From Publishers Weekly
Lightman (Einstein's Dreams, etc.) indulges his romantic side in this fourth novel, coming dangerously close to mawkishness with a tale of an aging professor pining for his lost youth. Charles, 52, teaches literature at a small college; once an aspiring poet, he is now content to read instead of write. Divorced from his wife and not particularly close to his grown daughter, he is lonely but takes defensive pleasure in material comfort ("Do I lead the life of a selfish shit? So be it. I am content in my shithood"). Upon attending his 30-year college reunion, a vision of his 22-year-old self startles him into recalling in exhaustive detail the great love affair of his life. Juliana, a fiercely ambitious New York City dancer, bewitches him with her beauty, determination and sheer unknowableness. After he meets her at a coffee shop, he makes many two-hour bus trips into the city to see her, attending her rehearsals and meeting up with her after hours in the dancers' dressing room. On a brief visit to Charles's college, Juliana meets his wolfish poetry professor; some time later, Charles discovers she is sleeping with him, too. This dramatic if unlikely development is quickly followed by another, which threatens to end Juliana's dancing career and leads to Charles losing her. In revisiting pivotal confrontations, Charles realizes that he has remembered things crookedly, altering the facts to view his actions in a more favorable light. Lightman's re-narration of key episodes as re-remembered by Charles is a clever device, and his Vietnam-era scene setting mostly skirts cliche. But even Lightman's elegant prose can't infuse the all-too-familiar love story with fresh life. Juliana is numbingly idealized, and Charles, despite his self-knowledge (or because of it), is frustratingly solipsistic. In previous novels, Lightman's scientific and metaphysical inquiries gave a bracing rigor to his romanticism. Here, unadulterated sentiment leaves the reader flailing for a foothold.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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*Starred Review* Time and the theory of relativity fascinate Lightman, a theoretical physicist as well as a trenchantly inventive novelist, as does the continuum of reverie, memory, and fantasy that constitutes our inner lives. In
The Diagnosis (2000), he considered this dimension of being within the stressful frenzy of the digital age. Here, in this tautly constructed and haunting tale of lost love, he tells a more intimate tale. Alienated, seemingly selfish English professor Charles' mantra is: "I don't want to be disturbed." Then why attend his thirtieth college reunion? Lightman's stellar satirical gifts are in full force as he describes this pathetically awkward event and a strange tumble in time that causes Charles to meet up with himself as a 22-year-old infatuated with the poetry of Emily Dickinson and madly in love with Juliana, a ballerina suffering from every neurosis that punishing discipline engenders. Lightman infuses even the simplest scenes with quiet menace as he explores the cataclysmic power of both erotic love and shocking betrayal. Like the light beamed by a star that takes eons to reach us, Charles' exploded past emits distress signals that he is finally able to decipher.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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