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Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite
What if your entire life, with every regret, every triumph, every ordinary Tuesday, were already shelved in a library? In David Samuel Allen’s A Free Will Manifold, this question haunts Edom Thompson, a pure mathematician stuck on a proof he calls the “Die lemma,” when he follows a stranger's directions to a mysterious building. It is a redwood atrium with a spiral staircase climbing five hundred floors and a key etched with “25E421.” The key unlocks a room where thousands of volumes narrate Edom’s past and future in his own voice, cataloged under headings like “Regret” and “Sex/Romance (See Also: John, Naomi).” He starts reading in secret, then decides to share the library with his art-historian best friend, Naomi, and his favorite grad student, Thomas. Then what they read begins to bleed into reality, and each must decide what to do with a fate they can read but cannot possibly change.
David Samuel Allen’s novel examines intellectual curiosity and asks the question: is everything worth knowing? We meet fully drawn characters whose desire to control their lives complicates their relationships with others. Edom is a logical man whose curiosity is only matched by his addiction to cigarettes. Naomi is the combination of the tender and the fierce, yet she is burdened by “thought toddlers,” and Thomas brings a unique angle to the story with his combinatorics homework that counts alpacas in hard hats. The worldbuilding in A Free Will Manifold delights in specifics, such as card catalogs recording conferences, the Librarian eternally reading behind her redwood desk, and Thomas's circular library indexed by angles of π. What keeps you reading is the sense of dread that permeates the writing, with a slow unraveling of mysteries. I have never read anything like this before: it is thought-provoking, spellbinding, and hugely entertaining.
