Gripping Best Seller Has Roots in Princeton

Becky Melvin

Like the play-within-a-play that becomes a catalyst for discovery in Shakespeare's Hamlet, a book-within-a-book features in The Rule of Four, sparking events and throwing into relief questions about life.

Well written by a pair of Ivy League graduates, including Ian Caldwell from Princeton University's class of 1998, The Rule of Four is a work of fiction that blends suspense and coming of age themes. It was published May 11 by Dial Press ($24), and has since risen to No. 2 on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

At the center of the novel is an historical text, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which was published in 1499 in Venice and which has baffled real-life scholars for centuries.

In The Rule, the text is the topic of the senior thesis of one of four friends and roommates who are the story's main characters.

"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." This enduring line, which concludes Act II of Hamlet, expresses the prince's hope that holding art up to life will help untangle a web of deception that overwhelms his life.

In The Rule, best friends Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, who may never even have met if not for the Hypnerotomachia, have become obsessed with cracking its mysteries. Its siren call causes them at times to go without sleep, food, and friends. Simultaneously, it entangles them in a series of campus escapades that culminates in murder.

Paul has always been entranced with the text, which means "Poliphilo's struggle for love in a dream," and Tom's father dedicated his life to studying the work, so Tom knows what life is like under its spell.

While it may sound like an unbelievable plot, the contrary is true. The story is completely believable, probably in part because lots of it is true.

The Princeton mystique becomes a large feature in the book. Many traditions and group rituals are explained like the practice of eating club "bickering," which is a form of initiation. Arch singing is mentioned. Landmarks are delineated. Academic requirements are outlined. The now defunct Nude Olympics appears in the story.

Dod Hall. Small World Coffee. Prospect Avenue. For Princetonians, who can add their own images to the words, the book reads with a movie-like quality. Meanwhile, plans for an actual movie based on the book are already in the works.

The 368-page story is told from Tom's point of view. During the last month of his senior year he debates whether to take a job offer from Daedalus, an Internet firm in Austin, or to continue his studies at the University of Chicago.

Paul is an alienated, melancholy, and driven guy, who remarkably manages to maintain two friends at school in addition to Tom. The friends are Charles Freeman, a good-natured, pre-med student, who is a Christ figure in the story, and Gil, the typical rich kid.

Mr. Caldwell, who studied history at Princeton and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and co-author Dustin Thomason, who attended Harvard University, where he studied anthropology and medicine, admit that fiction, in general, seems to be a mixture of autobiography and wish fulfillment.

The authors have been friends since they were eight years old and writing together has always been a hobby. This, their first novel draws plainly from the lives of individuals who aren't far beyond their college years (their rather narrow attitudes toward women, for example, attest to this). The book is dedicated to their parents.

Nevertheless their observations, which float smoothly through the narrative, are often original and compelling. One is: "A son is the promise that time makes to man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him."

Observations about books and scholarship also figure prominently in the novel in both significant and insignificant ways. A small example has to do with a dorm room during crunch time: "a novel to be read for a final paper is spread open on the floor with its spine broken, like a butterfly someone stepped on."

With a plot that includes murder, secret codes, letters sealed with wax, ancient diaries, a Good Friday cold snap, religion, and intriguing references to kabala and other Medieval and Renaissance occult lore, it is impossible not to compare The Rule of Four to The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, which is currently No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. Interestingly, their subject matter overlaps.

Is The Rule of Four as gripping as The Da Vinci Code? In the beginning, no. But what could compete with Brown's yarn in which nearly every truncated chapter ends in a cliff hanger? Still, The Rule of Four may hold up better with thoughtful prose and ideas that make a more entertaining book in many ways.

Every work has its world view. In The Rule of Four, Tom observes at one point: "Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifespan, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death."

But The Rule of Four isn't nearly as didactic as The Da Vinci Code, which makes strident theological claims as a piece of fiction. While The Rule uses a fifteenth-century Florentine friar as a foil, the main focus of the book is the students' detective work in their search for scholarly and artistic treasure.

In the end, what's going to happen to Tom and Paul and their future becomes a page-turning question, one that is perhaps more compelling than whether a daring duo uncovers the Holy Grail.