media consumption

The Grasshopper King

I'm taking a break from Rising Up Rising Down to read Jordan Ellenberg's first novel, The Grasshopper King.

The book's narrator is Sam Grapearbor, a grad student at the mythical Chandler State University, a small western US college known primarily for its basketball team and its Department of Gravinic Studies. As the Gravinics department's only grad student, Sam inherits the task of watching over the department's founder Stanley Higgs, a man who has refused to utter a word for the previous dozen or so years. Prior to his self-imposed muteness, Higgs was a preeminent scholar studying an obscure poet whose writings are not only excruciatingly bad, but also are of great academic interest, being one of the few insights to the (also mythical) tiny state of Gravine, located in the former USSR and shielded for centuries from the outside world's influence.

I'm about halfway through the book and I have to admit that I've caught myself laughing out loud more than once. The author's writing draws you into this bizarre little world gradually so that you feel the authenticity of the characters and the setting, despite the abundant layers of absurdity in the story. Mr. Ellenberg is also a well-known mathematician at Princeton and has written regularly for Slate and recently for The Believer magazine.

Perhaps it's no coincidence then that Mr. Ellenberg has just been named as a finalist for the NY Public Library's "Young Lions" award (winner to be announced on March 31). I hope he wins; from what I've read so far, he deserves to.

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