How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto review – skilful skewering

A young scientist follows her discredited mentor to a university for cancelled academics in this dark, complex debut about the culture wars

There are many interesting games going on in Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel about art and politics that seeks to skewer the prim puritans of radical wokery and the sweaty dinosaurs of the right. Part of the joke is that it is written very clearly in the style of, and in deep engagement with, a canon that literary America is doing its best to forget: Roth, Bellow and Updike are the obvious models. What’s more, as if snubbing his nose at those who will be looking for reasons to take offence, Taranto, a white male (he’s a former lawyer), writes from the perspective of a young Jewish woman, Helen, a graduate student. He takes great and obvious pleasure in describing her sex life, with a passage about masturbation that might have come straight from the pen of Philip Roth.

The setup is a good one, letting the reader know exactly the kind of dark, satirical world we are now inhabiting. A financier, Buckminster Witherspoon Rubin, has been forced from his investment company for an unspecified offence. He has had to resign from the board of Yale. He has now bought an island off the coast of Maine. On it he has established a university, the Rubin Institute, Plymouth (RIP), centred around a vast skyscraper known as “the Endowment”, from which the founder can, on a clear day, literally look down on Yale. The institute is staffed by those who have, for reasons of politics or malfeasance, been excluded from traditional academia: “The Institute said: Give me your cancellees and deplorables, your preeminent deviants, we’ll take them!”