Twenty Years Later, ‘The Rule of Four’ Still Enchants Readers

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“Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least. Nothing is lighter than being young with the world on your shoulders.” So began Ian Caldwell ’98 and Dustin Thomason’s Princeton-based novel, The Rule of Four, which remained on the New York Times’ bestseller list for almost a year. Published in 2004, amid the fervor over Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, The Rule of Four was perceived as the Princeton take on the “art history-thriller” genre. Despite the narrative conceit of a 30-year-old character reflecting on his collegiate experience — and campus intrigues involving the secrets behind a mysterious Renaissance text — the book’s two authors were only 22 when they wrote the first draft.

“For a young character written by young authors, it is a kind of a funny way to start a book,” Thomason concedes. That young character was Tom, a senior haunted by his late father’s obsession with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance-era codex believed to contain a hidden message. After he befriends another student named Paul, who has pursued the same puzzle for his senior thesis, Tom finds himself increasingly devoted to solving the mystery. Equally intrigued is a menacing fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Vincent Taft — a character bearing an uncanny resemblance to Princeton history professor Anthony Grafton.

For 20 years, The Rule of Four has enchanted readers both of a tiger stripe and around the world — not to mention being a fixture at the U-Store. The book depicted aspects of a Princeton experience that have since become ancient history (including the “Nude Olympics,” a streaking frenzy prompted by the first snowfall — banned since 1999 — as well as stealing Nassau Hall’s bell clapper — forbidden since 1992, when the clapper was permanently removed). Fictional flourishes, such as the presence of an underground network of “steam tunnels” by which the central characters sneak around campus (and play paintball) have transformed into legends perpetuated by The Daily Princetonian. While some such utility tunnels do exist, they hardly resemble the expansive, integrated system presented in the novel. “It seems to portray such an antediluvian Princeton,” says Grafton, who introduced Caldwell to the real-life Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in a course on Renaissance magic and witchcraft (and served as the inspiration for the book’s main villain).

But other aspects invoked by the novel remain timeless — the unusual world of the eating clubs, the graduate student who can always be found in Firestone Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, and a sprawling senior thesis project that motivates a campus murder. Well, maybe not that last part.

“I’m not surprised The Rule of Four was viewed as a sort of ‘Princeton book’ because of the Princeton-specific scenes,” Caldwell tells PAW by email. “What I really did love about Princeton, from the first day to the last, was the wonder and exhilaration that I felt in some of my humanities classes. The feeling of being given a seat at a table where the giants of the past 3,000 years were having the one eternal conversation.”

Caldwell and Thomason were lifelong friends who grew up together in Northern Virginia, playing on the same soccer team coached by Caldwell’s father, a diplomat. Though Caldwell went to Princeton and Thomason to Harvard, the pair vowed to complete a novel together after graduation, during the summer of 1998, before Caldwell pursued a career in software and Thomason embarked for medical school. Improbably, they planned to write the novel while driving across the country. “The road trip never happened,” Thomason says, “but we spent the whole summer right after we both graduated in [Ian’s] parents’ basement.” Setting two computers next to each other, Thomason wrote the odd-numbered chapters, and Caldwell wrote the even-numbered installments. At noon, they took lunch and discussed the next beats in the plot. “A consultant from McKinsey, or probably any smart third grader, could have told us this was basically the worst Rube Goldberg process for writing a book together, but it’s what we did, week after week,” Caldwell says. Though little of the original draft that summer made it into the final novel, which arrived years later, the pair found their own way, and Caldwell eventually quit his job to complete the book. “It looked like career suicide,” Caldwell says. “The decision to go for it set a pattern in my life of choosing my own path rather than having circumstances choose it for me.” His second novel, The Fifth Gospel, a mystery set around another ancient text, this time playing into Vatican politics, was released in 2014.

“What I really did love about Princeton, from the first day to the last, was the wonder and exhilaration that I felt in some of my humanities classes.”

— Ian Caldwell ’98

While Thomason produced his own follow-up (12.21, a thriller about the end of the Mayan Calendar published in 2012), he’s taken creative collaboration further in Hollywood, most recently as an executive producer of Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent. Thomason says that writing the first novel with Caldwell was “our own workshop, what I would ultimately understand to be a writers’ room.” Despite a long career in TV, for Thomason, “The Rule of Four will always be my ‘first love.’”

Perhaps the act of writing the book at that age reflected the romance the novel itself tried to channel about the moment in students’ lives when “big questions” consumed their attention. In a 2004 essay Grafton published in The New York Review of Books, he argued The Rule of Four was one of the first campus novels to acknowledge that students “spend vast amounts of time alone, attacking the kinds of intellectual problems that can easily swallow lifetimes.” Though many of the students from that time went on to professional lives, Grafton argued, “for a moment, amid the raging hormones, the desperate job searches, and the eager social jockeying, thousands of young people across America … know something of the mysteries that scholars and scientists call their own.”

Regarding the inspiration behind the steam tunnels, Caldwell insists on one last mystery: “What happens in the steam tunnels stays in the steam tunnels.”