Wittgenstein Jr

Starred review from July 28, 2014
Fresh from his acclaimed Spurious Trilogy (Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus), Iyer mines the history of Western philosophy in this unlikely fusion of a campus novel with high slapstick. Set at Cambridge, the story concerns a contemporary philosophy professor whose life and manners mirror the famous logician Ludwig Wittgenstein. A figure of fascination for a tight-knit circle of baffled undergrads who christen him “Wittgenstein,” he is a larger-than-life malcontent whose hatred for Cambridge, bizarre lessons, and typically gnomic pronouncements (“I have no intention of making myself understood”) set the tone for the usual series of higher-ed initiations. Preppy Ede teeters between love and despair, druggy Scroggins imbibes a catastrophic amount of ketamine, pretentious Titmuss is transfigured in India during his gap year, and outsider Peters deals both with his budding sexuality and the increasing commercialism on campus. But above it all presides their teacher, whose private pain and peculiar genius is the stuff of both light parody and heartbreaking tragedy. Through his class—and his example—the novel’s novice schoolboys learn more than rhetoric; they come face to face with the reality they long for. Like an upbeat, comic version of a Thomas Bernhard novel, the book occasionally exhausts its central joke but scores points for its outstanding strangeness, its rapid dialogue, and, of course, its grotesque, man-out-of-time hero-philosopher. Iyer already has a reputation for combining brainy dialogue with madcap action, but the triumph of his latest (and best) novel is that the cartoon turns out to have real substance.

August 15, 2014
An enigmatic young philosophy lecturer infuriates, intrigues and ultimately beguiles his Cambridge University students in this droll love story about logic and learning from Iyer (Philosophy/Newcastle Univ.; Exodus, 2013, etc.). Wittgenstein Jr. is the name they give him. Their choice is inspired more by his dress and manner than his looks or accent, but like his namesake, he's obsessed with logic. He's also brilliant, and as he strives to instil philosophical thought in them, they struggle to keep up. "His classes are just a series of remarks, separated by silences. Ideas, in haiku-like sentences, full of delicate beauty and concision," notes the narrator, Peters, as their meanings whizz over his head. Peters is a final-year undergraduate, and he sets a spry tone as he chronicles his classmates' extracurricular high jinks, which are fueled by a fear of life after graduation and a stupefying quantity of booze and pharmaceuticals. (Preparing for a toga party, they down something called a Black Zombie, made of vodka, gin, tequila, Bacardi, pastis and Coke.) Meanwhile, Cambridge is depicted as a shell of its historical self, desiccated by bureaucracy and posh boys with no real intellectual zeal. Iyer's is also a Cambridge with markedly little room for women, though this detail goes curiously uncommented upon. As the product of a modest home in Northern England, Peters doesn't quite belong, and maybe that's why Wittgenstein eventually reaches out to him, drawing him closer than he ought. The lecturer's obsession with logic turns out to be rooted in a family tragedy that threatens to engulf him; in striving to save him, Peters learns a very adult lesson about what it means to love. Pieced together from terse vignettes and enlivened with a liberal scattering of exclamation points, the novel teeters between exaggerated gloom and moments of true tenderness. Existential angst is rarely this entertaining.

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