Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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While the plotting was unusual, the writing, by contrast, felt very dry. Not dry in an Ali Smith meets Deborah Levy kind of way. But dry in a numb and detached sort of way. I missed lyricism, rhythm, nuance, artistry. The metaphors, when applied, did not work for me: Where would that leave them? Would she be facing the future alone now? Of course not, Arthur would have been born regardless of an imagined insect bite. She shook her head, as though the idea of the ant in Rachel’s head had somehow affected her own. Maybe it had. Not the physical mind, but the other part. The part that wondered how all these things were connected. I like the idea of the peppermint oil but I can’t see how it will stop the ants in the long term...” Rachel wiped down the kitchen surfaces and went to stand by Eliza’s chair. She rested a damp hand on Eliza’s shoulder. ‘They’re very tiny but even if they got the oil on their feet or paws or whatever ants have at the end of their legs, it’s not going to hurt them.’ The first arises from Pascal’s wager, although not with an explicit reference to religion, but more to ask the question of when it may be rational to believe in the irrational, here whether Eliza should believe her wife, Rachel, that an ant has crawled into her eye and stayed there (wonderfully based on an incident where the author herself had ants living in her computer, to the disbelief of her son).

Also, while I am not familiar with most experimental philosophy and it was interesting to learn about many ideas through this novel, there was one thought experiment drawn from game theory that I was familiar with, The Prisoner’s Dilemma (ch. 2), often used in social sciences. It was rather incorrectly “applied”, starting with the conflation between strategies (cooperation or defection) and outcomes (defeat) in presenting 3 scenarios. More egregiously, it focuses only on one person (Ali) while the preferences and motivations of the second person (Damon) were only tangential whereas the very nature of the game is that it is interdependent, i.e., dependent on the choices and motivations of both sides. The scenario of mutual cooperation is also presented as the best scenario when in fact it’s the second best outcome for each person in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (sorry if this sounds too technical: the entire paradox of the PD game is that this is a Pareto optimal outcome but not a Nash equilibrium, that is, there is the tension between collective and individual rationality), etc. That said, the chapter itself was interesting in presenting different consequences of one boy’s dilemmas in general, which will be weaved seamlessly into later chapters. Eliza couldn’t answer. She had accepted Rachel’s story as part of the woman she loved; a version of events that was not factual but more of a metaphor. Could she tell Rachel that now? This collection of scattered but interconnected short stories across which its various characters interact and intersect in their various paths, seem to all revolve around the same central questions: what is life? What is consciousness? And under what conditions are the two created and sustained? Sometimes philosophy and fiction meet in strange alleys of literature to produce a piece worth spending a long while pondering upon and this is one such work.

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Rachel reached across the table. ’As long as you believe me.’ The mirage of their life together pulled into focus. I thought this was particularly realistic and well written. Also, knowing what you know at the end of the book makes this conversation take on a whole different significance.

So far so reasonably conventional, but later Rachel asleep becomes convinced that an ant has entered her body via her eye – something the rational scientist Eliza of course refuses to believe and which, in the illogical way many decisions are made in real life to ease relationship tensions, leads Eliza to finally 100% commit to the baby idea.The boy inched the wheel and when he felt the cup respond he redoubled his efforts, throwing his whole body in the direction of the spin. Eliza saw her own determined frown on his face as he held fast. Love and Other Thought Experiments is one of the 2020 Booker Prize Longlisted books by seasoned actor and debut novelist, Sophie Ward. The book tells the story of a lesbian couple Eliza and Rachel, who one night, have a bit of a misunderstanding. Rachel feels that an ant has managed to get into her eye while Eliza, who is the more practical of the two, thinks that Rachel is making a mountain of a molehill. However, the sensation of the ant remains in the eye of Rachel, which is always refuted by Eliza. Until the day, they realize that Rachel has a tumour or cancer in that very same eye. I always follow the Booker Prize and read the Longlisted books. This is the first book that I read from the Longlisted Booker Prize books of 2020, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Rachel blinked. She reached across the table and took the bag with the test in it. ‘I’m going to do this right now.

The book was written as an extension of a post graduate student project (at Goldsmiths College, London), and I think it reflects that, with its academic and highly formalised creative writing construct. It is this narrative in parallel with the philosophy which I think really makes the book succeed as a rounded novel. It is a book which is both moving and stimulating.The boy wriggled from her lap and stood on the bench beside her, absorbed by the life of the park. Rachel took a deep breath, swept her newly grown hair behind her ear and smiled at Eliza. My favorite character in this entire novel was by far the ant that crawled into Rachel’s eye that night. This is not an attempt at making a cute joke; the chapter that is narrated by the ant that supposedly has taken residence in Rachel’s head was the most lyrical and genuinely gorgeous part of this novel. The ant’s narrative describes how its reality intertwined with the host it has infiltrated, about how it begins to feel human emotion as its consciousness begins to meld with Rachel’s. For instance, the ant, new to human feelings, describes what he feels when Rachel discloses her cancer diagnosis to her mother, saying the “burden of this disguise has worn us both down, wrapped, it seems, in hope and desire, bitter memories and the almond tang of sugar and death.” Take, too, this portion of the chapter that is my favorite part of the entire novel:

Fine! You want to be a thought experiment? You can be a zombie! No, no, I’ve got it. You would be, yes, Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue. The colour he has never seen but can still visualise. Happy?’ This is the story of an untraditional family told in an untraditional way. The family is untraditional because a lesbian married couple (Rachel and Eliza) decide to have a child using sperm donated by one half of another gay married couple (Hal and Greg). This child, with two fathers and two mothers, becomes gradually more and more central to the story and discovering that centrality is both intellectually stimulating and emotional. But it’s not why you said it. You said it because you thought I couldn’t handle anything; that I don’t know about the real world, about real life. And maybe I don’t.’ Rachel sat and sobbed. Her shoulders heaved and her breath came in shuddering gasps. In Chapter 5, "Clementinum," Rachel stays home alone after Eliza and Arthur leave. Feeling unwell, she climbs into the bath with a book. Once in the water, she cannot focus. Her mind drifts between dreams and memories. In this liminal space, Rachel realizes that she owes her life to the ant, and that Ali is her real father. She dies shortly thereafter.The future shimmered across the table. A world of possibilities, if only Eliza could believe in them. She was so sure. Eliza watched as Rachel stroked her eye along the lash line in a delicate sweep, as if not to disturb her visitor. She was fading like a once vivid stain on a sheet that with every wash grows paler until you forget it had ever existed.”