MATH AND LIFE

DA NYTIMES

Father Did the Math; The Maid Solved Problems
By DWIGHT GARNER
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JENNIEMAE & JAMES

A Memoir in Black & White

By Brooke Newman

Illustrated. 306 pages. Harmony Books. $24.

James Newman (1907-1966) was the kind of bad father who makes for good reading. He was a mathematical genius, the man who popularized the terms “googol” and “googolplex” in a 1940 book, written with Edward Kasner, called “Mathematics and the Imagination.” (The notion of a googol provided the name for Google, the internet search behemoth.) His friends included Albert Einstein and I. F. Stone, and he was a noisy opponent of nuclear proliferation. During the McCarthy era his phones were often tapped, and G-men loitered on the stoop across from his house, watching.

Newman’s private life was bigger and more chaotic than his public one. Alternately manic and depressive, and sometimes suicidal, he was addicted to fast cars, bespoke suits, I. W. Harper bourbon, Chesterfield cigarettes, hard work and especially, women. As his daughter, Brooke Newman, recalls in her new memoir, “Jenniemae & James,” he had so many nubile lovers slipping in and out of the house during his marriage to her mother that “like the dogs that slept on the living-room rug, they were just there.”

Some of Newman’s women were live-in lovers, a situation that Ms. Newman’s mother, Ruth, his fourth wife, didn’t always seem to mind. (She played cards and Scrabble with a few of them.) But it was a house full of tilting emotions and brewing drama. “My parents didn’t fight like couples who have come to know each other well and understand the boundaries of the boxing ring,” Ms. Newman writes. “They fought like two people who were willing to take the bout into the streets.”

All this sounds like a delicious and ready-made memoir kit; just add boiling water, a stick of butter, and stir. The results might resemble “A Beautiful Mind” spiked with peppery flakes of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But Ms. Newman takes this recipe in a different direction. “Jenniemae & James” is instead a portrait of her father’s platonic friendship with this white family’s illiterate and overweight black maid, Jenniemae Harrington, a lively and big-hearted woman who had her own way with numbers. Ms. Harrington regularly played illegal lotteries, and she regularly won.

The book’s problems begin with the irrepressible Jenniemae Harrington, but they don’t end there. Ms. Harrington was hired to work for the Newman family in 1948, when she was in her mid-20s and Ms. Newman was 4. (The family’s previous maid was fired after nearly lighting the young Ms. Newman on fire.) She’d keep that job until her death in 1969. Because Ms. Newman’s mother, a clinical psychologist and writer, was often aloof, Ms. Harrington played a major role in her life. Ms. Newman clearly loved her. Ms. Harrington’s arrival, she writes, “was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us.”

James Newman become close to Ms. Harrington as well. They talked numbers. He installed a second telephone line for her in the family’s house in the Washington area, a rarity at the time. After Ms. Harrington was raped by a white bus driver (she kept the baby), he acted as her chauffeur and protector. They enjoyed each other’s company.

But Ms. Harrington comes only awkwardly to life in “Jenniemae & James.” She’s an abstraction. We learn her basic biographical information (born in 1923 near Hissop, Ala., one of 12 children), but it becomes clear that Ms. Newman didn’t investigate her life in any serious way, or if she did, that material is not on the page. This may be a memoir in “black and white,” but its portrait of one black woman’s life is composed almost entirely of generalities.

Ms. Harrington’s personality is sketched through a nonstop stream of her apt but folksy aphorisms that, because they’re nearly all she has to say, quickly become cloying: “When a man finds hisself under the water, he has got to kick to get to the top”; “The crow and the corn can’t grow in the same field, Mister James”; “Can’t tell a black snake which way to get to the hen’s nest — ’cause he knows.”

When she is allowed to speak at greater length, it doesn’t get any better. Her dialogue is pure high-fructose corn syrup: “We might not be around for all the tomorrows, but there is still one. Even if there is no us and even if there is no Earth, there is always such a thing as tomorrow.”

Ms. Harrington isn’t to blame. Ms. Newman, who was a child when most of the events in this book occurred, admits in an author’s note that “I was compelled at times to create what I believed was plausible and likely dialogue to bring the actual scenes to life.” The book reads like a novel, and not a good one.

James Newman is given wince-making lines too. (“Take care of every minute; otherwise hours slip away and days are lost.”) So is Ms. Newman’s mother. (“Hard times come in lots of different shapes and shades, don’t they?”) They speak like zombie Care Bears. Everything about “Jenniemae & James” is moist and listless, including its therapized tone, sloppy editing (egregious repetitions) and canned historical filler.

“Jenniemae & James” is filled with tantalizing details. James Newman, the son of Jewish immigrants, had an I.Q. of 175 and at 7 would stand on a soapbox in Times Square and perform mathematical tricks. Later he could play chess, blindfolded, against five simultaneous opponents. One of his secretaries killed herself by jumping off a bridge. (She may have been tangled in a lesbian affair, Ms. Newman writes.) There were rumors, Ms. Newman says, that her father had an affair with Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress turned Democratic congresswoman. Mr. Newman taunted the F.B.I. agents who tapped his phones by speaking in foreign languages.

There’s a good book in here somewhere. Maybe even a movie. I bet those guys at Google could afford to pay for it.