Austin Taylor’s debut novel Notes on Infinity arrives like a lightning strike—illuminating, dangerous, and impossible to ignore. Drawing from her own Harvard chemistry background, Taylor has crafted a devastating portrait of scientific ambition, moral compromise, and the intoxicating allure of playing God. This is a book that reads like a fever dream of Silicon Valley excess meets academic rigor, wrapped in prose that cuts like glass.
A Tale of Two Minds
The novel centers on Zoe Kyriakidis and Jack Leahy, two Harvard students whose discovery of a potential cure for aging catapults them from lab partners to startup founders to international pariahs. Zoe, the MIT professor’s daughter who has lived in her brilliant brother’s shadow, finds her voice through scientific discovery. Jack, escaping a background of poverty and violence in Maine, sees science as his ticket to a life worth living. Their partnership begins in organic chemistry class and evolves into something that defies easy categorization—part romantic tension, part intellectual communion, part mutual destruction.
Taylor’s characterization is ruthlessly precise. Zoe emerges as a complex protagonist whose perfectionism and hunger for recognition make her both sympathetic and frustrating. Her inability to see Jack’s data manipulation speaks to willful blindness rather than mere naivety—she wants to believe so desperately that she ignores warning signs. Jack, meanwhile, is portrayed with remarkable nuance for what could have been a simple villain. His desperation to escape his past and prove himself drives him to increasingly dangerous compromises, each seeming reasonable in isolation but catastrophic in aggregate.
The Anatomy of Deception
What elevates Notes on Infinity beyond a simple cautionary tale about startup culture is Taylor’s sophisticated exploration of how truth becomes malleable under pressure. The novel’s structure—divided into sections titled Genesis, Dogma, Manna, The Fall, Judgment, and The Raven—echoes both biblical and mythological frameworks, suggesting that this is as much about hubris and redemption as it is about biotech fraud.
Taylor’s scientific background shines in her portrayal of laboratory life. The endless cycles of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis feel authentic, as does the crushing weight of negative results. When Jack begins manipulating data, Taylor doesn’t present it as a sudden moral collapse but as a gradual erosion—first small adjustments to make promising results look more definitive, then increasingly bold fabrications to meet investor expectations.
The startup world is rendered with equal authenticity and disdain. The venture capitalists, media handlers, and business development executives who orbit Manna speak in the distinctive language of disruption and scale, treating human longevity as just another market to capture. Taylor captures the seductive power of this world—the magazine covers, the conference keynotes, the sense of being special—while never letting readers forget the human cost.
Literary Strengths and Stumbles
Taylor’s prose alternates between crystalline precision and lyrical flights that occasionally feel overwrought. At her best, she writes with the clinical observation of a scientist combined with the emotional intensity of someone who has lived through intellectual betrayal. Her depiction of Jack’s impoverished childhood in Maine is particularly powerful, rendered with specificity that avoids both sentimentality and exploitation.
Key strengths include:
- Authentic scientific detail that never overwhelms the narrative
- Complex moral terrain where characters make understandable but destructive choices
- Vivid sense of place, from Harvard’s ivy-covered labs to Kendall Square’s glass towers
- Emotional honesty about ambition, insecurity, and the desire for recognition
The novel occasionally struggles with pacing, particularly in the middle sections where the mechanics of raising venture capital sometimes overshadow character development. Some supporting characters, particularly Carter Gray (Zoe’s love interest and the company’s chief business officer), feel more like plot devices than fully realized people.
Themes of Mortality and Meaning
Beneath its surface narrative about scientific fraud, Notes on Infinity grapples with profound questions about mortality, meaning, and what it costs to transcend human limitations. The irony is crushing: in pursuing immortality, Jack and Zoe destroy their own lives with remarkable efficiency. Taylor uses their fall to examine how the promise of infinite time can blind us to the value of the present moment.
The novel’s treatment of class differences adds another layer of complexity. Jack’s desperation stems partly from having grown up with nothing, while Zoe’s ambition reflects the pressures of academic privilege. Their different relationships to risk and consequences reflect broader inequalities in who gets second chances and who faces lasting consequences for failure.
A Debut That Announces a Major Talent
Notes on Infinity marks Austin Taylor as a novelist to watch. While this is her first published novel, her background—Harvard chemistry and English degrees, work in science policy, experience as a public speaking coach—clearly informs the book’s authenticity. The novel reads like the work of someone who has inhabited both the scientific and literary worlds and can translate between them fluently.
Taylor joins a small but growing group of novelists examining the human cost of technological progress. Readers who appreciated Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House or Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life will find similar pleasures here, though Taylor’s scientific background allows her to dig deeper into the technical details that make or break revolutionary discoveries.
Similar Reads and Recommendations
For readers drawn to Notes on Infinity, several other novels explore similar themes of scientific ambition and moral compromise:
- The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin – examines how knowledge of our mortality shapes our choices
- The Power by Naomi Alderman – another novel about scientific discoveries that reshape human potential
- Lab Girl by Hope Jahren – for those interested in authentic portrayals of women in science
- Bad Blood by John Carreyrou – the non-fiction account of Theranos that clearly influenced Taylor’s fictional startup
- The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling – science fiction that similarly examines the cost of technological advancement
Final Verdict
Notes on Infinity succeeds as both a gripping thriller and a serious examination of scientific ethics in an age of venture capital excess. Taylor’s background allows her to write with authority about both the technical aspects of aging research and the cultural dynamics that can corrupt scientific inquiry. While the novel occasionally loses momentum in its middle sections, the powerful characterizations and moral complexity more than compensate.
This is a book that will leave readers thinking long after the final page, questioning not just the ethics of Jack’s deception but the broader systems that incentivize such behavior. In an era when the line between scientific progress and technological hype grows increasingly blurred, Notes on Infinity offers both warning and insight. Taylor has announced herself as a novelist capable of tackling the biggest questions of our technological age with both intellectual rigor and emotional honesty.
For readers seeking literary fiction that engages seriously with contemporary scientific and ethical dilemmas, Notes on Infinity represents a remarkable debut that promises even greater things to come from Austin Taylor.