Review of “ROTH ” by Jonas Romano Weiss

Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

Do you ever feel like you're surrounded by idiots?
Do you ever wonder if low-IQ, moronic, and stupid people are the root of the world's problems?
It's hard being the smartest person in every room and knowing that you have few intellectual equals.
It's lonely at the top.

Who can you love? Who do you compete against? Where do you work? What do you do?

This is the vibe of ROTH by Jonas Romano Weiss!

ROTH is a delicately-woven, pseudo-biographical, existentialist novel that follows the titular Felix Amadeo Roth, a prodigy blessed with a higher-than-average IQ (which peaks at over 160) and the unique ability to fix almost anything. However, that comes at the expense of some of his normalcy and humanity

Felix Roth is really the reason we love this book so much. Throw away the plot. Throw away the other characters. Throw everything else away. You could even throw away the philosophical, existential musings and the weird supernatural/science-fiction/mind-tripping stuff that happens about 3/4ths of the way through. This book is so great because of ONE DUDE and ONE DUDE ONLY: Felix.

This is the Felix Roth show, and we are just privileged to be witnessing it!

So, what makes Felix such a compelling character? Well, how about this comparison to help wrap your mind around it: he's basically an amalgamation of the cast of The Big Bang Theory (especially Sheldon Cooper) and Sylar from Heroes (minus the murderous, homicidal bits).

Like Sheldon and Sylar, he is alienated from the grand majority of society due to his great intellectual gifts and the way he views the world and those around him as inferior and lesser than himself. Some of the ways he describes people are hilarious and amusing (and sometimes concerning). Here are a few of our favorite examples:

* “...he had to teach the executive team of baboons”

* Felix describes his peers at university as having "limited intelligence" and states he “didn’t see any value in them”

* Felix points out the flaws in his teacher's argument. Rather than admitting fault and saying she was wrong, the teacher deflects and tries to accuse Felix of being a “contrarian” and being disobedient and disrespectful. Felix's parents conclude that she's just wrong “and too stupid to realize it.” (Yes, this isn't a Felix-specific example, but it was too amusing not to note)

However, Felix's most intense, vile, and passionate descriptions of condescension are saved for one of the book's main villains/antagonists, Chadwick (full-name Tomi Gómez Chadwick), Felix's colleague who embodies everything Felix hates about society: mediocrity, incompetence, stupidity, and ineptitude being rewarded due to the mediocrity and low standards of the environment. Here are some of the amazing insults that Felix comes up with for Chadwick:

* The “Mozart of Mediocrity”

* "...a monumental idiot, an incompetent, a living embodiment of ineptitude."

* Like “putting a parachute on a submarine”

* An “intellectual void”

* "Comparing Chadwick to a lobotomized ape was, in Felix’s opinion, insulting to the apes. At least they had the excuse of being another species."

* "To Felix, Chadwick was not just an idiot; he was the master of ceremonies in the grand parade of incompetence, a virtuoso of vacuity, a pioneer in the art of the useless."

* "In the vast Amazon of incapacity, Chadwick was an anaconda of ineptitude, suffocating and swallowing any hint of common sense that ventured too close to his horizon."

Oh, yeah, and Chadwick also puts the corporation in a bad situation with the help of an embezzlement scandal, then attempts to steal credit for six months of positive work that Felix makes toward repairing the situation (and save the company). Anyway, all of this “plot” really isn't the focus at all.

This is arguably a plotless novel, at least in the traditional sense. This isn't a book about what's happening in the character's world, this is more about what's happening in the character's brain, heart, and soul. This is about a man slowly and gradually developing from someone who seems more robotic and nihilistic (often obsessing over a 20-years-to-live plan) to someone who is human and empathetic.

This is truly and unequivocally a character-focused novel.

Going back to our character comparisons, Felix is also like Sylar and Sheldon Cooper in that his social awkwardness alienates him from others, especially early in his life. He fails to think and act like most people. He speaks and writes in an overly-eloquent way that doesn't fit conversations well. He's fixated on things being perfectly right, stable, and orderly (in his eyes), and any deviation to that might set him off and trigger him (sorta like an OCD person or some on the autism spectrum).

Also, like Sylar, he has an obsession with watches. His brain even operates like a watch. He knows what time it is at all times.

Let's talk briefly about just how brilliant Felix is. At a young age, Felix is able to figure out how a half-dozen eye surgeries are done just after one conversation with an eye doctor. He fixes Amalia's toaster and numerous other appliances in minutes without any instructions. He performs a “Sherlock Holmes trick” by reading and forming a profile of his new employer just by observing different things and making deductions.

How cool is that?!

