THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS

PAOLO GIORDANO

There are two kinds of novels. One is about people. The other is about ideas. Novels about people very rarely have a shelf life. There are always more people to write about and they do the mundane things that people do. Try as we might, there’s not enough hype in the publishing industry to re-invent that wheel. Novels about ideas, on the other hand, tend to have staying power. Ideas move people. They engineer events. They cause people to think great thoughts and to learn, even when they don’t even know it is happening. Danielle Steel writes about people. Dickens writes about ideas. Paolo Giordano has decided to use his skills to write about nobodies.

I just put down Paolo Giordano’s debut novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, with a sigh of relief. I feel like I survived an ordeal, a trial of torture. His characters were people I’d never waste a moment with in real life. I feel cheated that I spent time with them in fiction. I look again at the accolades that decorate the cover and can only shake my head. Mesmerizing? My god, no. Unless one can confuse boredom with Mesmer. “A stunning meditation on loneliness.” Well, yes, stunning, as in getting hit on the head with a club stuns. And who wants a meditation on loneliness? You can do that without reading anything. A minimalist meditation on loneliness would be three hundred blank pages. Lock yourself in a room and meditate away! “Elegant and fiercely intelligent.” Giordano has writing skills. At least his translator does. But I don’t get any intelligence out of a guy who hasn’t got a story to tell and then persists in telling it anyway. “Seductive and unnerving.” I wasn’t seduced. I was unnerved because whoever put this piece of dreck on the market had a lot of nerve.

Let’s get down to it. Here’s a story of two damaged people who were obviously damaged before the events that Giordano tries to tell us molded their characters. They are brought up by clueless parents, but big deal. If that were a cause of human failings we’d all be bag ladies. When it comes to an explanation for their psychological flaws, the author gives us banalities. Parents. A skiing accident. Cliques at school. Guilt. Anyway, it’s all a hackneyed and puerile conceit. Alice is a spoiled brat who has learned to blackmail her servants to get what she wants. Her worldview runs the gamut from anorexia to self-indulgence. She has no attractive qualities, the sensibilities of a diva and the morality of a swindler. And her desire to be accepted by the nasty girls at school is in the “don’t waste my time” category.

Mattio supposedly hasn’t gotten over his abandonment of his twin sister and engages in corporal self-destruction when he is not being socially inept. But he was already missing some gears before he left his sister in the park. We never get a diagnosis, but I’d say he’s probably borderline autistic. So what? Get him some help, not a readership.

Then Giordano seems to take a trip down to central casting to dress up his threadbare tale with nasty girl and the obligatory gay teenager, who we must follow as he discovers the bar scene. Why? What do we gain by watching Denis suffer or Viola having her wedding pictures ruined in revenge for being trash a decade earlier? Whatever it is, it isn’t literature.

The novel isn’t saved by calling these two pathetic creatures prime numbers. It smacks of pseudo-intellectual hucksterism. And we, the readers, are supposed to gush at the intelligence of their creation? Sorry. These characters are just a couple of irrelevant nobodies, with nothing important to say and apparently nothing really important to do except to self indulge and wallow in their own social ineptitude. There are no ideas here, at least no important ones. There is nothing to learn. Nothing to see. Nothing to believe. Just 270 pages of unmitigated boredom and frustration. For god’s sake, why don’t they just recognize what a pitiful mound of human detritus they both are, perform mercy killings on each other and be done with it? It could have happened on page one and the world would be no worse off. Alice could have frozen to death in a snow bank and never been found. Who’d care? Mattio could have drowned in grief at age six. We’d be on to our next book ⎯hopefully something worth while⎯ all that much sooner.

I get a little angry when I see the publishers’ PR departments unroll the red carpet for yet another young author who they are designing for celebrity. My father once had an old Gillette razor, made of solid brass. It worked fine for thirty years but the company found it too solid. They were in the business of selling razors after all. Over time they came up with a flimsy plastic job that they called an “improvement” because it was much lighter in weight and it was disposable. In a glossy ad it looked durable, and the hirsute user looked so happy to have it, but it was actually insubstantial junk. All it was really designed to do was become landfill. That’s what we’re getting from publishers these days ⎯lightweight junk dressed up as shiny value but with the shelf life of a brown banana sitting in the hot sun. And the folks they get to blurb the stuff ⎯ they belch without embarrassment or shame. I know there is no accounting for taste, but they’ve got to realize in their heart of hearts that they’re wallowing in wastewater. And if they don’t someone has got to do the heavy lifting and say “Sorry, this book is a piece of crap.”

The Solitude Of Prime Numbers is an exhausting waste of time with nothing important to say and will be quickly forgotten. Let’s hope the author puts his above-average writing skills to better use on another project, one that perhaps follows his actually having experienced an idea.