Just like all evocative art, really amazing books are impossible to describe. One of those novels is A Naked Singularity, the story of Casi, a 20-year old public defender who has never lost a case.
The mind behind this 678-page mammoth? Sergio de la Pava, “a writer that does not live in Brooklyn” according to the about-the-author blurb. De la Pava is fascinating in his own right. A public defender in NYC by day, New Jersey family man-cum-writer by night, de la Pava self-published A Naked Singularity in 2012. It was picked up by the University of Chicago Press to become one of the best-sellers of 2012 and the winner of a Poets, Essayists, and Novelists award.
The novel is well-deserving of its success. A Naked Singularity is undoubtedly in the canon of works that succeed in every minute detail. It is a pulsating whole more powerful even than the sum of its exquisite parts.
To best describe a book that defies description, I’ll rely on the usual adjectives for a basic idea. First, regarding its girth: A Naked Singularity is a maximalist endeavor, an epic tale, a behemoth. But it is not overwhelming or over-ambitious, nor is it boring and drawn out. De la Pava ensnared me and kept me enthralled in Casi’s life. From daily routines to transcripts from court to dream sequences to dramatic descriptions of a heist, de la Pava had me hooked.
Which brings me to style, where calling A Naked Singularity creative is an understatement. De la Pava’s words fall into place so comfortably you forget that they were written—rather, you feel as though you are privy to a parallel universe, a little off from our own but more compelling. His wordplay is sophisticated, witty, and at times bizarre. Weird, strange, and, when put together with everything else, immaculate.
Beyond the basics of range, style, and creativity, what makes A Naked Singularity so unique and so stunning is that it transcends plot. The story is about a public defender who gets into criminal activity while dealing with family affairs and being a broke law grad 20-something trying to make it in New York (something for us to look forward to!). It is semi-realistic, or reality viewed through the tipsy, sleep-deprived eyes of a genius.
De la Pava himself said, “We don’t go to novels to see a perfect mimicry of life. After all, if you find quotidian life so compellingly instructive you can simply stand still and have it rush at you in blissful unrelenting waves.” His book is great mimicry, but edited to allow for extra satire and contemplation, reformatted to become a transcendent experience.
As clichéd as it may be, A Naked Singularity really hits you with the important stuff. It isn’t exactly life, but it is definitely, seriously attacking life in all of its unpredictability and digressions.
De la Pava focuses on the failure of the criminal justice system and the role of the individual in a larger cultural system. Much of this contemplation relies on de la Pava’s background in philosophy, which he studied before attending law school. He said, “I think I’ve always been prone to pretty radical skepticism with respect to the physical world; it feels odd to say it explicitly but to me it always felt like a far lower level of reality than say mental operations. What confounded me was that everyone else seemed to hold up this thing whose nature I was doubting as the paragon of unproblematic reality.”
This resonates with me. If you like to read for plot, style, and the physical world alone, I get it. We all need to read for the pure fun of it sometimes. Even reading A Naked Singularity at face value will fit this niche. But I know you’re after more, especially from as heavy an undertaking as this book is (seriously, it’s heavier than my stats textbook).
This semester, I’ve left inspired and transformed from a lot of my classes, mostly my philosophy and language classes, and once, I admit, I was even enticed by an econ lecture, but reading A Naked Singularity throughout the fall has been more exciting, animating, thought-provoking, moving (I could go on until I ran out of action verbs) than all of that put together.
In all seriousness, if you read one book from my year’s worth of reviews, let it be this one. Under the Covers is ready to commit—A Naked Singularity may just be my new one and only.
