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

He was giving her a chance to laugh; he had not expected her to mull it over. “Last year, there was, but this was his idea, not mine. A boy—man, really, he was older than I—I used to see in the summer, who my parents didn’t think was at all suitable.”

“They didn’t, but you did?”

She pursed her lips again, this time keeping silent. She did not like, beyond a point, being probed, and had already taken him in so much deeper than he would have dared hope a mere year ago, when she had been to him just a vision, floating through the halls. “You did,” he concluded.

She didn’t disagree. So: he had rivals lodged in the exterior world, like Jake and Ralph, and rivals lodged in her heart, her secret being, like the tremulously clever Klein and this unnamed man her parents objected to. Owen was learning when to change the subject, encountering a closed door in the corridors of her past. “Was it your parents’ idea to have you become a math major?”

“No: they were rather horrified, they’re such humanities snobs. Literature and the arts are all they care about. To them make-believe is life. Science is vulgar. My father’s specialty is the English Renaissance—the sixteenth and seventeenth century—”

“Thanks,” he interrupted, nettled by their previous conversation and this summer lover she was refusing to talk about. “I know when the English Renaissance was.”

“Of course. Some people don’t. My father doesn’t do just the poets and playwrights, Shakespeare and so on, that everybody knows about, but these prose writers nobody can bear to read any more, Sidney and Bacon and Lyly and Lodge, always writing about Arcadia in this elaborate way—he loves them. That’s where my name came from; all those old poems are full of Phyllises—sprightly Phyllises, naughty Phyllises. I turned out to be a dreamy Phyllis, rather disappointing.”

“Not to me. Nor to a number of others, it sounds like.”

“About ten years ago,” she went on, on her preferred topic, “when the man who teaches eighteenth-century prose had his sabbatical, Daddy took that on, too—Dryden and Bunyan, Addison and Steele, Boswell and Johnson—and he revelled in it, working it up, shelves of this impossibly dry old stuff. He hides in books, my mother says.”

“My father hid in numbers.”

“So do I; I’d love to meet him some day.” Owen shied from trying to imagine it, poor beaten-down Floyd Mackenzie with his tender stomach and penny-ante job, and this cosseted Cambridge princess. It would make a meeting as awkward and painful as the one between his mother and Elsie. Our parents hatch us but cannot partake of our work in the world. Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, “Don’t you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It’s music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving, Owen.” Did he need this nudge? Had he been falling asleep beside her long, soothing body? True, he relaxed when with her, as if home at last. “It used to make me cry,” she said, “when I was a teen-ager, having a problem come apart for me—the way it cracks open at a certain point, goes from being all outside to all inside, if you believe the equations and follow through on them. It’s like, at the beach, turning a horseshoe crab upside down, all the little legs wriggling and the tail flipping to turn it all over. No, my parents didn’t encourage me. They thought science was for plodders, grubby guys usually from the Midwest. I tried to tell them, math doesn’t do useful work, it does useless work. Which of course isn’t exactly true; physics and technology depend on calculus. And set theory.”

“Do you understand,” he asked her—and such a question must have demanded a more intimate setting than a corner, however dimly lit, of the visitors’ lounge at 120 Bay State Road; it might have been in her Bexley Hall room, against the rules, on one of those weekends when her roommate, Sally Fazio from Providence, was back in Rhode Island or off skiing in New Hampshire—“set theory? I mean, why it’s so wonderful?”

“I think I do. It is wonderful, so elemental and original. It’s one man’s invention, you know. Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently, Lobachevsky and Bolyai did the same for non-Euclidean geometry, and if they hadn’t Gauss would have—it was just sitting there waiting to be picked up—but without Cantor set theory might not have ever come into being. Hilbert said nobody will ever expel us from the Paradise Cantor created. Isn’t that nice? To create a Paradise nobody will be expelled from?” Talking of mathematics, Phyllis became more animated and precise—quicker-voiced, wider and more reckless in her gestures. Her blood ran faster beneath the thin fair skin.

“It is,” he had to agree.

“And he did it, a lot of it, in a mental hospital. His brain snapped, set theory was so powerful.”

“What my brain doesn’t quite get,” Owen persisted, elevating himself to Cantor’s class of mental fragility, “is why it was such a big deal when Russell and Gödel found these internal contradictions or paradoxes—as Klein points out, the confusion is basically semantic. I don’t see what undecidability has to do with the history of the computer.”

“You don’t?” said Phyllis, unable to quite conceal her disappointed surprise, as if her own clarity of mind had been conferred upon Owen by her regal act of accepting him as her boyfriend. The two of them met before class and rejoined afterwards; they shared mid-morning coffee and a dragged-out late lunch at the Student Center across Mass. Ave.; they went to movies together in Harvard Square or on Washington Street in Boston; sardonic Jake and menacing Ralph had been banished to the rim of the circle at whose quiet center Owen found