Oh and -- authors? Don't bother to sue; Dr Justice is a yachtless pauper.]
PHYSICS AND PHYSICALITY
This afternoon Rebecca Goldstein kicked off the reading season at Micawber Books, presenting her new novel Particles of Light. She first came to the world's attention in 1983 with The Mind-Body Problem, a title as witty and apt as any in this century, set in the world of Princeton University and the IAS. I read it shortly after it came out in paperback, having heard neither of book nor author, but intrigued enough by the title on the spine to pull it from the crammed shelf of a Cambridge bookstore, whereupon the cover seals the fate of any male reader who gets that far: a captivating nude painted by Balthus. I had not at that time heard of Balthus either, but I had heard of nudes, and swiftly inserted this one into the inconspicuous interior a stack of blameless scientific reading and headed for the cashier's.
(Ah, why not confess it all, since St. Peter knows it anyway. It was in that very Cambridge bookstore, on that very day, browsing, that I happened upon, and was tempted to buy, but did not buy, a slender overpriced volume, by some trendy overrated litterateur, called: Spanking the Maid.)
The book turned out to have all the novelistic virtues – funny, good plot, good dialogue, a heart. But what really intrigued me was that whenever (as frequently) she referred to physics, philosophy, or linguistics, three areas in which I had some preparation, she got things exactly right, not just in the factual sense but in the sense of the ethos of the field. (She has herself a Princeton doctorate in philosophy, and her husband is a physicist.)
A few months later, idly wandering through the stately and, for its provincial location, quite impressive Worcester Art Museum, I came face to face with the actual painting, very much life-size, that graces the book's cover in miniature: it was as surprising as though, opening your front door to get the milk bottles, you were confronted with a Botticelli in the flesh. This was the subjective correlative: The Mind-Body Problem was an icon of our age.
Goldstein followed up this beautiful debut with something less good, and with a dreadful title, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; then with something very much less good, The Dark Sister; and then a collection of short stories, Strange Attractors, that in places descends to the level of a Harlequin romance: "His eyes were large and liquid and luminous – too luminous. His nose is of an exquisite Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations”; this written by "a governess and parson's daughter" for whom "a volume of headiest poetry is debauchery enough". ("Dreams of the Dangerous Duke"; sic.) The books are progressively more seriously marred by what we may call the Pornography of Intelligence, consisting of gurgled tributes to the purported brilliance of someone (generally female, or the admirer of one) who does not actually ever get around to demonstrating that brilliance on the printed page. As: "And I told them of her meteoric rise to a brilliant, though as yet anonymous Fame; of how her slender book of poetry had been printed, through the aid and connections of the Duke…. `Were you not the greatest of living Poets,' the Duke had told her, `you would have been either a mathematician or a musician.’ " (Or a philosopher, or a physicist, or a frigging concert pianist, or the first violinist in space…) A few years after this junk was published, she was given a MacArthur Genius Award, too belated to be an appropriate recognition of The Mind-Body Problem (especially as, unlike the Nobel, the MacArthur is meant to catch geniuses before they fully sprout), thus perhaps a sort of consolation prize for the later books, little read and ill-reviewed. Her newest was sadly panned in last week's New York Times; and it was with a certain foreboding that I went to her scheduled talk.
But that was to underestimate the force of the publicity machine, by whose exertions the celebrated intercelebrate and further inflate their celebration: the book had drooling blurbs from the likes of Steven Pinker, and even from the often acerbic Richard Dawkins, Michiko Kaku-caca be damned. Nor was there any relaxation in the ubiquitous tensile tightly-inter-self-satisfied Princeton Smile among those coolly, watchfully, sipping the chablis with their thin lips -- a mannerism as catching as coughing or yawning, so that fight as you might soon your own face aches. (Among the cozy Micawber bookstore personnel who put on the show, this rictus is widened and frozen to a Full Tooth aperture, so that bilabials actually receive labiodental articulation.) The author herself was as yet mysteriously unseen ("Is she here yet?" “Have you seen her?”), which only increased the buzz.
Somehow I had pictured her as greying and getting stocky, as befits a philosopher of science. Her jacket photo on Woman of Mind could be of a woman with nothing but mascara between herself and middle age, and who-knows how outdated that photo was at the time. So I was unprepared for the vision of loveliness which, appearing out of nowhere, stepped demurely to the podium. She wore a little bit of a thing of an off-olive-green dress, a hue inherently unbecoming, so that it could only be due to her own beauty that it so fetchingly complimented the equally strange tint of her hair – sort of a blonde that had become sun-tanned, which the sun had sweetened to honey with a hint of amber, to which poets despair of ever affixing a name. That this was no natural color (matching neither the black of her earlier jacket photos nor the brown of her current one) no more detracted from its enchantment than that the Venus on that half-shell is a thing of paint. Over her thin shoulders was draped a thinner champagne sweater, which soon – my heart stopped – dropped, with the drama of an ecdysiast shedding her entire sheath. Her head, like her body, is remarkably slender; perhaps her brain became more brilliant as it was miniaturized, like microchips.
Much more than the usual author on a book tour, doing signings in a Barnes & Noble in is-this-Cleveland, she really could have schmoozed up this audience and flattered its yen for the inside dope, having written after all the Great Princeton Novel, anyhow better than Fitzgerald's. But all she said was, "I'm just going to read," and proceeded to do so – Storytime, children -- starting from page one, which consists of the single sentence, set proudly by itself, "The essential thing is that I hate her".
(A pause, to let sink in, the bewildering-bewildered disappointment of this.)
She proceeded to recite, in a delicious feline voice, the musings of a physicist (I think he turns out to be a ghost; shades of the Dangerous Duke) on how he hates people, and how he isn't interested in things, though being really quite precocious, a fact dwelled on in extenso – not an auspicious strategy for drawing-in an audience, though ultimately, she told us afterwards, it's a love story. (Having known a few physicists pretty well, I am baffled at how very far off this is.) So far as I can tell, it's another bodice-ripper, but with enough glitzy glancing references to quantum mechanics to give it what passes in our age for gravitas.
Ah, but enough – why satirize or even summarize. She said this and that; the crowd murmured, and dispersed; as yet another shovelful of sadness is tossed upon the coffin of my hopes.
It is evident that I read her first book one-sidedly, too exclusively emphasizing the former conjunct. Since then, she has chosen increasingly to develop the body half of the dialectic. And who should scant that? The first novel was written, perhaps, by mere necessity; the latter are the works of one who can do anything she darn well pleases. And this is what she pleases to do.
[© 2010, David Justice]
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