SINGER DISTANCE

A math genius figures out how to communicate with Martians but not with the earthlings who love her.

In Chatagnier’s debut novel, humans have been exchanging messages with Martians since 1894 by carving giant symbols into the Earth’s surface, filling the grooves with petroleum, and setting them on fire at the exact moment of Mars’ opposition. The first message earthlings sent was three parallel lines, which the Martians answered with four parallel lines of their own. In subsequent oppositions, the Martians used a Socratic system of quizzes to teach humans the Martian notational system and increasingly sophisticated mathematics until nobody alive on Earth was smart enough to solve the extraterrestrial puzzles except Einstein, and finally not even he could. Then the Martians fell silent for decades, ignoring our puny attempts at communication. As the novel begins, in the winter of 1960, five MIT math grad students are driving west to dig Martian notation into the Arizona desert in time for the next opposition. The group comprises the narrator, Rick Hayworth; his girlfriend, Crystal Singer, the genius whose formula they’re planning to beam to Mars; and two other men and one other woman. Chatagnier describes the scenery of the American past with lyrical zest, but he doesn’t seem to have devoted much effort to imagining or researching what people’s lives were like back then. In his fantasy version of the novel’s timeline, unlike the same period on actual Earth, women, including women of color, are allowed to be mathematicians and scientists just like men. Women in his novel run telescopes and are professors at prestigious universities in more than token numbers. (In contrast, for example, in the real world it wasn’t until 1959 that MIT appointed the first woman to its science faculty, and from 1965 to 1975, less than 5% of the graduate students in the MIT physics department were women.) After the Martians respond to Crystal’s message, she buries herself deeper and deeper in her research, ultimately vanishing from Rick’s life and public view. Her disappearance sets the scene for the novel’s exploration of the difficulties of truly understanding the self and others. Chatagnier expresses this theme in descriptions of Crystal’s research: “Her voice came into my mind…I heard her say: Light-years of distance separate us even from ourselves.” For all the charm of these wistful musings, the plot makes little sense. (How has Crystal been supporting herself? Why hasn’t some reporter found her long ago?) And the novel’s ultimate revelation, when it comes, is a cliché.

Lyrical writing and a suspenseful story fall apart when anachronisms and lazy plotting undermine them.