Book of Numbers (novel)

Some critics compared Cohen's writing favorably to that of Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace.[2][3] Dwight Garner, writing for The New York Times, stated that the similarities with Roth come from "...[blending] slashing comedy with a brooding awareness of family, of the Old World, of prior claims on his soul." Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the London Review of Books, said about the novel, "There are wonderful things here cloaked with an invisibility spell, tucked away in the middle of the book, where only the stubbornest seeker after enchantment will find them."[4] The critic and editor Robert Gottlieb, writing in The New York Times in 2021, called the book an "overstuffed and pretentious monument to (or of?) narcissism."[5]

Cohen wrote the novel before the Edward Snowden leaks, but the narrative predicts several of the government initiatives revealed by Snowden.[6] Cohen read numerous books and treatises about the Internet's history and studied the biographies of technologists before and during the writing of the book.