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The truth was, Ray hadn’t played ping-pong in years. Not after Stanford Table Tennis Club. Not after it turned out that the level of play he faced at home was an unreliable test of his ability with a paddle, and that the number of players who could render him a sniveling idiot in uniform-mandated s…

His sentimentality, his flawed decision-making—all his problems were rooted in his past. There was no escaping them. They were in these bookshelves, and in the way he’d been raised. Yes, he made mistakes. Just that morning, after two weeks of failed reasoning, he had finally told his parents he wou…

He hadn’t been lying at dinner: it was true, his own personal results, however losing, had not been bad, and qualified as what mathematicians called a “statistical tie.” But that didn’t fool him. He had been there, sitting in a room where technicians who could have easily been classmates of his at …

[...] Unable to shake the residual sentimentality of his weeks at home, he decided to allow himself a frank assessment of his thoughts and, well, feelings on the subject of his father’s deteriorating health. Ray did not consider himself a cold person, immune to human emotion. He was just by nature …

The days leading up to Thanksgiving became an elaborate game of domestic chess. Ray’s king, who only wanted to castle short and mind his own business in a corner, was assailed by opposing forces from both flanks. His father, a short, thin, gray-haired man whose face had developed a kind of puffines…