What ballet is to football players, mathematics is to writers, a discipline so beguiling and foreign, so close to a taboo, that it actually attracts a few intrepid souls by virtue of its impregnability. The few writers who have ventured headlong into high-level mathematics—Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace—have been among our most inventive in both the sentences they construct and the stories they create.
Presently, we have become too enthralled by the notion of literature as Jackson Pollock action painting, the id flung with violence upon the canvas. The most lasting fiction has both the supremely balanced palette of Rothko and the grandeur of his themes. All this may seem like I am urging for a literature that is cold and scientific, subjecting itself to the rigors of an alien discipline. That isn’t so. I am pleading, instead, that fiction think more deeply and determinedly about how it is to be composed and what it is to say—that is the best gift mathematics could give us.