‘‘NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING,” was William Goldman’s succinct precis of the film industry, but it applies to all the consumer arts, particularly publishing. Editors follow the market to some extent, but most new novels are published on a nose and a hunch. Books are thrown overboard weekly in their thousands, and most drop so far and so fast you don’t even hear the splash.
So a bit of lucky timing cannot be begrudged. Did Pushkin Press know when they acquired Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac — his first book to be written in English, and “a work of fiction based on fact” — that two of its featured subjects, J. Robert Oppenheimer and artificial intelligence, would be high on the news agenda bang on the time of publication? (Hell, it even features walk-on parts for Elon Musk and messenger RNA.) Perhaps, perhaps not — either way, full credit to them for not plastering the cover with Cillian Murphy’s face.
It was (2020) that drew them to publish him again. That was an eccentric, gripping compendium of the permeable barrier between genius and madness — and between fiction and non-fiction — described by one critic as a novel about nature’s revenge on man, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
