Wittgenstein Jr reviewed in the New York Review of Books by John Williams

In the philosophical prankster Lars Iyer’s latest, a group of students at Cambridge nickname a professor Wittgenstein Jr. (more for his “visible despair” and tormented mind than any physical resemblance). The narrator, a student named Peters, relays Wittgenstein Jr.’s entertaining rants about subjects like his hatred for dogs and why England can be seen as “the quintessence of lawn.” The professor’s brother committed suicide and now he “means to enter the region in which his brother lost his mind, and to come back out.” Like the actual young Wittgenstein, he’s searching for a logical solution to “all the fundamental problems of philosophy.” His students continually disappoint him — and themselves. They know they are “too late for politics” and “too late to march on the streets.” Mr. Iyer, himself a philosophy professor in England, is a deeply elegiac satirist. As in a previous trilogy that featured two bumbling philosopher frenemies, he manages to both send up intellectual life and movingly lament its erosion.