[.ca] Leaning Towards Infinity (ISBN 0704346583)

From Amazon.com:
Sue Woolfe's biography states that she knows nothing about mathematics. With the central event of her novel set in 1994, she ought to have had a fairly easy job of finding out how math is done and discussed nowadays, and who does it and why. However, Woolfe's determination to humiliate her main character, middle-aged prodigy Frances Montrose, with the scorn of a unanimously badly behaved, testosterone-driven male mathematical establishment leads to her to untruth, fatally undermining the premise and effect of her novel. Deliberately demonizing men as mates and as mathematicians is sexism of the worst kind. The multigenerational familial dissonance and harmony of this book, its redeeming features, are lost in Woolfe's caricaturing of men and women and a science she does not understand.

Infinite reading:
I wanted this book to continue. I loved it. I read it about the same time as some other books ...Hanna's Daughters was one, and I thought it had every bit as much to say about mother-daughter relationships. Also 'Gut Symmetries' by Janette Winterson, which I did not like...this had more to say about the mathematical woman genius. It makes the point rendered over and over by Dale Spencer in 'Women of Ideas and What Men have Done To Them' but in a fictionalised account, well plotted and without the hyperbole to which Spender is prone. Woolfe is a good writer, and her use of language approaches the delights of Arundhati Roy in God of mall Things (but never surpasses).

Demanding, rewarding, stunning:
A demanding, but very rewarding exploration of the destructiveness of unrecognised genius, through the lives of three generations of women. The mother is on the verge of discovering a new form of mathematics, but is driven mad by social isolation and betrayal. The narrator, her daughter, attempts to piece together her work. Meanwhile, her daughter is trying to get her attention ... A stunning novel.

Beautiful piece of writing:
I loved it. Beautiful piece of prose. Funny, sad - some of the relationships heart-wrenchingly so. Haunted me for a long while after. I think Carol Shields fans would like it.