Four the Hard Way

The book was hardly a hit. Even in an age when circulation was used to calibrate chart position, it barely bubbled under.

Published in 1499 by a noted Venetian, Aldus Manatius, and penned by nobody-knows, even its fans admit it's but "an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel, a dissertation on everything from architecture to zoology, written in a style even a tortoise would find slow." As if that were not enough: "Rabelais made fun of it. [And] Castiglione warned Renaissance men not to speak like [its hero] when wooing women."

The book was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili-literally, —"Poliphilo's Struggle for Love in a Dream."—A work so dense "it makes Proust literally look like Hemingway."

No, evidently not the kinda book that becomes a blockbuster.

The Rule of FourBut myth meets more than a marketeer's eye, and legend sometimes treads where only cartographers look, together they form the sights of which epics are made. So it makes great good sense that Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason would take that dusty ol' tome and make of it a vision quest called The Rule of Four (The Dial Press $24).

Bring things up to millennial-end Princeton, a full 500 years after the Hypnerotomachia made its invisible mark. Hard to believe but some still stand mad beneath the book's shadow. Namely Tom, the son of a bibliomaniac who never could crack the book's code, and Paul, the gifted orphan who's bound to the book well beyond compulsion or disorder. Add Charlie, an "Othello on steroids," and Gil (nee Preston Gilmore Rankin), the silver-spoonfed scion of all blood that's blue, and you've got The Rule of Four's core quartet.

Conversely, there's another much less fab foursome: the "fat and shabby" basement-based scholar Vincent Taft ("a mercurial creature, hard to know and harder to love"); gallery owner cum auction house head Richard Curry ("a man of possibilities rather than facts"); the aforementioned dad to Tom, Patrick Sullivan, now but a ghost driven dead by the quest; and Bill Stein, the greasy grad student who's grunting for Paul so that he might reap the thesis that hermetically reveals the secrets hidden in the Hypnerotomachia.

And far above and behind everything is the book's once-anonymous author, "a man who [not only] embraced the language of violence," he rewrote it into arcana, then left it as a legacy.

Onward from The Belladonna Document ("the story of a simple Roman mason who slew the messengers at San Lorenzo"), it's a deliciously deadly legacy. And while what's to come may pale in comparison to Pope Paul II's crushing of the abbreviates (a clue), and it might lack the impact of the "horns" on the head of Moses (another), rest assured that what's to come has it coming. Bad. And Good. Beneath the morass, through cipher and riddle and embedded acrostic, there lurks truth. And it is toward that truth that each gets driven. Hard.

Or is it? Could all the hullabaloo over some old book really be about nothing more than some convoluted Gnostic glory? Of course not. The tenure tracks on some unwitting backs scar one reason; "the delicious futility of impossible tasks" hint at another. Then there's what may come from the actual Rule of Four, "a device that would lead readers to [the author's] secret crypt." A crypt, I might add, that could contain many Renaissance spoils.

Yes, even to geniuses, polymaths, autodidacts and philosophers, loot might explain everything.

To make it simple: Let The Wonder Boys swing from Foucault's Pendulum, put some Ivy League Hardys In The Hand of Dante, set the proceedings on a campus where The Rules of Attraction hardly apply but breaking The Da Vinci Code most certainly does, and you might come close to The Rule of Four. Helm it with two young guns who've a penchant for brainy bibliomancy and you'll come even closer.

Easy outs aside, more than anything, The Rule of Four is a book by and about people who are struck by the history of ideas, that mystery leaves them struck smart only makes the endeavor that much more compelling. After all, in the wrong hands even the biggest ideas can become dry and lifeless. Not so here. Caldwell and Thomason, by steeping their sleuthing in the hallowed hum of cognition, have concocted a tale that even Hermes could dig-enlightened, enthralling and entertaining. Thrice great indeed.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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