Michael's Reviews > The Housekeeper and the Professor

This tale charms us with the friendship that develops between a young housekeeper and her 12-year old son with an elderly recluse and former mathematics professor. Though he can’t retain new memories beyond 80 minutes, his 50-plus years of skills developed as a mathematician prior to the accident and brain damage that disabled him are still accessible to him. These skills he creatively puts to use each day trying to figure out and live in whatever social world of people falls his way as if anew. The “Housekeeper” (the only name we have for our narrator) learns how to promote continuity with the self-absorbed and fragile octogenarian by pinning to his shirt to see each morning a drawing of herself and a square-root symbol for her son (who becomes “Root” because of his flat head). It felt brilliant how Ogawa’s three characters formed a fruitful virtual family despite all the challenges of the old man’s memory problems.

The Professor has outlived any friends and family he might have had, and his one limited family member is a daughter-in-law who provides his apartment and hires housekeepers told to handle all problems themselves. Thus, the Housekeeper understands how she is his only human connection, and her kind nature leads her open whatever doors to his heart can be opened. His main occupation during the day is solving math puzzles posed by certain journals, a task that can build each day on his own written proofs and series of equations from the day before. His use of math as a timeless way to query and grasp the world becomes quite a revelation to her. She even gets inspired enough to work on math puzzles herself during pauses in her day, driven by the sense of wonderful truths about reality are there to be discovered.

The reader needs no facility with math to appreciate the hold of mathematical thinking on the characters (i.e. as was true of “The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime” and “The Beautiful Mind”). For example, The Professor likes to ask the Housekeeper what her birthday is or some other quantity question and then identify amazing mathematical properties of the number, such as it being a “Perfect Number” (one equal to the sum of its factors) or a special kind of Prime number (one that has no factors but one and itself). The Professor takes special pleasure in treating her son to tales of the wonders of numbers, such as the weird features of Imaginary numbers (one based on the square root of a negative number). The Housekeeper breaks the rules of her agency by bringing Root to her job each day after his school, as the pleasures of her son’s bond with the Professor clearly enhances the quality of both their lives. The fatherless boy gets beneficent wisdom from an adult stand-in and learns the empathetic ability to protect him from the pain of learning out of synch his memories are with the present world. For example, they share the common pleasures of a favorite baseball team’s successes, but Root makes up a story for why the Professor’s hero of the 50s is not in the games they share.

A read of this book provides some of the same rewards of cross-generational friendships and collisions of the serious and the comic that are common in the work of Fred Backman. On top of the fuzzy warmth of experiencing the breaking down of barriers between people, this novel adds an artful layer of mathematics played out as a language that can mediate the kind of human connections and framework for reality that all of us need to fully live in this lonely life.

As a sample of the frequent zest of math applied to life, here the Housekeeper is tending the Professor when he is sick and she is realizing how fragile he is:
I remembered something the Professor told me, something a mathematician with a difficult name once said: “Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.” The Professor’s body had been consumed by the devil of mathematics.