A review by silvej01
The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung

4.0

I’m drawn to stories of young people with special gifts, particularly those related to intellectual areas (I was a total sucker for Good Will Hunting) or the arts. This novel is such a tale. The first-person narrator, Katherine (with a K rather than the author’s C), is an older celebrated mathematician looking back on her childhood and early adult life in the 1950s and 60s. Her story includes her complicated origins with mixed ethnicities (Asian mother/European ancestry father), the sudden inexplicable abandonment by her mother in Katherine’s adolescence, her precociousness for mathematics and ambition to make her mark in the field as she progresses from her student days to her early academic career. Chung’s writing is vivid and there is a lot of story going on here. It ultimately encompasses several generations, several decades, and several continents. Throughout the telling, Katherine weaves in sometimes familiar but always interesting true side-stories and puzzles related to mathematics, the history of science, myth, and other areas that enrich the main storyline. The other characters in the novel – including family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and rivals – are well drawn, and even those who do bad or, in a few cases, truly evil things remain recognizably human. The major theme here concerns the prejudices and disproportionate burdens a woman faces in academia, especially in the mathematics and hard sciences, and the hard life choices that accrue from such circumstances, but there are many other issues too going on. The horrors of the mid-20th century—the Holocaust, the Japanese atrocities inflicted on other Asian people, and the compromises necessary to have some chance to survive also play a large role in the novel. While I don’t want to overstate its value as a work of literature, I also don’t mean to demean it when I say that I often found myself envisioning it as a high-quality streaming channel mini-series, sort of along the lines of The Queen’s Gambit. As in that story (which of course was a novel too, but I haven’t read it), this is a story of a young woman with a difficult childhood who has an extraordinary talent in what is thought to be a primarily male domain. Here, rather than chess, Katherine is moving in the rarified and sexist world of mathematics, especially as it existed in the 1960s.