Simple scientific laws are preferred, then, because, if they fit or fully explain the data, they’re more likely to be the source of it. With more knobs to tweak, arbitrarily complex models such as Ptolemy’s astronomical system could be made to fit any dataset. As the mathematician John von Neumann once quipped: ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk’.
Had he retired 40 years ago, after his Karla trilogy (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People”) was completed in 1979, he would have been regarded as one of our greatest spy novelists. After “A Perfect Spy” (1986), he was often considered one of the finest novelists, period, since World War II. It’s not that he “transcended the genre,” as the tired saying goes; it’s that he elevated the level of play. The great Graham Greene didn’t quite take his own spy novels seriously, labeling them “entertainments,” but le Carré revamped the genre to fit his considerable ambitions. “Out of the secret world I once knew,” he wrote, “I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit.”
In The Magician, Colm Tóibín reimagines what it cost Thomas Mann to sustain his writing life after fleeing Germany in the early 1930s. Mann shuttled for a time between France and Switzerland, then escaped the continent altogether for Princeton before resettling in Pacific Palisades, where he built the house that still bears his name.
Friedrich Schiller called Joy the spark of divinity
but she visits me on a regular basis,