THE BLIND BIDDER'S EYE

A teenager forges an impossible connection with a long-dead Swiss mathematician in Seurat’s debut novel.

Fifteen-year-old Ulrick Kennedy has been having nightmares. He’s a member of the paper airplane team at the elite Percival Lowell High School in New York, and he’s terrified that he’ll mess up in some way to prevent his team from making it to nationals. His father, Wall Street executive Harry Kennedy, is not pleased by his son’s slipping grades—nor by the fact that the boy cares so much about paper airplanes that he’s having stress nightmares. He’d much rather see Ulrick focus on his math studies and learn some skills that may one day serve him on the trading floor. When Ulrick and the rest of the paper airplane team lose a bet concerning the law of fluid dynamics to their eccentric math teacher, Professor Ross, they find themselves forced to take a makeup exam—one that Ulrick is willing to go to any length to pass, including buying and consuming a strange study aid called Altus Aerius Oculus (“High Altitude Eye”) from an apothecary in Chinatown. “The mixture is very selective in that it does not have the slightest effect on memory, but dramatically increases one’s analytical powers,” the woman at the shop tells him. “The active ingredient is a solution from an optic nerve of a Swiss mathematician, I forget his name.” At the same time, incautious traders at Harry’s firm find themselves targeted by the SEC over some blind bid trades that could potentially bring the whole business crashing down. Finally, back in 18th century Berlin, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is desperate to solve the Great Theorem of Fermat at the behest of Frederick the Great. As time and space begin to converge, Ulrick finds he’s doing much more than studying the laws of physics—he’s accidentally defying them.  

Seurat’s prose has a technical precision that complements the many physicists and mathematicians who populate the novel’s pages. He’s particularly adept at evoking the richness of Euler’s Berlin, a place and time in which astrology, science, and the caprices of philosopher kings exert their influences side by side. The author clearly enjoys exploring physical laws, logical paradoxes, and other reality puzzles—at times, the book can feel less like a novel and more like a giant word problem. There are three main narrative threads, all of which take a long time to get going and an even longer time to reveal how they are connected to one another. Fans of this type of cerebral storytelling will enjoy the book’s payoff, so long as they manage to stick with it over its nearly 400 pages. Along the way, they can look forward to unexpected plot twists, impressive evocations of setting and character, and a wry sense of humor—here, Frederick the Great practices the flute: “A shrill, squeaky sound cut through the State Room. It was a complete surprise; even the walls of silver and pink pattern refused to resonate the ugly shriek. His Majesty tried again; he lifted the flute slowly to his mouth, and with distrust blew into the mouthpiece.”

An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.