Catherine Chung's (Forgotten Country) novel The Tenth Muse champions female intellectual independence while uncovering sacrifices made to acquire it. Episodic chapters allow Katherine, a celebrated mathematician, to organize her memories, which she says have "never seemed very straightforward to me."
Katherine's early life is fraught, and her loving but distant mother ultimately abandons the family. Escaping a tense home and proving herself in a university mathematics program--unusual for women in the 1950s--becomes her raison d'être. She remembers wanting to "ground myself in science, with its fixed rules that never changed and never lied." Her genius for mathematics is apparent, even as her place in the program isn't: "I was always watched, as a symbol of something--an outsider who'd somehow made it in." Throughout her life, Katherine's friends and lovers take advantage of her talents, causing extraordinary personal and professional loss. Yet she reflects that she's proof that mathematics--"the divine language"--is not the provenance of the "world of men" only.
The titular 10th muse was Zeus's youngest daughter, who sang her own songs, not those of men, and whose transfiguration into a mortal was her punishment. Women in the sciences who also charted their own course, independent of men, encourage Katherine throughout her life. Even readers who don't recall their own math classes will get the mathematical references woven seamlessly into Katherine's emotional memories. "Numbers blink in and out, glowing like fairy lights." Readers who enjoyed The Only Woman in the Room will appreciate this intelligent novel. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.