Booked: The Joshuas Cohen

Booked: The Joshuas Cohen

An interview with Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.

Booked is a monthly series of Q&As with authors by Dissent contributing editor Timothy Shenk. For this interview, he spoke with Joshua Cohen about Book of Numbers (Random House, 2015). Read an excerpt of the novel here.

Why bother fighting the internet? If you’re Joshua Cohen, one answer is that you can get a novel out of the attempt. The book centers on two characters also named Joshua Cohen, one a struggling author living in New York, the other a Silicon Valley magnate. Although its discussion of the internet has attracted the most attention from reviewers, the novel succeeds because it uses that subject to explore a much wider range of issues—the identities we make, the weight of history, and sex, to name a few. I discussed these subjects and more with the real-life Cohen in an interview that, appropriately enough, was conducted over email.

Timothy Shenk: You’ve said that “the Internet has taken so much from writing—it’s time that writing took something back from the Internet.” What has the internet taken? How does Book of Numbers try to retrieve it?

Joshua Cohen: The problem with saying something is that someone’s always saying it back to you—quoting you. Nothing’s ever just lost. The problem with that thing I said is that I said it—I didn’t write it, so it has all the urgency, and all the flaws, of the spoken moment. What I gather I was getting at was the way in which the book, or book-culture, haunts online—it’s the ghost inside the machine (to mangle philosophy’s metaphor for mind/body duality). The book is still the standard of literacy, and its symbol too. It contains the highest examples of prose-art, the writing that all writing is compared to, and will be compared to, for a while, at least. With this novel, I was trying to work the opposite magic: it’s the machine inside the ghost. I was trying to fill the novel with examples of its (proposed) digital decline, to find out if, and how, the two got along.

Shenk: Does the “problem with saying something” make the whole interview process feel a little ridiculous? I’m guessing that the temptation to say “just read the book” is strong.

Cohen: I’m not trying to sound dismissive, evasive, or lazy. And certainly I’m not ungrateful for the attention. The problem I’m referring to only begins with the difference between talking and writing. It proceeds from there into a matter of character. By which I mean, when faced with interview questions, my natural inclination is to ask myself: What character could, or should, I answer as? or, Which me do I have to become—or create—in order to answer? Because, let’s be clear, I’m a fiction-writer, or—to be even warier of self-definition—it might be better to say that I’m a person who has written and is writing and hopes to continue writing fiction, and that it’s this hope for the future that seems especially fragile, at all times threatened by certitudes, fixities, and figments of conviction.

Or, to put it straighter, fiction is the only certitude or fixity that has ever made sense (to me). Not as a habit, but as an inhabitation: a way of processing, or experiencing. The irreducible or unified “I”—the “I” utterly identifiable with the author—isn’t fictional: it’s the fictionalizing impulse itself. That said, not only am I not going to speculate as to why I believe this, I’m not even going to try convincing you that I believe this, and that this first person I’m using now is truly first—my primary, my fundament. Here, read Heine (in my own admittedly lacking translation): “And we become especially human at masquerade balls, where the waxen mask covers our ordinary flesh-mask, where use of the plain Du [of the informal pronoun, ‘You’] reinstates a primal social confidence; where a domino [a traditional Carnival mask], by concealing every entitlement, brings forth the most beautiful equality; and where the most beautiful freedom reigns—Maskenfreiheit, the freedom-of-the-mask.”

Shenk: And so you offer a novel centered on a writer named Joshua Cohen, another waxen mask?

Cohen: Not to wax too abstract, but all characters are masks—it’s only that the book’s two Joshua Cohens (or Joshuas Cohen) are the obvious ones. And instead of eye-holes, they have mirrors.

Shenk: You’ve written that, unlike earlier plutocrats, today’s tech billionaires “aren’t the born elite but the products of meritocracy. . . . They are us and we are them, not just biographically but in that we help create what they sell us and improve their services—along with their fortunes— all just by our use.” Yet Silicon Valley Cohen (or, as Book of Numbers refers to him, Principal) is about as far from a ruthless pursuer of profit as I can imagine—whatever pushes him, it doesn’t seem to be a hunger for money or power.  Why make him the book’s major representative of our new elite?

Cohen: I’m not sure my character Principal is “representative,” at least not in that sense. He’s my novel’s one tech mogul, yes, but he’s not the archetype of all of them. Rather, Principal, to my mind, is a purer creation: he begins with purity (an interest in math, and computing), becomes corrupted by opportunity (not by money or fame, but by access and scale), and returns to purity via religion, which he embraced initially as a “lifestyle choice.” He is someone who begins by wanting to “change the world,” and ends by wanting to “change his life.” Unlike most people, though, he realizes this fantasy. This, more than anything else, constitutes his eliteness.

