Notes on Infinity was described as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow meets Bad Blood, and I really see why. Usually the “x plus y” logline means which genre(s) the book is, or maybe it has some elements of another, but in this case, seriously, those two together make a perfect description.

In Notes on Infinity, Zoe and Jack are Harvard students when they meet, and start collaborating on a way to increase the human lifespan. There’s a description of the science, but you can skim and just think of cells living longer. Like in a hard scifi, I want to know a bit of what they’re doing (is it blood tests? DNA replication?) to picture the lab, but I don’t really care how close it is to reality. They drop out for a start-up to research this concept, and it’s all the start-up excitement and risk, with the added intensity because their discovery might change human lifespans and change the world. 

Zoe is the daughter of academics, but that doesn’t mean things are easy for her. She knows some of the system already. There’s a moment when she says that obviously a college student’s sophomore year  summer internship is when you start your career, making connections and positioning for after graduation. It was such a good moment that highlights the difference between her and and classmates who might think that summer break is for working a retail job to save up or for resting or visiting family. They both got into a good school, but one will come out ahead.  The book is very good at highlighting these invisible structures. 

The whole novel is third person, but there’s a perspective shift from Zoe to Jack later on. This slowed the story for me and seriously, I just did not care about Jack. It’s very early-20s, when after being a egotistical dick for most of the book, we hear his tragic backstory. But I’m not early-20s and simply did not care about why he acted like a dick. 

I deeply enjoyed the first three-quarters or so of Notes on Infinity  I read this in a Celadon readalong, and several of us in our group chat had to know what happened next, and we couldn’t stick to the readalong schedule. But as other readers have noticed, the last section of the novel is weaker. I don’t know if it tried to take on too much or what. Without a spoiler, there’s a shift when it stops being about the startup and I lost some interest there.  It’s not a bad last act, just not the same pageturning intensity. 

I also found less of an emotional punch towards the end in Zoe realizing that she had been pushed out of the lab and into biz dev. Maybe this is another moment that was weaker for me because I’m not early-twenties so some of the characters’ young adult moments didn’t resonate that way they might with younger readers.  I felt like the rest of the book made interesting observations on youth, talent, money, and life, so I was a bit disappointed by Zoe’s discovery that even with a scientific background with a cutting edge start-up, the unimpressive and boring work falls to the woman. Zoe talking up the company in interviews is just the next generation of her mom hosting academic dinners, and Zoe’s kinda the last one to see it. 

Overall, I enjoyed reading this one and I especially enjoyed chatting with the other readers in my group to hear their thoughts!