The Weight of Numbers

Math whiz Anthony Burden has anonymous alley sex at the height of the London blitz, which produces Saul Cogan, an eventual jaded-idealist-turned-human-trafficker. The botched childhood abduction of Stacey Chavez—eventually an epileptic, anorexic supermodel—obliquely links the three, as does a gift encyclopedia set rigged with a bomb to assassinate a Mozambique revolutionary. That much one is able to confirm in Ings's deceptively readable, dizzyingly constructed novel: the sentences are conventional, but the things they describe are not, and abrupt shifts in time and setting (Paris; London; Mozambique; Cape Canaveral, Fla.; etc.) are even more jarring. Through it all, Anthony struggles with madness, marriage and sexual identity; Stacey battles illness and sudden stardom; and Saul drifts through the world as "a ghost in the globalized machine." Ings, a London-based science fiction novelist, offers further clues to their common story in the form of adventurer Nick Jinks, who haunts the three like Zelig. This Pynchon-on-speed romp relies heavily on coincidence and trivia—Anthony and Stacey seem to be crushed by the weight of history, self-destruction and destiny, while antiheroes Nick and Saul skirt history's edges—yet Ings's mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core. (Feb.)