. Meanwhile writer Cohen is evading divorce papers filed by his wife and falling in love with a younger and more exotic model, and everyone is wondering what is going on with the other Cohen, a pioneer of online who seems to want to go off-grid permanently.

The reader’s interest may perk up around page 238, when Cohen begins relating how he met his business partner, Moe, a Hindu engineer who, though he appears only in secondhand flashback, is the novel’s most vivid character by far. Moe first turns up in a story about attempts to build a universal remote control in the 1980s, which is much more interesting than any of the search-engine startup lore the novel recounts in excruciating detail. (This sort of thing: “We had set a full functionality deadline of September 1996 but we were behind schedule by April so we revised for December, but then it was May and we were behind the revised schedule.”) Moe is a lovable mystic genius (who in one amusingly gratuitous scene sits down at poker with Keanu Reeves and Ben Affleck), but unfortunately he does not stick around long. A few hundred pages later, some relief is provided by the cameo of a hapless German translator named Dietmar Klug. Cohen’s literary agent, Aaron, is also a funny guy. Of billionaire Cohen, Aaron speculates: “Or maybe his hobby’s the Holocaust – why not? Whose isn’t?”

But this is mainly the story of a procession of styles. Billionaire Cohen refers to himself only with the royal “we”; he never says “as” or “like” but only the phrase “as like” interchangeably; he shortens certain words, such as “cur” for curious; and he refers to his parents as “M-unit” and “D-unit”. Ghostwriter Cohen’s narration, meanwhile, is styled as glossolaliac self-pity (“I spilled Cal’s mouthwash and spilled myself downstairs,” please), laced with museum-guide meanderings, writerly bitching and stabs at epigrammatic grandeur. Cohen’s abortive attempts to write the book he is supposed to be ghostwriting are reproduced at ineffably tedious length. By the time one such passage peters out with the frustrated writer typing “THIS IS JUST POINTLESS FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK”, the reader feels it would be rude to disagree.

Yet periodically, just as you are writing the whole thing off, there is a flash of real mischief or sardonic humour. As spring turns to summer in New York, “the sweater layers came off and then the women put on shorts and then the men put on shorts and everyone became a child”. In a restaurant, “The steaks were gushing in that rare to raw style that homophobe kitchens hash out to men on dates who request medium.” And billionaire Cohen’s mathmo affect pays off in rare jokes such as the “career vegan who after his wife left him for a woman stuffed his freezer with enough cuts of venison to make 1.33 deer”. There are hints, as well, of what could have been a better dramatised argument about reading, writing and forgetting in the digital age.

Book of Numbers comes with a blurb by the critic James Wood, which is interesting for what it doesn’t say: “He certainly can write!” Cohen certainly can write. And an editor who had the time might have found the decent shorter novel buried somewhere within these pages. But then, because of the changes in modern media that at least two of these Joshua Cohens lament, fewer and fewer editors have the time these days.

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