Felix is relatable in that he's in a tough spot from an academic perspective. He is, effectively, too smart and too brilliant for school. The academic standards and curriculum haven't caught up with him.

Yes, he's extremely smart and likely a genius, but his gift isn't something easily recognized and rewarded in most schools. He's an average mathematician who even struggles with arithmetic at times. His writing and speech don't fit the norm. Astrophysics (like what's taught by his rival and eventual friend, Zain Lestari) seems to go over his head, with Felix often admitting that he has no idea what Zain is talking about.

These things are strangely relatable to some of us including our founder, Steven Seril. Steven, like Felix Roth, was a teenage prodigy with an exceptionally high IQ (181 at the age of 13). He happened to attend the same school and competed against the two smartest teenagers in the world, Philip Mocz (now a professor of Astrophysics at Harvard) & Lucia Mocz (now a professor of Mathematics at Princeton), only to always come in third-place to the two. Steven suffered from learning disabilities including dyscalculia, making mathematics and standard learning difficult, very similar to the way that Felix struggles.

So, despite his eccentricities and often condescending view of other people, Felix is actually a very relatable and real-seeming person.

Throughout the book, Felix is undergoing several personal journeys. Three of the most prominent are:

- Building empathy and sensitivity to others, seeing value and good things in them

- Forming intimate, loving, and romantic relationships

- Coming to terms with the concept of permanency and what it really means for something to never be created or destroyed (like energy)--an idealistic allegory for human memories and experiences. After all, can anyone ever truly erase your memories and experiences? They will always exist in one form or another because they existed before and happened.

His relationships with other people, particularly the love-interests in his life, really advance his character arc. Each relationship is special in its own way.

He forms a brotherly bond with his former rival, Zain Lestari. Due to Zain being “extremely gay,” there's often an aura of possible romantic tension which never really gets explored. They become such great friends that Zain is even willing to leave his class in the middle of a lecture to talk to Felix.

He blasts through a fling with Sofia Duprat who "gave Felix an accelerated doctorate in absolutely everything." Their intense and fleeting relationship involved kissing, sex, parties, and manipulation, until Sofía left Felix for an exchange student. This all is described in an amusing, humorous way.

Keyla Whitney is another major love interest of Felix's, described as being an irresistibly beautiful girl from Buenos Aires, Argentina (like Felix). Keyla is like the attractive, beautiful female friend who is always in and out of your life for some reason.

However, perhaps the love interest that has the biggest impact to Felix in the book is Bambi (Amber Erin Stern). Bambi, like Felix, has a special gift. She is able to identify genuine works of art from fakes via an exotic emotional reaction that involves crying. She is also an very intelligent person, partly satisfying Felix's quest for a worthy partner. What really stood out to us about the relationship between Felix and Bambi is how natural it seemed. The two flirt and interact in a way that seems genuine and real. They create nicknames for each other. They have an off-topic conversation about otters, then Felix returns with a textbook with an otter with sunglasses on the cover, almost as if to troll her. They have a lot of ups and downs including on a spiritual or pseudo-spiritual level. See, Felix expresses to Bambi his budding philosophy about life, romance, and the universe—the “permanency” that we talked about earlier. Things like memories and experiences can never be taken from you. They will always exist if even just in the past. Felix develops an almost religious idea about how when you love someone and form a spiritual bond with them, they will always be with you no matter what. Even death can't end that bond. Felix uses the example of Bambi's deceased dogs and how they still live on in her heart and memories.

It's actually rather beautiful.
And maybe a bit cringe and creepy.

But give Felix a break. He has been a freak his whole life. He's a dude who, like Bobby Fisher, could live in a hotel abusing room service privileges for months.

Anyway, this book gets really weird about 3/4ths of the way in, venturing into science-fiction or even supernatural territory.

Where do we even begin?

Ok, well a pair of major deaths occur. Felix has a nightmare that then compels him to leave Buenos Aires permanently and live a life of austerity (or something like that). We then exclaimed something along the lines of: GREAT NOW THIS BOOK CAN FINALLY HAVE A PLOT!

Then, that immediately gets squashed. That whole arc and hope for a future journey then abruptly falls to pieces. And that's not even the weird part.

See, Felix begins to deduce that he has experiences some kind of quantum-shift phenomenon in which there are interdimensional crossings between two different versions of Bambi, causing two engagements rings to magically appear in his pocket (and causes a coffee maker to suddenly break).

He then starts referring to himself as a “widower” as if Bambi is legitimately dead and not willingly absent from his life (as we interpreted it). This is really weird and bizarre!

It's even more weird and bizarre when he starts telling people that he's a widower with dead-pan seriousness.

But anyway, like we said, Felix is a weird dude. Let him be weird. That's part of his charm.

Check this out on Amazon!