A debut novel about Helen, a graduate student who follows her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbour to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience and marriage. Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation, a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity which could perhaps save the planet. When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn, should she give ump on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?

Helen’s mother died when she was a girl, she lost herself in maths and has never really emerged from the safe world of problems that can be solved by equations. Put the right numbers to the programme, and you’ll get the result you need. Her supervisor Perry Smoot got his Nobel prize for a theoretical model for superconductivity; If Helen sticks with him, she might win her own. 

When Perry is forced out of his University thanks to a relationship with a graduate student, she agree to go with him to the Robin Institute, a private institution just across the water from Yale. Pinched a bottom> Bullied a colleague? The Rubin Institute known for drily by all as RIP will take you in. Its  billionaire founder has made a home for the brilliant and disgraced those who gifts would otherwise be lost thanks to what has come to be called home for the brilliant and disgraced. “Here there is no code of conduct, no Human Resources, only your work”.

Alongside Smoot on faculty is the. Novelist Leopold Lens, a notorious womaniser who bears a teasing resemblance to Philip Roth, plus other usual suspects, “ There was the winner of the Bancroft Prize who had, as department chair while drunk, felt up an untenured professor, There was Blackface Metzger, and over there, of course, that’s R. Kelly.”

Helen is married, in a sort of halfhearted way, to Hew, their union effected in order for them to share graduate housing. “ The condition was unstable, evading description.

This novel is certainly an entertaining and stylish tale, which grasps the nettle of cancel culture and refuses to flinch. It come garlanded with the usual accolades like Razor sharp, Crisp intelligence, Unabashedly precise and in many ways the praise is merited.

In the wake of the resignation of Claudine Gay and Liz Magill. Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania respectively, in the midst of an ongoing furore about what, precisely, “cancel culture” is and what it means for students, teachers and all of us. 

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto, Picador £16.99, 304 pages