"FOR LAST YEAR'S words belong to last year's language," T.S. Eliot wrote, "and next year's words await another voice." It would be hard to find a more apt description of Joshua Cohen and his brilliantly exhausting fourth novel, "Book of Numbers." On its surface, the book is about a struggling New York novelist hired as an Internet billionaire's ghostwriter - but its breadth, the ambition of its ideas and devices, confounds standard book review responses. Trying to approach this demanding, overstuffed novel is a bit like hyperlinking one's way around the Internet: It's bigger, wilder and fuller than you imagined, and there's always more where that came from. "Book of Numbers" is a thematic and stylistic continuation of "Four New Messages," Cohen's story collection dealing with the vagaries of life in the Internet era. Readers of his previous work will recognize his antic, breakneck excesses; even his short stories overflow. Cohen makes no bones about his impatience with conventional narrative - he, or rather his fictional stand-in (also named Joshua Cohen), announces his disdain for the dusty tropes of the novel on the first page: "There's nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is." Unsurprisingly, on those counts, "Book of Numbers" is sometimes a hot mess. But then there's the language. The voices that crowd the novel can easily be misread as merely mischievous or opaque. Yet it is more rewarding to approach Cohen's sentences as a wild music, an aural manifestation of Internet traffic. This novel deals in many narrative modes - interview transcripts, emails, blog posts, book drafts replete with strikeouts - and is rich with clever neologisms. Cohen takes obvious delight bending the language as far as it will go. Sometimes it breaks, but these are noble failures. Comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace have become de rigueur when discussing Cohen's work, but there's also a trace of Saul Bellow's stylistic exuberance in these pages. For example, here's Principal, the reclusive Internet overlord whose memoir the fictional Cohen has been hired to ghost-write, on his Palo Alto youth (the "we" is he - one of Principal's tics is to refer to himself in the plural): "We felt more as like hardware, mauve, taupe, beige, boxcolored, putting in an intense amount of interior hot effort only so that our exterior, our skin, would appear jointless, seamless, cold. We felt more as like software, writable, rewritable, if not compatible, we would adapt. Point is, we had secrets, we hid. Our rebellion thing was that we were aware of it, our compatibility or adaptability thing was that we worked through that awareness, though both impulses might be genetic and if so in regard to work ethic it could be cur to examine dopamine levels in the striatum of the brain, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior insula." This paragraph is indicative of all that is best and worst in Cohen's style. There are the twitchy idiosyncrasies ("We," "as like," "Point is") that grate even as they bring Principal to vivid life; the apt hardware/software metaphor to convey the inward and outward states of adolescence, invoking the jointless, seamless cool of so much tech gear; the self-awareness, the intimate confession of secrets; and then it shatters against a list of ugly, neurological jargon. Your interest in "Book of Numbers" will depend on your enthusiasm for passages like these. Without the prose fireworks, however, "Book of Numbers" is a conventional piece of storytelling (Cohen is better with ideas than plot), a reminder that vital language can't do the job by itself. The fictional Cohen's first novel failed in the wake of 9/11: "My book was destroyed," he laments. His wife has left him for an actor when he is hired by the Steve Jobs-ian Principal - whose real name, as fate would have it, is also Joshua Cohen. Principal is one of the founders of the multinational behemoth Tetration.com, a thinly veiled Google stand-in. What follows is a globe-trotting series of interviews, ranging from Dubai (a newly fashionable destination for novelists) to Paris to London and Berlin. The travels take place under the cover of local business, but in fact, Principal is on the move, trying to get his story told before the sinister forces arrayed against him intervene. These sinister forces include his own employee Kor Dienerowitz, an amoral executive forced on him by the money people; and Thor Ang Balk, a Julian Assange type who runs a site for leaked documents. Principal's big reveal, however, feels rather anticlimactic in the post-Snowden era. Cohen the character (the other is always Principal) can be an arch scold, and his share of the tale weighs down "Book of Numbers." This might be the moment to declare a binding moratorium on New York novelists writing novels that feature New York novelists. The too-many pages devoted to agents, publishing deals, lunches, literary rivalries and the Frankfurt Book Fair (Adorno, anyone?) can be numbing. Yet the rich and substantial middle section, which combines Principal telling his story with Cohen's hapless attempts to write it, realizes the promise of "Book of Numbers." Nothing less than the 40 years of the modern computing age are synthesized. It's here that Cohen's unruly style best serves the novel, where the very consciousness of the Internet, the joining of all worlds, is suggested by Principal's oracular insistence on the first person plural. It's a familiar enough story to anyone who has ever read a copy of Wired magazine - plucky start-ups, spit and chicken wire leading to untold fortunes - but Cohen beautifully takes us back through the early days when it was all new, when search engines were populated manually, at once brute force and bespoke. The early hand cataloging of websites performed by Tetration interns brings to mind the censuses that dominate the early chapters of another Book of Numbers - the fourth and strangest book of the Pentateuch, which concerns the 40 years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert. IN CONTRAST WITH Principal's vividness, "Book of Numbers" fails most conspicuously in its depiction of its female characters. They are lifeless creations, especially the two central women: Rachel, the hectoring, soon-to-be ex-wife who publishes a familiar litany of male failings on her blog; and idealized Izdihar, the battered Arab bride with whom Cohen has an improbable and unpersuasive obsession. And, of course, there's a Jewish mother. (There's always a Jewish mother.) They are types; they serve purposes, move on and are forgotten. The remaining women are mostly assistants, servile and weepy. As God tests the endurance and faith of the Israelites, Cohen will test the commitment of his readers. "Book of Numbers" contains disquisitions on Hinduism, Buddhism, primitive art, binary code, Gulfstream jets, firewalls, Russian prostitutes, daggers, shopping, pornography websites, the draft, punch cards, the census - and that's a small sampling. Cohen has bristled at characterizations of "Witz," his prior 800-page novel, as a Jewish "Ulysses." But the comparison is instructive here. In absorbing the full cacophony of the broadband era and displaying less interest in physical place than head space, "Book of Numbers" can be read as a digital-age "Ulysses." (Cohen invites the parallel with Rachel's long, underpunctuated blog posts summoning the spirit of Molly Bloom.) It's notable that most everyone 20 years or older dies before the end of the biblical Book of Numbers; the tale is directed at the next generation to enter Israel. At times, "Book of Numbers" can feel too insistently young, as though Cohen is speaking only to those beside and behind him. For an older generation that remembers the elegant simplicity of Pong, "Book of Numbers" may feel like a long trek through the desert. Still, the dominant theme of searching is a resonant one for all ages. "He who insists on having the end before the beginning will still only have the beginning," Principal reminds us. And as Cohen himself observed in The London Review of Books, "if German poetry was able to survive the German-language press (and two wars, and communism), the odds are that American fiction will survive Google." Equally, odds are that Joshua Cohen will be one of its prophets. MARK SARVAS'S second novel, "Memento Park," will be published next year.

