A FREE WILL MANIFOLD

A library that records the future upends the lives of academics in Allen’s quirky fantasy novel.

After receiving a mysterious message promising help in proving a theorem, Boston math professor Edom Thompson discovers an enormous library with millions of rooms, one of which contains books that detail every event of his past and future—including a book about a run-in with a mugger that comes true when he leaves the library. Edom brings in his graduate student Thomas and his friend Naomi, an art history professor, to help him explore the card catalogue. When Thomas discovers a book that mentions his future divorce from his wife, Belinda, he becomes obsessed with finding out how it will happen so that he can avert the breakup. Subplots revisit crucial periods in each of the characters’ pasts, including Edom’s romance with his college girlfriend, Leah, who got him to break out of his rule-bound cautiousness, only to see their engagement break up after his one-night stand with another woman; Thomas’ sometimes testy relationship with Belinda; and Naomi’s adolescent battles with her tyrannical adoptive mother, who ignored her when she complained about being groped by a swim instructor. Allen’s intellectually rich yarn muses deeply on the nature of free will as characters struggle to perceive and rewrite their fates—a project that hinges on math, philosophy, and Naomi’s exuberant classroom lecture on the artist Chuck Close, whose paintings paradoxically blend abstraction with photorealism. He grounds the novel in lushly textured depictions of everyday life that resonate with emotional insights conveyed in limpid prose: “The quick hug Leah gave Edom would have been their first if Edom had not been too stupefied to participate. As it was, the hug bore the singular possessive form of someone briefly holding a heavy bag for a boxer.” The result is an entertaining read full of curiosity about the puzzles of existence.

A beguiling tale of people trying to edit their lives into better versions of themselves.