by Nova Jacobs
Philip looked down at his granddaughter and then back to Hazel.
Suddenly she felt ashamed that it was she and not Philip who had been given Isaac’s most prized composition. She wanted to apologize—to explain that Isaac had needed to leave it with someone outside mathematics. Perhaps, in his way, Philip’s father had been protecting him. She wondered how to say all this without making the situation any more uncomfortable.
As she opened her mouth to speak, he stopped her.
“Just tell me this. Are you doing what he would have wanted?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then,” her uncle said, “that’s all I need to know.”
He handed back the pages and paused at the door, giving Hazel a final smile before leaving the cabin.
She slipped the paper into her purse and stood up. On the counter, someone had placed a group portrait of the family—an old photo that had been taken on a trip to Disneyland. Hazel singled out Isaac’s proud, paternal head, and smiled at him. “I found it,” she said, tears returning to her eyes.
Now, as she looked out the triple-paned window, past condensed water droplets and onto clouds blanketing the ocean, she wondered what would become of the equation. When she had asked Raspanti this, he would speak only of genieschultern: the shoulders of genius. He hinted at brilliant jewels that were lodged inside the equation, from which additional mathematics could be mined—the less predictive and potentially less dangerous kind. As for her grandfather’s other request, that the contents of his hotel room be destroyed, this was, of course, impossible. But then, if Alex was right, and Isaac had been dangling a red herring in front of everyone while keeping his true gem artfully hidden, well, it hardly mattered.
At first, Raspanti had been skeptical that Hazel had the equation in her possession. In fact, he hung up on her twice. But after she repeatedly insisted in a series of cryptic emails and phone messages, he said finally, “If what you are implying is true, Hazel, you must come to Italy at once.” He bought her a first-class ticket and called her to say, “My wife and I, we will take you to Rome by way of Florence and Pisa, where the great mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci worked. I’ll teach you the beauty of your grandfather’s mathematics while you gaze at the beauty of our country. I insist.”
An Italian vacation! She would wander up and down the Mediterranean while she figured out what the hell she was going to do with the rest of her life. Could anything be better?
She’d flown back to Seattle to oversee the shuttering of her store and to say good-bye to the old-world fantasy she had wrapped herself in these past seven years. At an in-store auction, she sold off her banker’s lamps, pedestalled reference books, Christopher Wren architectural prints, cracked leather chairs, frayed kilim rugs, and probably a city block’s stretch of warped shelving. She got a decent price for these, given that most of the buyers were rich techie types hoping to infuse their bland apartments with a vibe Hazel dubbed “destitute intellectual clinging to the past.”
She stacked nearly all of her library into boxes—saving only the most precious volumes for herself, including the Fitzgerald hardcovers—and sold her collection to Books Now!, an across-town competitor specializing in politically engaged fiction and nonfiction. The owners, an older couple with no children, had been looking to draw a more general readership to their store and were thrilled when Hazel was willing to part with her inventory at such a fire-sale price. She wished them luck and promised to send all her customers their way.
One rainy afternoon, Hazel broke the news to Chet over lunch, apologizing for the hit to his already modest writer’s income. Over lobster bisques, she slid across the table a hardcover copy of George Gissing’s New Grub Street, which Chet had been steadily working through for the past year but had never finished.
He smiled, pushed up his oversized glasses, and let the Victorian novel fall open to its Guttersnipe bookmark.
“I’m sad to see the store go, Hazel, but then, I got what I came for.” He produced a small cardboard box from his messenger bag.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
She pulled off the top to find a manuscript: Amazon Warriors. By Chet Hu.
“Is this real?”
“I told you I had big plans for that article.” He laughed. “What did you think I was doing that whole time?”
In the back of her store that night, she read Chet’s manuscript, a dystopian tale—half truth, half fiction—about a near future that no longer valued ink and paper. At its center, a doomed shopkeeper waged battle against bad plumbing and other natural disasters in order to preserve the world’s last cache of hardcover books. At least the spirit of her store, Hazel told herself, would live on in the pages of a book.
As she set down the last page and looked around the tiny back room, she was suddenly gripped by sadness. She imagined her brother sitting in his cell at that very moment, scribbling in his diary. She wondered if he would get along with his bunkmate or have the temperament to weather prison life. How odd that Gregory’s basement confinement so many years ago had eventually led him to another kind of confinement. Lying back on her mattress, she looked up at the ceiling and recalled the imperfect constellations they had so cheerfully created together in their bedrooms. She hoped that as he lay on his prison bunk, her brother might glance up one night and remember that amid the disorder of their childhoods, there had been glimpses of real happiness.
* * *
It was early morning when Hazel stepped off the plane at Milan’s Malpensa Airport. She made her way down a shiny white hall toward the arrivals gate, anticipating that the car Raspanti hired would be waiting. As she pushed through a revolving door and into a crush of drivers, she hunted for her name among the signage. After a minute, she spotted a familiar word: Herringbone.
She held up a hand.
