Sarang's latest effort, The Coleridge Proof, is a slim volume, but its density of ideas and Baroque style give it a much bigger impact than its page count would suggest. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Calista's Into the World (which I reviewed in these pages) and Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, and owing more than a little to Sarang's previous work Bletchley Park (which I also reviewed), The Coleridge Proof explores the overlap between abstract ideas and personal interests, policymaking and the war of ideas.
The novel opens as Anabel Coleridge, a political philosopher guest lecturing at the University of Chicago, achieves the holy grail of left wing scholarship: a formal proof refuting neoliberalism. In the opening pages of the book, Coleridge alternates between carefully checking her work, covering page after page with careful, neatly written notation, and strolling through Hyde Park, her mind on fire with the astounding implications of her proof. Of course she understands that capitalism is not going to go away without a fight, but her proof of its incoherence will remove any last vestige of intellectual justification, and slowly but surely the new socialist order will take shape. Of course Coleridge also stands to become famous, a towering figure in academia, a God on Twitter.
The turning point comes when Coleridge, almost finished writing up her proof for publication, idly works out a few of its logical implications. She is brought up short when she realizes that her proof not only refutes capitalism, it also proves that walkable urbanism lacks any rational justification. Coleridge desperately works through the proof again and again, but the stubborn fact remains. She cannot launch her attack on capitalism without exploding walkable urbanism as well.
Once she has resigned herself to the harsh truth, Coleridge confronts her unpalatable options. She could, of course, publish the proof without making any mention of its implications for urban policy. For some period of time, she would reap all the rewards for her accomplishment without any price being paid. It is even possible that the destruction of any intellectual case for walkable urbanism would go unnoticed for years, decades... maybe forever.
But the difficulty is that Coleridge's proof is certain to inspire a deluge of derivative academic work—the proof will be the basis for thousands of papers mining it for new ideas. It would be foolhardy to think that its implied refutation of urbanism will go unnoticed, especially when so much money is riding on it. And while Coleridge despises neoliberalism and longs to sound its death knell, she loves cities almost as much, and would hate to give up her carless lifestyle, enabled by the very mass transit and dense zoning that her work has the power to destroy. But is her reluctance to publish simply an expression of her own privilege? Doesn't integrity require her to publish her ideas even at great personal cost? (Though she tries to be high-minded about all of this, among other things Coleridge can't ignore the huge and vocal urbanist presence on Twitter—if she publishes the proof, then so much for her dreams of widespread Twitter acclaim!)
In desperate need of advice, Coleridge turns to an online forum for academics working in political philosophy. Obviously she can't reveal the full extent of her dilemma, but she lays it out in abstract form. Alas, even this general description is enough to pique the interest of Charles Laval, a veteran lobbyist for the car industry. In his youth, Laval was working toward an irrefutable refutation of urbanism with a brilliant Vietnamese philosopher, Dr. Phan, when the war interrupted their collaboration. Laval made it out of Saigon on a helicopter; Phan didn't. Without Phan's help, Laval was unable to complete their work, and he eventually quit philosophy for a career on K Street.
Now, decades later, Laval notices a few seemingly innocuous details in Coleridge's forum posts that suggest that she has stumbled on the same argument that preoccupied Laval and Phan so many years before. Of course, Laval is now in a position to mobilize vast resources in service of his clients' interests, and, perhaps haunted by his failure to get his friend out of Saigon, he sets in motion a plan that ultimately brings The Coleridge Proof to its stunning denouement.
It is not my place to spoil the ending of the book, so I will simply note that I wish more novels were as convincing as The Coleridge Proof in describing the ways in which academic work and personal foibles interact. We may like to think that grand ideas exist on some elevated, airless plane, far above our petty concerns and personal feuds. But in real life they are all a jumble, and it is only when we confront this truth about our ideas that we can evaluate them in their true light.
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