Ratner's Star

Ratner’s Star is a profound(ly funny) work of metaphysical fiction. It is metaphysical in both the Ancient (Pythagorean/Parmenidean)sense, and the Modern (Dialectic of Enlightenment) sense.

It is an enormously ambitious novel that presents and resides in the age-old tension between reason and faith, truth and superstition, science and art, pure math and formal logic, mind and body, being and becoming, everything and nothing. Abstractly speaking--as the precocious young mathematician that serves as our protagonist would prefer--this all points to both the necessity and the problem of the One and the Zero; oppositional binaries that purportedly cannot be resolved without the destruction of the other. And yet here we are, constructing show more technology that runs on binary code, incorporating the opposition in every aspect of our lives. If we are to believe Horkheimer and Adorno, the history of the human species is just this: the dialectical process of scientific disenchantment and mythical re-enchantment, perpetuating itself ad infinitum. If I had to guess, I’d suspect DeLillo agrees with their conclusion.

The history of Pythagoreanism provides a helpful topology for understanding the tension or “dilemma” of the novel. Iamblichus (3-4th C.) tells us in On the Pythagorean Way of Life that followers of the mathematical-genius-cum-mystical-sage split in two after his death in the late 4th C. BCE. One discipleship, the mathematikoi professed to deal only with Truth. They pursued Pythagoras’ mathematical insights, and sought to expand his work on ratios and the table of opposites. The other group, the akousmatikoi (literally “the ones eager to hear”--the root of our word acoustic and all it implies), were not recognized by the mathematikoi as genuine Pythagoreans. The akousmatikoi were circumspectly treated as a superstitious, mystical and undisciplined cult. This split, in a very fundamental sense, marks the beginning of the dialectic of Enlightenment: it is the beginning of the rejection of mysticism or myth in favor of scientific-mathematical truth.

But it is worth noting that Pythagoras himself fell on neither side of this divide, but believed that both myth (read: spirituality) and mathematics informed and depended upon one another. Pythagoras understood that human life--how we live and how we should live--is not decipherable nor discoverable via pure mathematics. Perhaps, on Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, Pythagoras was the last real Mensch: he daringly lived well in the opposition before the opposition, and for that reason is rightly venerated.

I’d suggest DeLillo, or at least the younger DeLillo that wrote Ratner’s Star, was fully aware of Pythagoras’s mensch-ness, and wrote a (literary/untrue) novel about (mathematics/truth) to explore the tension and how to resolve it. show less

14. Ratner's Star (audio) by Don DeLillo
reader: Jacques Roy
published: 1976
format: 16:04 overdrive audiobook (~446 pages, 448 pages in paperback)
acquired: Library
listened: Feb 22 – Mar 16
rating: 3½

Delillo's fourth novel is mystery for those who have read it closely. I just borrowed an audio e-copy out of curiosity, because it was available*. And I probably only kept listening because I really liked the reader, Jacques Roy, who is challenged here to come up a zillion different male and female voices. It was always curious but in very odd ways, and I found my attention sometimes engaged, but often less than perfectly attentive. Maybe it was more of an audio skim.

This is basically a philosophically playful novel that has some issues with show more science, math and logic. Billy Twillig is a 14-yr-old winner of the Nobel Prize for obscure work in mathematics (There is no Pulitzer Prize in math, he was apparently given a special addition). He takes on a position in secret research group staffed full of exceptional scientists from a variety of different fields, many of them very strange and well outside stem-stuff, who are working to figure out an extraterrestrial message that came from an object known as Ratner's Star.

There are numerous characters and most of them make single appearances. Each one has a philosophy that he or she tells Billy about, and each philosophy is very carefully thought out from their specialty and then extends from there, and, as we soon discover, each one eventually reaches a very weird point. The idea is that these are serious (and seriously odd) individuals who have pressed into their ideas as deeply as they could go and tried to push further and get something more. The last part of the book has Billy involved with a group trying to come up with a perfectly logical language that any being could understand simply by following the logic. The name Gödel doesn't come up, but if I understand correctly, he more or less proved this was impossible long before all this. This group doesn't seem to aware of this, but so they go. It's, of course, all fruitless, but in some mind-bending and fun ways.

Wikipedia tells me "The novel develops the idea that science, mathematics, and logic—in parting from mysticism—do not contain the fear of death, and therefore offer no respite."

