Talking To A. Natasha Joukovsky About Men, Myths, And March Madness

The odds of filling out a perfect NCAA bracket are one in nine quintillion, two hundred twenty-three quadrillion, three-hundred-seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight-hundred-fifty-four million, seven-hundred-seventy-five thousand, eight hundred and eight. This is according to Phil Fayeton, anyway, the doomed protagonist of the very funny new novel Medium Rare , by A. Natasha Joukovsky. The statistic is a recurring bit—it is what you get if you consider every game a 50/50 toss-up, which is not accurate in a seeded tournament.

“It's just not true,” Joukovsky tells me. “That would be random chance. But of course, brackets are not random chance. The seeding is asymmetrical.” The real odds, she tells me, “can be really different year-to-year,” and they can be debatable. They’re still minute, but significantly more likely than Phil makes them seem.

In the novel, which opens in the winter of 2019, Fayeton is poised to do the highly improbable: predict every game of March Madness perfectly for a billion-dollar prize furnished by a tech mogul. A retelling of the Icarus myth, the book traces his climb, asking not just “What if it happened?” but “What if it happened to the most average guy you’ve ever met?”