Ingenious. Absolutely ingenious: Wouk’s first fiction in ten years.
At 88, Wouk (The Will to Live On, 2000) writes with the brightness of a 45-year-old kid hell-bent on fun about subatomic physics.
The hole in Texas is the underground 50-mile Superconducting Super Collider built at Waxahachie but closed down when Bill Clinton cut the budget. Astrophysicist Guy Carpenter spent five years preparing 10,000 superconducting magnets for the project, then suddenly found himself out of work, as did a whole raft of fellow physicists. Since then he’s worked on the forthcoming, vastly advanced space-telescopes project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (four scopes floating a million miles out) and has had many second thoughts about what the collider was supposed to search for: the Higgs Boson, an elementary particle or force field that allows atoms to attain mass and thus produce the substance of the material universe. Or something like that. Guy wonders: Was the Boson just moonshine? Then, shaking up the whole field, Chinese physicists announce that they’ve found the Boson. The American military gets nervous indeed: a Boson Bomb would be to the hydrogen bomb as the hydrogen bomb is to gunpowder. Widowed but wealthy Congresswoman Myra Kadane, who is on the science appropriations committee that will keep the wavering space telescopes project funded, pastes herself to Guy to learn more about the Boson. Guy’s wife Penny, a microbiologist, isn’t jealous of Myra but rather of Guy’s old girlfriend Wen Mei Li (now 63), who once worked with Guy. She has led the Chinese to the Boson, and now comes back to the States for a conference. Guy, meanwhile, has been hired as a consultant for an idiotic disaster movie about the Boson Bomb. Worse, when he’s fired as well, the movie company wants back its $25,000 advance (Penny’s already spent it) because a Washington Post reporter has dubbed him the “Deep Throat Physicist” who passed secrets to the Chinese. Then the House subpoenas the Deep Throat Physicist to appear with the Mother of the Bomb, Wen Mei Li.
Ingenious. Absolutely ingenious: Wouk’s first fiction in ten years.Pub Date: April 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-52590-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.
Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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