Divide Me By Zero
Lara Vapnyar
Reviewed by Joy Clark
Tolstoy, Brodsky, math word problems that lead to orgasms, hyperbolic geometry, experimental braces, bedbugs, George Bush’s chicken thighs, caviar, immigration, the writing life, a loveless marriage, love emails, Orthodox Christianity, and school essays where the mother is the hero.
Such are the pleasures of Lara Vapnyar’s Divide Me By Zero, a smart and moving hybrid novel/memoir that explores the narrator’s relationship with her dying mother—a brilliant math teacher who immigrates with her from Russia to Brooklyn—alongside the narrator’s three love affairs with three very different men. Vapynar makes this odd conjunction work. She writes, “Back when I was seventeen, the only love that I had witnessed was the love between my parents, which was all-consuming and absolute, and I thought that it was only natural that my love [. . .] should be the same. What I didn’t know then was how quickly all-consuming and absolute can turn into obsessive, strip you of sanity . . .” She shows us how love, in any form, manifests in our lives as incomprehensible, without form or sense.
Vapnyar creates a form for this senselessness, using notes from her mother’s self-help math textbook. She pulls the reader into conversation with these themes using boxed-off asides, asking for comparison and empathy, offering life advice. It is this unique structure that makes Divide Me By Zero such a mesmerizing, intimate text, inviting every reader—no matter how affected by lost or broken love—to enjoy the mystery of the tangles and snarls, the absurdity of our relationships with one another.