Few novels begin more dramatically than Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac. “On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink’s Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turned the gun on himself.” That owes nothing to Labatut’s febrile imagination, for every word …