Shenk: What do you mean by “purity”? What is Cohen looking for that can be provided by computing and by religion?

Cohen: The book uses “purity” to mean non-monetized being—knowledge pursued for its own sake, not for material gain. My magnate seeks to know himself, and others. He seeks to open himself to that knowing. The profit is incidental, until his partners think it’s not.

Shenk: That quotation about tech billionaires and meritocracy came from an essay on Thomas Pynchon you wrote for Harper’s in 2013. You ended the piece by arguing that for Pynchon, “the last redoubt has become the family, and the last war to be waged is between our virtual identities and the bonds of blood; a war to keep the Virtual from corrupting the Blood.” At the time, you expressed ambivalence about the importance family assumed in Bleeding Edge, writing that Pynchon himself might see it more as indictment than redemption. Family is also one of the major preoccupations in Book of Numbers. Where does Book of Numbers fall on this question? Does the family offer a way out, or is it just another trap?

Cohen: That question is a bit difficult for me to answer, given that I have a family but not a family of my own (meaning I don’t have any children of my own). All I can say is: I’m a son, and hopefully one day I will be a father. Life is a trap. (Fear of) death is a trap. What isn’t a trap? What love-relationship hasn’t seemed at some point like, as you say, “a way out,” and then at some other point like “a trap”? I’ve never been able to shake the idea of family, which is to say I’ve never been able to shake my family. Being membered—being one limb of an immense grosser body—that’s always been a fact to me. Or not even a fact: limbs don’t think.

Shenk: Your book has spurred a lot of comparisons—to Philip Roth, to William Gibson, to David Foster Wallace. But its reception most reminds me of the treatment that Jonathan Franzen (about whom you’ve written in the past) received when Freedom was published—you’ve both been described as a “Great American Novelist.” Now the two of you are linked as contemporary authors who have wrestled in public with the problem of writing fiction in the age of the internet. But where Franzen responded to the challenge by staging a return to the Victorian novel, you’ve taken the opposite tack: this is a challenging book that at times seems to dare readers to use Google for backup. Did you think of yourself as bucking a trend? Did you ever worry that you were asking too much of readers?

Cohen: Trend me no trends, please. Writing is bucking—good writing is good bucking. And as for readers—what am I, if not a reader too? I remember reading the Victorian Novels 1.0 (Dickens, Gissing) and using my father as Googlesque backup: “Dad, what’s a ‘gammon’?” My father said: “It means ‘a deception’.” Online you’ll find that it’s a “cured leg of pork.” 

Shenk: This is a book about the internet, and, as Avenue Q reminds us, the internet is for porn. Book of Numbers doesn’t shy away from details: it lists the websites novelist Cohen goes to (e.g., “maid4jizz.biz”), describes his masturbation technique, and devotes a lot of space to his sexual fantasies. That used to be standard practice for novelists—it’s terrifying to think of what a young John Updike would have done with wi-fi—but it breaks from a more recent style filled, as Katie Roiphe has written, with “boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls.” How do you respond to those who have criticized the book’s depiction of women?

Cohen: I respect the verdict of the Supreme Soviet of Millennial Identity Politics and hereby withdraw and disavow my novel. I was wrong—and too “I” was wrong—the author and his or her narrator are, and should be, indistinguishable. I obviously wasn’t aware of this when I named my narrators “Joshua Cohen.” In the future I will write novels not about the world as it is, but about the world as it should be. Everyone will treat everyone marvelously. My characters will work hard, play hard, and abjure irony, sarcasm, resentment, and sex.

Shenk: Since this is for Dissent, I think I have to ask about politics, but the book’s perspective on collective action is fascinating enough that I’d want to do it anyway. Authors like Pynchon and DeLillo had the luxury of paranoia, the belief that there might be some shadowy group pulling the strings. That wasn’t an optimistic way of interpreting the world, but it held out the (slim) hope that if the conspiracy was exposed some better way of organizing the world might be possible. Today, we have to deal with the dispiriting prospect that revelations of all the secrets would be greeted with a collective “meh.” As you’ve put it elsewhere, “That ’70s generation asked, ‘Is this true?’ Novelists now have to ask, ‘How do we live with it?’” You’ve also suggested that in this changed context the novelist might take up a prophetic role, interrogating the world but standing outside it. There’s something noble about that vision, but it makes for a bleak politics. Do you think novelists should ask for more than living with it?

Cohen: Novelists can ask—they can ask for anything—but their books are their answers in advance. Each and every novel is a world outside the world—for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge. This is beyond politics, or must be regarded as being beyond. It’s more of a religious, or transcendent, concern: the religio poetae.

“Religion,” I should note, has a disputed etymology, in Latin: some say it’s from relegere, meaning “to reread”, while others say it’s from religare, meaning “to connect” or “link.” Literature is life’s fastener. You can quote me.