Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

He went on, in a voice that sounded whiny in his own ears, “I didn’t expect all this rather creepy mathematical logic, Frege and Russell and Gödel’s paradoxes—all this propositional calculus, my God, what a tempest in a hypothetical tea-pot! I thought we were going to learn how to program digital computers.”

“Oh, we will, I’m sure. But he’s”—the assistant professor who taught the course, whose name was Klein, his style murmurous and spasmodic and hard to follow—“leading up to something, a whole new way of looking at numbers, seeing them the way machines do instead of how we do.”

“I can hardly wait,” Owen said, more sarcastically than he had intended. He was sounding like a malcontent, a surly know-nothing, and after all that watching at a distance might lose this marvellous girl her first minute on the hook. This was a fastidious, almost transparent fish on his line, with surprising, quick leaps to her talk. She made him feel (and always would) dark, a little thick-blooded, slightly slow and heavy.

“You’re too practical,” she told him. “Mr. Klein wants us to think about how we think. Our so-called thinking is messy, with many little determinations, more or less simultaneous, whereas machines have no intuition, no mass of experience. Normal human illogic won’t do for them. Nothing is obvious to them that isn’t absolutely spelled out.”

“They can do only what we know how to order them to perform, like Lady Lovelace said.” He was parroting Klein, that silky embodied intelligence, who spoke with a retractive tremor, as if voicing anything loudly would jar his delicate brain. “Wasn’t she something, for a woman back then?” Owen added lamely, trying to keep up in the hall, sidestepping and being bumped as Phyllis floated at his side. “She was a number,” he added, a joke to dilute, perhaps, the taste of flirtation in his mouth; for by bringing up Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and Charles Babbage’s handmaiden in the invention of the Analytical Engine, he had hoped to flatter this other mathematically minded female.

“She was,” was Phyllis’s flat reply. She was drifting away; he had failed to engage her. They had come, in the numbered maze, to Room 7, the ten-pillared entrance hall, where right-angled paths diverged. Seeing they must part, and recognizing that this stranger had made an effort, she took a livelier tone: “Didn’t you like, today, the way he diagrammed inference? All these ‘well-formed’ formulas for something so obvious we all know it without thinking twice about it?”

He mustn’t lose her; he must try to rise to her with some provocation, something to carry over to their next encounter. “You’re not practical?” he asked.

The two stood, immobile in the flood of swaddled, pimpled, boisterous bodies hurrying to their next class. “I guess not,” she told him, in her gentle, fading voice. “I love what’s pure and useless.” She shrugged, lightly, apologizing for all of her, the whole length of her pale, pink, diffidently carried body.

“That’s beautiful of you,” he told her. It just popped out of him, too coarse a compliment; he saw her wince. Owen hurried to patch it up: “Look. Let’s have coffee some time—would you like to?”

He saw, there in the enhanced light of this high-domed chamber, that he was adding to her burdens—she was already fending off many suitors, many potential coffee-mates. He tried another joke, taken from the lecture they had just heard, which had touched on the Turing machine. “That’s not an if/then,” Owen assured Phyllis. “No necessary consequences. It’s more an n plus one. You’re n, n for ‘knows it all,’ and I’m a one, meaning ‘simpleton.’ I’m a simple scholarship hick who is dying to ask you about”—he snatched at another phrase from the lecture, Klein’s concluding phrase—“ ‘primitive recursion.’ ”

“That’s what it’s going to be all about, primitive recursion,” she prophesied, turning away after an upward glance at the clock. There was a characteristic look, he would learn, a regretful gaiety in the moment of parting, that she would convey over her shoulder; she was never lovelier, with more affection in her smile, than when saying goodbye. “And I don’t know it all,” she added, leaving his direct question unanswered.

But she did, as winter bore down upon the school, share coffee and then more with him. Why? What did she like about him? She was a year older than he, as Elsie had been a year younger, and Owen saw her as a creature above him, in advance of him, moving easily in these realms of enlightenment. In MIT’s forest of fact and concept he had at first felt lost, but his marks were all right and got better as he blended in and his interests narrowed. He was tall, thin then, with a thick head of soft hair, darker than his father’s wispy brown; he let it grow carelessly long, in that strictly barbered era. Where so many of the high achievers were bespectacled Asian-Americans and pudgy Jews, Phyllis must have liked the big-boned way Owen stood taller than she; they looked good walking together. Though never athletically competitive in the public schools of Pennsylvania, he had a nervous wiriness that, in those daydreaming farmhouse years, he had worked up into minor feats of agility—juggling three tennis balls, hopping over a broom held in both hands before him, taking harmless pratfalls on the steel-edged stairs, thus alarming Phyllis and making her laugh when she saw he was unhurt. He loved seeing the blood of surprise pinken her pale, thin-skinned face. His mock injuries parodied a wish to abase himself before her that was real enough—the clown, the pretender, daring to present himself before the princess.

As winter took away outdoor spaces from the students, they crowded after class and in the evenings into the luncheonettes and cafeterias and cheap Chinese and Indian restaurants of Kendall Square—not yet a high-tech Oz but a pocket of low-end industry darkened by a century’s grime—and the southern end of Central Square. Doors swung open to admit sharp drafts of