PROPERTIES OF LIGHT

Sex and physics turn out to have a lot in common in the latest from Goldstein (Mazel, 1995, etc.), who depicts the tortured passions of three scientists trying to restore meaning to a relativistic universe.

Many years ago, Samuel Mallach published a paper that defied the reigning orthodoxy of quantum mechanics by asserting that objective reality existed and could be measured. This affront to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle earned him decades of invisibility; when narrator Justin Childs discovers Mallach’s work—which taps into his own distaste for “unraveling the rationality of the world” through physics—the older man is a bitter ghost relegated to teaching an elementary undergraduate course at the fancy university at which Justin has just arrived as a rising faculty star. Justin wants to work with Mallach on new equations that will vindicate this heresy; he’s even more enthusiastic when, after his first dinner at their home, Mallach’s gorgeous daughter, Dana, takes him to her room for a night of bliss. The sex is as high-falutin’ as the science; Dana’s mother, Carlotta, was a student of Tantric erotic disciplines, and Mallach believes his dead wife’s expertise is what fueled his innovations in physics. We know from Justin’s opening sentence (“The essential fact is that I hate her”) that some catastrophe has destroyed his collaboration with Mallach père and fille, but the arrogant, aggressively intellectual tone of his narration makes it hard to feel much apprehension for the clearly doomed characters. Goldstein has always been a rather chilly writer, and it takes a while for the story to develop enough momentum to overcome this emotional distance. Gradually, however, you’re pulled in by the odd anomalies in a narrative that seems to be shifting between Justin’s first-person chronicle and a more omniscient account. Goldstein ties together all the seemingly loose ends with a fabulous final plot twist far more satisfying than her sententious summing-up: “We are things that would know and we are things that would love, and oh how fused is that entanglement.”

Not as profound as it aspires to be, but great fun for those who like to match wits against a tricky author practicing some masterful sleight-of-hand.