Language is paramount in Cohen's work. His last novel, Witz, was a linguistically dexterous work spanning more than 800 pages. Two-page sentences spiked with shards of scattered verses invited the reader into the deep psyche of his characters. Here, the author pens a syntactically enticing narrative of technology. The main character, Joshua Cohen, is an unsuccessful novelist who makes a living as a ghostwriter. He has written everything from PhD dissertations to conference presentations for academics. However, when he is contacted by the CEO of Tetration, one of the world's most successful tech firms, to ghostwrite his memoir, Cohen's life transforms from the mundane to the electrifying. What starts as just another freelance job ends in an investigation of the technologies that mediate our collective fears and desires. Delving deep into the semantic web of our networked lives, Cohen pushes the reader into the wasteland of our abbreviated vocabulary, one SQL (structured query language) at a time. VERDICT Much like Cohen's previous work, this densely packed narrative will appeal to readers with an appreciation for experimental fiction and the ever-expanding limits of language.-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Like Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Eggers's The Circle, Cohen's (Witz) latest is an ambitious and inspired attempt at the Great American Internet Novel. The narrator, Joshua Cohen, is a struggling writer whose debut effort was inauspiciously launched on Sept. 10, 2001. Deciding to "earn better money... at the expense of identity," he agrees to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen, referred to as "Principal." Principal is the secretive founder of Tetration, a tech company that has developed a revolutionary search engine and seeks to "equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves." Speaking to his ghostwriter in the first-person plural he leisurely relates the genesis and evolution of Tetration while sprinkling in a mixture of ominous epigrams ("All who read us are read,"), mystical musings, and "techsperanto," the language of Silicon Valley. But Principal has another motive in sharing his story, one which forces his biographer to go into hiding, and offline, to complete his task. The novel maps the recent history of the Internet onto one of Western culture's oldest stories, the plague-filled wanderings of Moses and his fractious band of Israelites journeying toward the Promised Land. This allegorical element imposes just enough order on a saga as sprawling and unruly as the Web. A dense, thrilling, and occasionally perplexing work, Cohen's encyclopedic epic is about many things-language, art, divinity, narrative, desire, global politics, surveillance, consumerism, genealogy-but it is above all a standout novel about the Internet, humanity's "first mutual culture," in which our identities are increasingly defined by a series of ones and zeroes. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A writer's effort to prepare a biography of a Google-like company's founder sits at the core of this smart, choppy novel that's trying to take on technology, creativity, and much else. In a couple hundred pages fewer than 2010's mammoth Witz, Cohen (Four New Messages, 2012, etc.) presents a writer named Joshua Cohen whose last novel fared poorly because it came out on Sept. 11, 2001. Ten years later, the fictional writer is offered the job of writing "the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I'm always mistaken for," the "genius googolionaire" creator of the Internet-search firm Tetration.com. Long stretches rich in high-tech lingo entail the Web genius describing his growing up, how the company got going, and how success affected the initial team, particularly the enigmatic Moe, who made searching profitable and then disappeared. The villainwhose complicity with the government raises echoes of Edward Snowden and Julian Assangeis the unsubtly named Tetration president, Kori Dienerowitz (with the likely laugh that the real writer may have made little dinero on Witz). The first fictional Cohen's rocky marriage allows for fun pokes at bad blogs (his wife's) and sloppy emails (her boyfriend's). The real Cohen riffs impressively on countless Web-related matters, from chaos to code to venture capital to Y2K and the woes of single-minded work: "we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitiscircadian rhythm disorder, tendonitis." The corollary for common readers could be frustration at the flood of tech terms, shorthand, and slang. It's comparable on both counts to William Gaddis' comic dissection of postwar finance in JR. Like Gaddis, Cohen also recognizes the laughs and peril at this technologically challenging stage of the human comedy and its new questions about what people are searching for, how the results may affect them, and what it all may cost. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.