Rating: 3/5, average
My brother’s been bugging me to read this for a long time and I haven’t been too interested, but he came and visited and started reading it at my house so I thought “what the hell” and picked it up after he left.
The front cover looks tasty but doesn’t tell much about the contents of the book.
The back cover reads:
“The doughnut is a thing of beauty.
A circle of fried doughy perfection.
A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps.
For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.
Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he’s unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn’t have any money.
Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.
By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.
This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny — and a doughnut.”
The plot is pretty convoluted. We join Theo, a disgraced scientist, as he’s trying to recover the shambles of his life after a miscalculation he makes causes a giant explosion. His most recent ex-wife Amanda (he had three previous wives, Amanda was his fourth) left him, we’re told because people were whispering about her “there goes the woman whose husband blew up the VVLHC.”
I suppose she couldn’t handle that… he also implies that she’s greedy because she received a large amount of assets in the divorce but was still mad she didn’t get more. This seemed a bit misogynistic to me because I can’t imagine a woman leaving a man she truly loved because he’s suddenly infamous. Especially if what he did was a mistake… well, maybe if it killed people. But it sounds like it didn’t, because he says the scientists he worked with were mad at him because they were out of work, which means they’re alive, so it sounds like no one died.
Theo has a lot of toxic relationships, but he has no sense of introspection about his role in them. The people around him are all terrible to the point where it strains belief. He doesn’t seem to have any self-reflection, only self-pity. I did start to actually pity him about halfway through the book as I learned what the other characters did to him, which made it a bit more tolerable for me because I could see where he was coming from, but I still couldn’t quite believe that one semi-decent person could be surrounded by nothing but selfish people.
The negative depiction of his ex-wives as greedy, status-conscious, and fickle and the wallowing in self-pity got me off on the wrong foot with this book, but I started to get more interested as the plot started picking up around page 50. Unfortunately, I can’t really go into detail because it’s all spoilers, but it’s mostly about hopping between custom multiverses while searching for lost relatives.
The humor was a bit hit-or-miss for me.
Hit:
“Blood is thicker than water; it’s also sticky, messy and frequently a sign that things aren’t going too well.”
Miss:
“He froze for a second, hedgehog-in-headlights fashion, then smiled and said, “Hi.”
“Sweet dreams,” Matasuntha said, and the woman he didn’t know gave him what, if a smile was a sandwich, would have been the filling.”
Those lines are from the same scene… maybe the point was that he was nervous and crushing on Matasuntha? They seem a bit too nonsensical, though. I just stared at them for a couple seconds and was like “okay.”
“Wizard.” He had to ask, but he already knew, with the resigned foreboding of an infant at the font who knows that his three older brothers are called John, Paul, and George, what the answer would be.”
I think the humor gets better as it goes along, but it was pretty rough at the beginning. The writing got smoother as it went, too. At the beginning I was struggling to get through pages, but they passed.
Reading Doughnut feels like going on a road trip in a 1920’s car, puttering along as the driver takes a very circuitous route and then at the end it suddenly grows wings and flies but then gets lost in white fluffy clouds.
I liked how the end connected back to the beginning and explained things pretty well, but I’m not exactly sure what happened with Matasuntha (I would say more, but spoilers).
I think it would be interesting to compare this with Cat’s Cradle. They have a few things in common: science causing disasters, religious themes (talk about G-d). The family structure is similar, with eldest brother, middle sister, youngest brother (and Pieter acts as a father figure). Max and Frank are kind of similar—both are irresponsible jerks, but Max is suave and Frank is more retiring. Janine and Angela are both a little crazy. Newt and Theo, the youngest boys, are the most normal of their families. Pieter and Dr. Hoenikker both obsess over science to the exclusion of the people around them.
Family is a big theme in Doughnut: the message I got was “even if you hate them, you would do anything to prevent something from happening to them,” which is fair. I mean, depending on your family dynamics… every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Also, men will literally blow up the universe before going to therapy.
This could be an enjoyable read if you’re a quick reader (unfortunately, this took me a couple weeks to get through…). If you’re slow, it’ll hook you just barely enough not to quit for hope it’ll get better (not unlike some of the toxic relationships depicted… lol).
I would not really recommend this one, but I’m glad I finished it because it did have some interesting parts. It’s not a bad book or badly written, it just didn’t have much to offer me personally as it seems geared toward a more masculine demographic.
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