“You are Miss Herringbone, yes?” he asked.
“That must be me.”
She turned, and that’s when she saw him, standing a few yards away in a slightly ill-fitting suit, looking directly at her. His hair was wild, but his face recently shaven, and he held a to-go coffee cup in each hand. He grinned at her, though a trace of fear passed over his features.
For several long seconds she didn’t move, wanting to be absolutely sure she was seeing this right. She turned to the driver: “Hold on.”
She walked toward Alex, who met her halfway.
“Cappuccino?” he offered. “They really know how to make them.”
“I can’t begin to imagine what you’re doing here.”
“What I’m doing here?” he said. “I live here.”
“Italy or the airport?”
“Well, neither, but I do live in Paris, a mere train’s distance away. I have a photo gig at the CERN particle accelerator later today, which happens to be down the road.”
“So you really are a photographer.”
Alex smiled somewhat self-consciously. “It should be fun—you know, lots of wide-angle shots of nerds puffing themselves up in front of billion-dollar machinery, arms crossed, that kind of thing. Anyway, thought I’d swing by, welcome you to the Continent.”
She took one of the cappuccinos, still marveling at his being there in front of her. “What about your other job? You were working for someone, weren’t you?”
He nodded gravely. “I quit.”
She couldn’t be sure if this was true, though she desperately wanted it to be. “How did you find me?”
He scratched his chin. “Well, not to seem too pleased with myself, but many years ago, as you may recall, I solved one of Hilbert’s twenty-three problems. Someone else crossed the finish line first, but I solved it nonetheless. In comparison to that, do you think locating one woman is all that difficult?” When Hazel didn’t appear impressed, he added, “I found an article about your bookstore online and called the guy who wrote it. Chet? Nice guy, though I really had to charm him for your whereabouts.”
She nodded, inhaling the aroma from her
cup. “You’re good at that.”
“The far more interesting question,” he continued, “is why you’re in Milan.”
“I’m taking a trip.”
“Not for math-related reasons, I hope.”
“I’m visiting a friend.”
“Good,” he said, with a wink in his voice that reminded her of Isaac. “Because there are other things in life besides mathematics—” He suddenly looked in the direction of the baggage carousel, then held up a finger, and disappeared.
He reappeared a moment later with her luggage, the bag that had been stamped with an oversized H. S.
“I put two and two together,” he said. “Unless this belongs to the German physicist Horst Störmer. That guy would monogram his Nobel if he could.”
Suppressing a laugh, she said, “It was a gift.”
Alex set down her bag and frowned. “I lied to you just now. I mean, before.”
“About there being more to life than mathematics?”
“No, about having a photo shoot at CERN. That’s next week. I came all the way here just to see you.”
She looked down briefly, trying to hide the extent of her delight. “So, tell me,” she said, looking up. “What are these other things besides mathematics?”
“Oh, I have an entire list. If you have some time, I’m happy to go into detail.”
Hazel felt her entire body thaw, as if for years she had been lying out in open tundra, and only now was the climate shifting.
She turned to the driver and signaled him to follow. Then she and Alex walked out the doors of the airport and into the low, wintry light that was rising to meet the continent.
Acknowledgments
First, to agent-of-my-dreams Lisa Bankoff, I can’t thank you enough for taking a chance on me and my story. Heaps of appreciation to Kaitlin Olson at Touchstone for her enthusiasm, spot-on instincts, and for making the editing process such a happy one. And to the entire Touchstone team for their outsized talents and care with this book.
My research would have been unthinkable without enormous help from Mordechai Feingold at Caltech, whose reading lists and professor lunches brought me into the lives of mathematicians. I owe additional thanks to John Schwarz and Shuki Bruck at Caltech, Ed Witten at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Robert Sacker and Scott MacDonald at the University of Southern California. I’m in awe of what you do and forever grateful for your guidance. On the law enforcement front, much gratitude to Vincent Neglia, who gave me an insightful peek into the LAPD.
My smart, eagle-eyed readers, I love you: Holland Christie, J. C. Conklin, Coralie Hunter, Kate Kennedy, Julianne Ortale, Lorna Owen, John Douglas Sinclair, and Peter Spiegler. Thank you to Geoff Nicholson for your Luna Park counsel. And to the bighearted Gabrielle Burton, who insisted on helping me at the worst possible time in her life. I’ll never understand it or forget it.
Rebecca Agbe-Davies: you kept me off the streets. May all writers have such fun survival jobs and supportive friends. Thanks to Jennifer Lange for her friendship and confidence that I would make something of this thing. Jenna Turner and the crew at Susina Bakery: you fixed me gallons of tea and let me sit at that corner table for hours. It didn’t go unnoticed.
Greg Beal and Joan Wai, you run the best writers’ club around.
Heartfelt appreciation to the Rabb family—Theodore, Tamar, Susannah, and Jonathan—for your keen eyes and unflagging support. To my talented sisters, Moksha, Starlet, and Ananda, for cheering me on and tolerating the refrain I have to write. And to my parents, Peter and Linnah, thank you for your unwavering belief in me and for always charting the unconventional course.