*I'm not sure, but I think this audio version was only released in December

2018
https://www.librarything.com/topic/288371#6426232 show less

Reason Read: TBR takedown, Reading 1001
DeLillo has 8 books on the combined list that I am working from. I've read 6 counting this one. Some I've enjoyed more than others. This one started out well but because of the loony, excess of characters and the rambling and obscure story line it was hard to say I enjoyed it but I can say that there was much I appreciated. This book was published in 1976 and if you think about it, this novel really is quite ingenious considering when it was written. The book is a work of science fiction/novel and involves a 14 y/o math genius who has won the Nobel Prize. He is taken from his home in the Bronx and flown to the Space Brain situated somewhere in Central Asia to work on decoding a message that is show more reported to have come from Ratner's star. Reportedly, the author has stated that Alice Wonderland was an influence of this book. I also read that this novel is "playful" in a game sort of way. The computer-radiotelescope site (called Space Brain) is a reverse Babel with the tower going down instead of up. The math is there but a knowledge of math is not required. There is a reference to Schrodinger's thought experiment. There are actually some cats that hop in and out of a box. One of the characters is named U.F.O. Schwartz. One character, Robert Hoppe Softly would be the white rabbit. I felt that there were too many characters and it was confusing. Even the time line was "messed with" and that made for confusion. I did not like the amount of sexual, secretions, etc. It is a brilliant piece of writing but it was not necessarily enjoyable or held my interest. show less

My reactions to this novel can be put rather succinctly. If David Foster Wallace is indeed a fan of Don Delillo, this is the novel he has stolen from most. If Don Delillo is indeed a fan of Thomas Pynchon, this is the novel that Pynchon most directly inspired. But regardless of its influences or the work it later inspired, because those things are speculatory, it is certainly true that this novel, Delillo's fourth, is his first great novel.

The novel centers around child math prodigy Billy Terwilliger. At fourteen years old, Billy has already won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with "zorgs" (as near as I can figure, Delillo made this term up) and now lives a life of quiet seclusion at a mathematics academy for genius teenagers. He is show more called, somewhat against his will, to a remote laboratory (named Field Experiment Number One) to decipher a string of code believed to have come from a newly discovered planet coined Ratner's Star.

This is a wildly funny novel with sequences of surrealistic absurdity and populated with bizarre characters. There's Henrik Endor, who, before Billy, failed to break the code and now lives in a hole, spending his days digging and feeding on larvae. There's Orang Mohole, the acknowledged kingpin of alternate physics, who subsists on strange green pills and vicarious threesomes. There's Shazar Lazarus Ratner, a renowned astronomer turned mystic so diseased that he now lives in a plastic bubble so that oxygen cannot kill him. There's Elux Troxl, the entrepeneur, who, alongside his oddly-perverted sidekick Grbk, deals in leased computer time, chain letters, and bat guano. There's Cheops Feeley, who annually awards a prize to the mathematician whose new ideas holds the highest "madness content." There's also Chester Greylag Dent, ninety-two-years old and ending his days in a secret submarine somewhere off the shore of Europe.

It's hard saying what purpose this novel is intended to serve, what point Delillo is trying to make. But it seems obvious that there is something to be said here about the stupidity of science, the differences between thinking analytically, thinking logically, and thinking superstitiously. And, despite its humor, there is an overwhelming sense of attempting to understand the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel when they truly are more brilliant than the people around them.

This is as close to a five star novel as I have read in a while. Distinctly Delillo, it shows definite strides in the direction of becoming the novelist he will eventually become. show less

Vero, Don DeLillo è un grande, e Rumore bianco e Underworld mi sono piaciuti tantissimo. Nonostante ciò non sono riuscita minimamente a digerire La stella di Ratner, che alterna momenti di bellissima prosa, scritta meravigliosamente, eppure del tutto inutile, a momenti di noia profondissima, a cambi di prospettiva tanto spiazzanti quanto ingiustificati, a flashback inutili.
Il libro, nonostante ciò, è celebratissimo.
Che sia il potere dell'incomunicabilità?

DeLillo has always been more of a novelist of ideas more than the basic linear event-event-event-conclusion linear plot style.

Here he experiments with mathematics, logic, and the meanings of language, and language as a means to shape the world. This is no bullshit and repetition of terminology - he's obviously done his homework - I see discussions of Higgs theory, the origins of language, and the intersection between the pursuit of science and the almost mystical devotions of mathematics/language. This is dense reading, but DeLillo's fantastic prose style still illuminates.

As an aside, I wonder how many contemporary authors have some sort of training in math/science? DFW did work on modal logic and Wittgenstein, and Cormac McCarthy show more edits physics books in his spare time at the Santa Fe institute. show less

Ratner's Star is intellectual, creative, strange, funny, clever, and dense. It's exciting to encounter a work of fiction about a group of quirky and brilliant scientists living together on a compound, trying to decode a radio message sent from a distant star. But it is not at all like Carl Sagan's Contact. Rather, imagine Contact written by David Foster Wallace.

I would recommend it, but only to specific people looking for a particular kind of read. Say, science lovers who are smart, patient, and looking for an active read (not a simple distraction).

It took me three and a half months to finish this book! That's insane for me: I can read a 438-page novel in a day, and I often do. As I mentioned, Ratner's Star is dense -- it was also kind show more of boring in places, particularly to begin with. As "funny and clever" as I describe it overall, I didn't laugh out loud in response to it until I was more than halfway through. But there were some hilarious scenes. Also, this book took concentration. I couldn't read it for escapist purposes: it took too much brainpower. In many ways, it is one of those books I feel I need a smarter person to explain to me to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Which brings me to the ending, which was intelligent and satisfying, although I can't claim to be 100% sure I completely understood it. show less