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Harvard’s undergraduate pre-professional culture is infamous. Finance, consulting, and tech were the most popular industries for graduating seniors in 2024. Harvard founders — dropouts, alums, or even current students — occupy an outsized space in the start-up world. In short, careerism is intense here. Some pillar of the popular perception of Harvard, however, maintains the image of centuries-old, ivy-covered, red brick buildings in which philosophical discussions abound. “Notes on Infinity,” a debut novel by alum Austin E. Taylor ’21, mostly forgoes the sense of hallowed history to focus on an unmistakable depiction of today’s Harvard. It’s a version of the school most salient to many of its current students — one that is all discovery, money, and ambition.
“Notes on Infinity” depicts Harvard’s STEM world, with research at the Biological Labs and lectures at the Science Center giving way to conversations about renting an office by Moderna and Pfizer’s sites in Cambridge. After Zoe, a daughter of an MIT professor studying at Harvard, meets Jack, a brilliant and elusive classmate in her organic chemistry class, the duo make a scientific discovery with the potential to revolutionize the anti-aging market, catapulting themselves into the biotech start-up sphere.
“Notes on Infinity” is bound to be defined by its Harvard setting, which Taylor embraces. Local buildings, street names, and landmarks appear frequently. The familiarity with which Taylor paints the campus strives for physical realism, pulling in Harvard’s atmosphere of pressure and genius along the way. The result is rather accurate. It’s not rare for students to skip class or lose sleep to prioritize extracurriculars tantamount to jobs or sit down with investors decades older than them. All in all, Taylor’s portrait of Harvard is a pretty fresh addition to existing media about the school.
Taylor’s background in chemistry — which she graduated with a degree in, alongside English — has also clearly worked to her benefit, resulting in just the right balance of credibility, terminology, and accessibility in “Notes on Infinity.” The anti-aging research that she weaves into the plot is both clear and credible enough for this category of fiction, not incredibly strict about science but not unbelievable either. This successful balance of realism and approachability extends to Taylor’s depiction of start-ups and venture capital, with all their accompanying risk, reward, and media buzz. To its merit, the novel also paints a complex set of motives, commenting on the pressure of having successful family members, rejecting a set path in academia to prove one’s own intelligence, and facing sexism in the STEM and business world.
However, “Notes on Infinity” doesn’t always fulfill its potential in dealing with this last, essential theme. Sometimes unoriginal to the point of feeling shallow, Taylor’s portrait of sexism only peaks as the novel reaches its end, when she proves more than ever that Zoe and Jack have the counterbalancing and complicated backgrounds necessary to portray different shades of privilege and disadvantage with nuanced tension. Yet unfortunately, Jack’s background is fleshed out too little, too late — dealing a blow to the emotional appeal of the characters and their relationship.
Still, the novel is quite engaging, a well-paced blend of niche and accessible. Taylor’s writing is solid, deft at avoiding cheesy or clumsy sentences to contain its ambitious premise neatly. She is skilled at bringing out poeticism when it comes to vividly describing the rush that Zoe feels working on her project with Jack, a testament to the ephemerality of bright college years that — sprinkled throughout the narrative — thematically complements the pair’s high-risk mission of turning back the clock.
In spite of Taylor’s consistent thoughtfulness, however, no reader will buy Zoe and Jack’s idea. The start-up’s Theranos-esque promise and the protagonists’ youth lock in skepticism from page one. Tactics set up to counterbalance this sense of the start-up’s impending downfall — compelling characters, relationships, or motives that elicit hope against all odds — are only partially effective. Glimpses of the attraction beyond romance between Zoe and Jack or the dangerous allure of their vision are believable. But they might fail to ensnare reader investment because of the duo’s only weakly appealing connection, with Jack rather opaque and unsympathetic, in what is technically an unconventional romance.
Speaking of unconventional romance, “Notes on Infinity” will inevitably draw comparisons to — and fans of — the 2022 novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” penned by Gabrielle L. Zevin ’00 (Girl meets boy. Girl and boy create a company and shoot to fame together). Yet while Zevin — who’d written numerous novels before, to be fair — balanced literary writing with an exciting plot that kept both the relationship and career stakes high, Taylor must achieve more on both counts to join the ranks of “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” Taylor’s own high-stakes plot about struggles and successes in the tech world doesn’t come together so smoothly with her literary fiction writing style, leaving one wanting more unpredictability or originality. A general lack of strikingly original writing renders many scenes depicting low-impact choices or actions superfluous.
Still, Taylor has drawn from multiple areas of expertise to deliver something fresh in “Notes on Infinity,” a solid story of a biotech start-up cultivated in the petri dish of ambition that is Harvard. The debut author’s first results are promising, brimming with potential for a breakthrough. And for anyone curious about a side of Harvard less prominent in pop culture yet undeniably dominant in reality, Taylor brings something new and engaging to this particular corner of literature.
—Staff writer Isabelle A. Lu can be reached at isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @IsabelleALu.
