Introduction to Jim Chaffee's Studies in Mathematical Pornography: American Dream

Tom Bradley

…the sparsity of text on the board surprised me. A nebulous shape with some squiggles like lonesome spermatozoa or maybe spirochetes emanating from a couple points to the boundary, a formula for the conditional expectation on the boundary, nothing else.

Whitey Butcher has been making marks on a chalkboard, pretty much in a trance. Then he comes to himself and notices what he has written. This moment in American Dream is remarkable, in that it clarifies, as much as possible, the subject of this novel: higher math.

Jim Chaffee calls it "…art for art's sake, with no reason to be otherwise."

Like the majority of Americans, I am functionally innumerate. Teacher kept me in from recess in second grade till I memorized the stupid fucking times tables, which I've since forgotten. I never made it beyond first year algebra—no calc, no trig, nothing.

But, in addition to being a mathematician, Jim Chaffee is a novelist, so he knows exactly when to have his protagonist draw me a picture: two or three quasi-organic shapes, or maybe crystalline facets being hinted at by force of number, images that help a numerical mongoloid appreciate all the algebraic topology that's washing over him. Here's one such helpful image, straight from everyone's childhood:

So, connecting preimages above the 2-sphere where they came from as fibers, a bundle of some kind then, clearly you would have a torus wrapped around the 2-sphere with a twist in it. A kind of twisted slinky with infinitesimally close rings… I saw an infinity of slinkies along every potential direction around the great circles, all adjoining in perfect harmony…

And the novelistic aids don't have to appear on a chalkboard or spring from a toy bin. Nightmare hallucinations are effective as well. Disturbing Whitey's rest is a "machine-quaking mound of sand" which makes the math concrete, like a cement mixer configured as a Klein bottle.

But this is not just a mathematics book. It's mathematical pornography. Fucking is done in borderline infinite numbers of ways; human orifices are delved into like non-orientable surfaces. Whitey's encounters with females are analytically penetrative, like those portrait busts the Romans used to carve, with every wart and skin pore and chancre right in place, alongside noses and brows that would, in a more idealized context, be implausibly beautiful.  Butcher sees the ugliness and the beauty and the inner complexities they conceal, ornament and express.

In the middle of the sex sections, which begin primarily non-mathematical, sudden throw-aways propel us back into the math guy's head—

I wasn't up for her mood and didn't take the bait, sitting quietly probing for deficiencies in my grasp of Ito's construction of his stochastic integral.

Whitey Butcher has the mathematician's manner of considering people other than sex partners as well. His view of his own family shows the superhuman aplomb available to the mind accustomed to moving in pure abstraction, the brain quintessentialized in the retort of cohomology and Hodge theory. A Vietnam vet, he was better off being AK-47ed in the jungle than hanging around his monster mom. And not only does he allow himself and us to realize this, but he expresses it out loud, without rancor or sentimentality. Her death scene equates thus:

...about her I certainly didn't give a rat's ass. Let the ancient vengeful volcano god of genocidal, homicidal smiting fury she worshiped carry her through…

Fancy-fucked women and dead mothers are all well and good. But, as one might expect, it's in the field of music appreciation that we get our sharpest glimpse of Chaffee's supra-dimensional mind. At one point Whitey turns on the phonograph, and—

 

…listens to [Eddie] Gomez man-handle the bass and [Bill] Evans’ deeply self-involved solos, conversing with himself and handing Gomez as much rope as himself…

…I found myself leading the Gomez solo on the seventh cut by an infinitesimal time step. After a brief flirt with some melodic memory, it simultaneously dove and climbed onto the atonal aharmonic arhythmic free-born bowing path… jangly stuff, nervous tension building to a dissonant variant of an exotic sphere a la Milnor or Kervaire…

Jazz brings K-theorists to a mind such as Chaffee's—which is unutterably strange. But nobody has gotten musical experience any better than this in fiction. When, at the end, topology is spoken of as "singing true magic" it comes across with absolute authority, from a man who hears music as sharply as he maps unmappable space.

As a feat of virtuosity, American Dream is analogous to one of Eddie Gomez' four-octave sixteenth-note runs, executed on a fingerboard with extreme negative Gaussian curvature. This is and will remain a unique book.

© Tom Bradley 2011

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