I just finished Aimee Bender's debut novel An Invisible Sign of My Own, published back in 2001. Bender is a master of the absurd, a consistent trait in her writing that actually segue into the impossible in her later novels. This one teeters on the very brink between reality and surrealism, illustrating the effects of depression on a family. I'd never seen the beauty--and the potential randomness--in numbers as fully as I did in this book.

The book centers around Mona Grey, a twenty-year-old who is hired by her old school to teach elementary math. We meet a number of Mona's math students as they play Number and Materials, a game that Mona has created to help the children better appreciate math in the world.

Mona Grey is a fascinating character, engrossed in her own pathos while trying to understand the reason and extent of her father's depression. Her father, a prize-winning runner in his youth, inexplicably becomes obsessed with death one day, shrinking from himself and his family.

Mona can't understand her father's change, but simultanesouly shrinks away from herself and her life in her obsession with wondering what's happened to her father. She also starts quitting everything like her father quit his life; Mona quits piano, running and even boyfriends--sickening herself away from her attraction by sucking on a bar of soap.

The one thing that Mona has always been able to stick with is math, and she finds two surprisingly kindred souls in two other math lovers. The first is her childhood next-door-neighbor and math teacher, Mr. Jones, who has retired from teaching but still wears his mood on a high-to-low number scale around his neck. The other is one of her students named Lisa, a little girl obsessed with death because her mother is dying of cancer. Despite her best efforts, Mona also finds love in a science teacher who insists on keeping her close.

The disparate--and certainly spatially-confined--elements of the story come together to create a portrait of a young woman who, like her father, continuously tries to free herself from ties of deep passion or deep love, preferring nothingness. It's truly an adept storyteller who can make a bunch of literary nerds appreciate numbers enough to let them give a character motivation to let herself be free. Bender does it while crafting an enthusiastic, darkly funny and creative novel that rarely veers into the precious.  I highly recommend it, along with all of Bender's other writing.