And finally, to my husband, whose belief in this book rivaled my own. Somewhere, in a sad parallel universe where there is no Jeremy, there is no book.
A Touchstone Reading Group Guide
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy
Nova Jacobs
This reading group guide for The Last Equation of Isaac Severy includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Nova Jacobs. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Just days after mathematician and family patriarch Isaac Severy dies of an apparent suicide, his adopted granddaughter, Hazel, receives a letter from him. In it, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that seeks his final equation—the culmination of his life’s work—and charges Hazel with safely delivering it to a trusted colleague. But first, she must find where the equation is hidden—and why it’s so vitally important.
When Hazel realizes that she’s not the only one seeking the equation, she learns that its implications have potentially deadly consequences for the extended Severy family, a group of dysfunctional geniuses unmoored by the sudden death of their patriarch. Now, Hazel must unravel a series of confounding clues hidden by Isaac, drawing her ever closer to his mathematical bombshell—and forcing her to rely on those who may be less than trustworthy.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. This novel is equal parts family drama, literary mystery, and suspense thriller. Which element of this genre mash-up did you most enjoy, and why?
2. Contemplate the Pierre-Simon Laplace quotation that opens the novel, especially in the context of the exploration of predetermination at the center of the story. How would “such an intelligence” (in other words, a predictive power that eradicates uncertainty) be a blessing, and in what ways would it be a curse? Was this “intelligence” a burden or a gift for Isaac Severy himself?
3. Familial expectations and pressures are the lens through which we meet most of the main characters in the opening funeral scene of the novel, especially in Philip’s introductory chapter. How did this inform your initial impression of the family dynamics of the Severy clan?
4. Isaac’s passing leaves a different void in the life of each character. Whom do you think feels this loss most keenly? Who plays a similar role as patriarch (or matriarch) in your own family?
5. Raspanti, the ultimate inheritor of Isaac’s equation at the novel’s end, introduces the idea of genieschultern (“on the shoulders of genius”) when discussing the value inherent in Isaac’s equation. This concept—an allusion to Sir Isaac Newton’s quote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”—suggests that if the equation is not used for its predictive abilities, it can serve as the seed for other types of equations. Do you think that the equation should have been destroyed? What are the risks of the “shoulders of genius” concept, and what are the potential benefits?
6. In a rare conversation between Paige and Hazel, the estranged Severy aunt says to Hazel, “Your generation could stand to live in the pursuit a bit more. You’re all rushed to get to the end. To succeed. […] It’s an empty way to live, in constant pursuit of the trophy.” Dissect this philosophy; do you agree or disagree?
7. Describing Isaac’s equation, Nellie asks: “Can you think of anything more exhilarating than the realization that the future is, in fact, knowable?” Would you find clairvoyance “exhilarating”? If you could use a predictive equation akin to Isaac’s formula to foresee only one type of phenomenon, what would it be, and why?
8. The dynamics at play in the Severy clan are complicated to say the least. How do you reconcile Isaac’s cruelty to Philip (or perhaps, Philip’s perception of intense judgment and derision from Isaac) with the kindness that Isaac shows to Hazel and Gregory?
9. How did you react to the revelation of Gregory’s murderous double life? Was there a moment in the novel (prior to the big reveal) when you sensed that Gregory could be capable of this level of duplicity and brutality? Do you understand, or sympathize with, the motivations behind his vigilante killings?
10. Throughout the novel, secrets of every variety are revealed about each cha
racter—affairs, betrayals, shocking backstories. Which character’s secret surprised you the most, and why?
11. What was your reaction to the revelation of five-year-old Drew’s role in Isaac’s sprawling mathematical mystery? Did you ever sense that Drew would play a greater role in the novel?
12. In your opinion, who is ultimately the most tragic character in the novel, and why? Which character(s) do you believe emerge redeemed, and which do not?
13. The author has a background in screenwriting; what scene (or scenes) in particular could you see playing out on screen, or felt especially cinematic?
14. Throughout the novel, the author explores the concept of predetermination. Ultimately, Isaac’s equation proves fallible when Philip survives his suicide attempt. What do you think of this outcome?
15. Consider the Tom Stoppard quotation that opens Part Three: “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” This perspective merges these two divergent concepts to explain the way of the world. What are your thoughts on this world view? What moments in the novel (or, to take the question a step further, what moments in your own life) represent “the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold[ing] together”?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Ask each member of your book club to bring (or create) a family tree, tracing their lineages as far back as they can. Can anyone trace a specific intellectual gift, or even a vocation, back through his or her family tree, the way mathematics is a defining element of the Severy clan? If so, what are those genetic gifts? Launch a deeper discussion by posing the following question to each member of your book club: Do you embody any defining intellectual or professional “family traits”? (Or, do your siblings and/or cousins exemplify a trait that you do not possess, making you an outlier like Sybil?)