Fine Hall, the 12-story bastion of mathematical insights and freshman calc angst, is home to more than just numbers and theories. It also contains the office of Jordan Ellenberg, assistant professor, math scholar — and novelist.
Ellenberg recently published his first novel, "The Grasshopper King." The book is set at a tiny college in the Midwest and draws on the author's own collegiate experiences, both as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a professor at Princeton.
"The book is about the worst poet who ever lived," explained Ellenberg.
It follows the poet's experience at the small college and the effect that his words have on those who listen, including a professor who stops speaking for 15 years and a myriad of disaffected students.
Despite the familiar university setting, Ellenberg says that "very little of the book's actual apparatus is drawn from real life."
"It's definitely not a realist novel," he said, explaining instead that the various people and places in the book are "personifications of certain traits."
Ellenberg cites the tension between "the simplifying descriptions that you assign to yourself" and "the complex reality of the full human being" as one of the book's themes.
"Those two facts are not compatible. They create tension, and that tension is funny. And that tension is in the book," he said.
Ellenberg began "The Grasshopper King" in 1993, when he was a student in the masters' program for creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. At the time, though, none of the major publishing houses expressed an interest in the book. Ellenberg "put it in a drawer" and returned to Harvard to get his Ph.D. in math.
This year, though, a friend suggested that he try Coffeehouse Press, a small publishing company in Minneapolis. Coffeehouse published the book this month.
Asked about his hopes for the book's popularity, Ellenberg was cautiously optimistic. "I like to think that people who don't actually know me may still want to buy it," he said.
"The challenge," he continued, "is not so much to get people to like your books. It's to get people to notice that the book even exists."
The book has already attracted attention from critics, earning a spot as one of Booksense's top 76 books for May and June.
A Publisher's Weekly review on April 7 noted that "campus novels often tend toward the parochial or the arcane, but Ellenberg breathes fresh air into the genre."
Author Stephen Dixon, with whom Ellenberg studied at Johns Hopkins, called Ellenberg "one of the funniest, flashiest, zaniest, cleverest and also one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable new young writers around."
Ellenberg will be reading from his novel on Thursday, May 8, at 7:00 p.m. in the U-Store.
More information about Ellenberg and his book is available at www.panix.com/~zeek/jse.
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