HOW I WON A NOBEL PRIZE

A physicist’s dream lab proves to be a not-so-safe space.

Helen, the narrator of Taranto’s smart and funny debut, has made a devil’s bargain. She’s a rising researcher in the field of superconductors, addressing knotty quantum-mechanics problems that might resolve the climate crisis. Her adviser is Perry, a Nobel Prize–winning genius. But staying with Perry means joining him at the Rubin Institute, a billionaire-funded and defiantly un-PC think tank on an island off the Eastern Seaboard that's determined to provide a haven for academics and artists dubbed “cancellees and deplorables.” (Protesters have dubbed it “Rape Island.”) Helen’s partner, Hew, grudgingly tags along but attends anti-Rubin protests; Helen, meanwhile, is determined to sidestep politics and not scrutinize Perry’s cancellation too closely. (It involves a sexual indiscretion, but details are withheld for a clever late plot twist.) Taranto initially plays this setup for laughs; the Institute is centered in an overtly phallic tower named the Endowment, R. Kelly is among the attendees at get-togethers, and the spreads include “ostentaciously problematic meat: foie gras, roast suckling pig, octopus, horse.” But in time Helen becomes more enmeshed in the Institute’s politics, complicating her relationships with Hew and Perry and her sense of the world. (The scientist in her assembles a spreadsheet to clarify Hew’s place in her life, but life isn’t so tidy.) Taranto expertly explores the messy discussions around cancel culture and how much geniuses might be forgiven inappropriate conduct—a dilemma personified by a louche, Philip Roth–like writer Helen befriends at the Institute. That subplot clangs a little against the main narrative, and Taranto’s climax is over-the-top. But it’s a fine study of the idea that, for all the complaints about the culture wars, nobody can pretend they’re not implicated in them.

A bright, well-turned satirical debut.