The housekeeper and the professor

It's easy to count in integers, whole numbers - just look at those five stars we assign to the books we read here. Assign an exact numerical value to a 300-page book. There should be a mathematical formula, some simple way of explaining just how good a book is, whether it's cheap entertainment for the masses or a work of true Literature. But then there are those rare books that manage to be both, striking a balance between heart and brain, where both the author and her characters come across as intelligent, where by the end you've got so much to think about that you don't have to feel cheap if you get something in your eye.

The Housekeeper And The Professor really wants to be one of those books, with a plot that might have been turned into a vehicle for whoever is the Japanese Julia Roberts, yet so well-written and with so much going on between the lines that it feels meaningful. The plot itself is simple without being dumb; a young woman with no family or education takes up housekeeping to support herself and her young son, and the agency sends her to an old mathematics professor who's suffered a brain injury and lost his memory; he remembers everything up to 1975, but after that he just remembers the last 80 minutes. Every morning when she turns up, he's never seen her before. But somehow, between the three of them they start building a weird little family unit, centered around her son's math homework and the old man's fascination with baseball statistics; memory and friendship may be fleeting, but numbers are constant. I'm strongly reminded of the real story told in Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, about the conductor who can only remember the last 90 seconds of his life yet is capable of performing music that goes on for far longer since it gives him a context.

There's potential here. A lot of it. Ogawa is an excellent stylist, who manages to create complex characters without giving away too much, painting in very thin lines - despite all the mathematical themes she weaves in, and the personal and societal issues they hint at without making them too obvious, it's a very unbusy novel. It's refreshing, and I want to like it. And yet at some point I want to go "Oh come ON." It becomes a Sophie's World for adults, where Ogawa tries just too hard to show that she's done her homework, and tries to turn Fermat's last theorem and Euler's identity into some sort of mystical pieces of eternal wisdom showing that three irrational numbers can make 1. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just way too overdone, and somewhere around the seventh time the professor explains how a certain number can explain the perfect world order that the everlasting blah-de-blah-de-blah I start wondering how I can possibly like this and loathe Paulo Coelho at the same time.

OK, that's unfair. Ogawa is far too good a writer (if maybe not author) to earn that comparison. A lot of people will love this book, and it's hard to tell them not to. It's going to make them laugh, cry, and think a bit. If I see it on a bestseller stand I won't be surprised. I'm just not sure how much of it I'll want to remember.