“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “and next year’s words await another voice.” It would be hard to find a more apt description of Joshua Cohen and his brilliantly exhausting fourth novel, “Book of Numbers.” On its surface, the book is about a struggling New York novelist hired as an Internet billionaire’s ghostwriter — but its breadth, the ambition of its ideas and devices, confounds standard book review responses. Trying to approach this demanding, overstuffed novel is a bit like hyperlinking one’s way around the Internet: It’s bigger, wilder and fuller than you imagined, and there’s always more where that came from.
“Book of Numbers” is a thematic and stylistic continuation of “Four New Messages,” Cohen’s story collection dealing with the vagaries of life in the Internet era. Readers of his previous work will recognize his antic, breakneck excesses; even his short stories overflow. Cohen makes no bones about his impatience with conventional narrative — he, or rather his fictional stand-in (also named Joshua Cohen), announces his disdain for the dusty tropes of the novel on the first page: “There’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” Unsurprisingly, on those counts, “Book of Numbers” is sometimes a hot mess.
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