Book Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor

By Nina Sankovitch

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa has a beautiful rhythm to it — easy-going, fluid, and peaceful.  The characters come across clearly and the situation they are in is compelling.  But the three devices Ogawa employs to keep her plot going, math, the Professor's 80-minute memory span and baseball, are contrived and manipulative.  Under the burden of artificiality, the characters lose their identity and they become flat symbols, incapable of change. Without change, the book is only a good book of interesting ideas but not a great book where conflict, understanding, and resolution reveal a final and compelling truth.

Ogawa uses math as a metaphor for life throughout the novel: she sees both as mysterious, full of problems and demanding proof. But math and life are not equivalent quantities. Although I agree that math and life both offer an endless number of problems to explore and mysteries to uncover, only math can use proofs to solve the problems posed (the novel is full of wonderful examples of mathematical problems of easy and difficult scale).

Life has been around for as long as math, as the Professor tells us (again and again) and like math, life is intricate and complicated. But unlike math, life is a chaotic mess and cannot be approached logically or mathematically.  We do our best to make sense of it through conversation, books, art, and music, but there is no formula we can apply or proof we can use.  Life's moments of solution/resolution (love, joy, peace) have an incredible beauty, as do math problems when solved, but the path to solving life's problems are very different from the path used to solve math's problems.

Math is not only used as a plot device but also in how the book is presented.  It moves in numbered chapters that culminate in the eleventh chapter with the celebration of the eleventh birthday of the housekeeper's child on the eleventh day of September. But what is the importance of the number 11?  We are never told.  And what is the importance of the formula that the professor scribbles out in response to the sister-in-law's anger and that works to calm her suspicions of the housekeeper?  We're never told that either.  This novel is full of interesting and complicated relationships that start to feel like manipulations of the readers by the writer; she is playing with us, offering hinted-at secrets that are only decipherable through numbers, but the hints are never followed by solutions offered.  In the end, no truth is revealed and no final resolution offered.

The 80-minute memory span that the professor is burdened with provides another device for Ogawa to use, this time to explore the nature of friendship. The friendship between the housekeeper and the professor is certainly made more interesting given that each morning the friendship must be renewed: they have a chance each day to start fresh. That is both good and bad.

New beginnings and a chance to do something better is certainly a situation we've all craved at some time, and I loved when the housekeeper tells of how having such a person teach her math is perfect:  "Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the professor to explain until I finally got it."  For him, it was always the first time she'd asked the question.  The bad part of the limited memory span is that a friendship is based on shared experiences and understandings that build up over time: when there can be no accumulation of shared memories, can there be a friendship?

What the memory constraints do allow in the relationship between the professor and the housekeeper is a friendship free of purpose or motive.  It is a friendship of the moment, valuable only for the present comfort and companionship it brings.  There is also a certain amount of dependability in the relationship: the housekeeper always knows how the professor will greet her each morning, as well as where he spends his time every day, and how he will respond to the housekeeper's son.  He is always positive and receptive with the son.  Why? We never find out and this is yet another unanswered question in the book.

The final plot device in the book is the game of baseball: the professor loves baseball, as does the housekeeper's son.  The housekeeper grows to see the games almost as omens of both past and present and we tense with the possibility of finally getting some answers.  But the paragraphs about baseball, like the paragraphs about math and memory, tease and preen with possible solutions and in the end, offer nothing but tantalizing ideas.  There is much to think about in the book but the reader does all the thinking and all the growing, and the characters do none at all.

Ogawa's failure to bring her characters to a place of catharsis and truth does offer a certain ironic proof: that her writing is not like math.  The professor argues that math serves no purpose other than to seek truth: "The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world. Life isn't going to be any easier, nor is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers.  Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem. ...But those things aren't the goal of mathematics.  The only goal is to discover the truth."  Unfortunately, The Housekeeper and the Professor does not discover truth; it only offers devices for hiding it.

ABOUT NINA

From Oct. 28, 2008 to Oct. 28, 2009, Nina Sankovitch read one book a day and wrote about each book on her Web site. Her next project is to keep reviewing two to three books a week on Read All Day and she is writing a book blog for the Huffington Post. She's also working with HarperStudio  to write Tolstoy and The Purple Chair, a book about her year of magical reading, and about the power and pleasures of books.