I’ve been woefully behind on the booklog for a long, long time now, but we’ll take a lazy post-Thanksgiving Sunday morning to catch up on a few of the more notable books in the backlog. These comments won’t be in any particular order, and, in fact, will start with the most recently read of the lot, Schrödinger’s Ball by Adam Felber.
The cover of this one has a certain chick-lit look, at least from a distance, but I picked it up anyway, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the title does tend to catch the eye, if you’re a physicist. I also recognized the name “Adam Felber” from blogdom. And, most importantly, the riff on Boston traffic that opens the book is both dead on and pretty funny. It looked like an enjoyable light read.
The main action of the book follows a few days in the lives of a group of four post-college friends living in the Cambridge area. There’s Arlene, whose cat just died; the effortlessly attractive Deb; Grant, a lovelorn dork obsessed with Deb; and Johnny Felix Decate, who dies on page six, but forms the center of the strange events of the next few days. There are also subplots involving the President of Montana, a couple of crazy homeless people, and a plural narrator interacting with the pompous and somewhot boorish Dr. Schrödinger, who’s weirdly still rattling around Cambridge, cadging food and holding forth on a wide variety of topics, including the nature of God:
“God died a cartoon death, you know.”
Dr. Schrödinger, we noticed, had taken to introducing topics as though composing a tabloid headline or providing catchy buzz-phrases for a movie preview. He was also, we observed, knee-deep in his several desserts.
“Look, God cheerfully led us to science, right past the cliff’s edge of his own plausibility. Then, sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century,he looked down, saw he was standing on empty air, did one last double take to the camera, and plummeted to his death. If there ever was a deus ex machina the machina was built by the ACME Corporation. […]”
“There was a sweet spot, you know. Back about a hundred years, after God had walked the plank but before Planck had walked all over us– ha-ha. We’d briefly, beautifully eliminated the unknowable and incompehensible. And people would’ve been much happier if we’d kept it that way. That’s what we want. People want electrons to orit atoms like tiny planets, hard and regular. They make sense that way. People like that– they don’t want their electrons to exist only as a cloud of potentialities. But that’s what we’ve got now, and we’re stuck with it. Quantum mechanics isn’t going to roll over and die as easily as God did.”
(That’s a long quote, I know, but I like the image…)
Lots of the individual bits of this book are well done. The interactions of the four close friends at the center of the story are well drawn. The crazy homeless people provide some amusing faux-scripture and revisionist history. Dr. Schrödinger goes off on some entertaining rants. Even the President of Montana provides some amusing scenes.
The problem is, the pieces don’t really come together. There’s a loose organizing theme involving quantum mechanics (Johnny’s death was unobserved, you see, so he’s both dead and alive until somebody finds his body) and the Rube Goldrberg workings of chance that bring all the characters into the same place for the climactic scene, but it doesn’t work to pull the book into a coherent whole. The various plots don’t go anywhere all that dramatic, and their intersection isn’t all that satisfying (I’m still not sure what the President of Montana has to do with any of the rest of it).
There’s some entertaining material here, but the book as a whole feels more like an experiment in odd narrative structure than a fully realized novel. The quantum mechanics stuff at least isn’t actively stupid, though it is a little strained (though not much more strained than, say, “Copenhagen”), but it’s not really enough of a reason for the book to exist, and none of the individual plots do much of anything.
When I summarized this for Kate, she said “Ah. Mainstream novel.” And, really, that’s pretty much all there is to say about it.
I wonder if it would be a worthwhile side read for a “QM for Poets” class? Sort of… “Read this book and write a 3-4 page paper critiquing its use and misuse of the ideas of QM.” I’m trying to add a lot more assignments like that to my classes. (I’ve decided my students don’t READ enough in my classes.)
Finishing a pretty detailed, and interesting, review by saying that the novel in question is “mainstream”, and that, actually, this is all there is to say about it, is self-evidently false.
On the assumption that “Pride and Prejudice”, “Heart of Darkness”, “Catch-22” are “Schrodinger’s Ball” are all mainstream, I’d say there is a pretty huge spectrum of possibilities inherent in “mainstream”, and that it’s worth describing its inhabitants in reasonable detail. (Which you did, thankfully.)
Michael