Properties of Light

I just finished my dissertation (in physics) and was looking to relax by reading some fiction. A friend suggested that Properties of Light might be a nice transition from the straight physics. Is it just that it's been so long since I've read a novel, or is this book pure bliss? I enjoyed every last bit of it, and was particularly surprised by how accurate her presentation of the physics involved was. I must admit that I have been interested in the physicist David Bohm (whom the character of Mallach is inspired by) and his mysteriously ignored interpretation of quantum mechanics since my undergraduate days, and have always thought it would make a good novel. There are so many deep questions here: why wouldn't the scientific community want to adopt a theory that seems like such a better candidate for the truth? How could it be that scientists seem so to prefer the mysterious and ineffable, to the straightforward and easily explained? Though Goldstein is careful to point out that the character Mallach is very different from Bohm in many ways and the dramatic twists and turns of her book are entirely fictional, Mallach's physics is nearly the same as Bohm's and she manages to get to the core of the real-life physics story, and deal with these deep questions, in an incredibly skillful way.

Once again Rebecca Goldstein proves her virtuosity as a novelist of style and substance as she continues to reinvent the novel of ideas. She deftly immerses us in the most formidable problems of the mind (quantum physics), and heart (the tragic love lives of the three main characters). She hits our cosmic funny bone with one of the narrative voices, that of Justin Childs, a physicist looking for a universal truth in mathematics, who is mortified by any irrationlism, and who also happens to be a ghost. This novel, also a serious jest, I suspect, at the zeitgeist infatuation with the turning of the man made millennium clock, is an investigation of time and timelessness. Goldstein using her powers of imagination and intellect pulls us into the world of those of genius who delve into the mystery of quantum physics, yet who are no more immune than the rest of us to irrational motivations, immediacies and obsessions of the broken heart and lost spirit. And isn't that what great novels are about? That and the understanding of goodness and cruelty and how we are all both kind and cruel. You will find all of this human-all-too-humanness in the characters of Childs and the Mallachs, father and daughter, as well as in the other significant players in the book. Goldstein's satirical eye is also once again on display. As she did in The Mind Body Problem and The Dark Sister, her dialogue and wit skewer the hubris of professors and know-it-all windbags of all stripes.After you've fallen under the sway of Goldstein's poetry, in this tragic comedy, with its abundant ironies and sadness, I promise, you will laugh, cry, wonder, and you, as was I, will be enlightened.

Here's an irony for you: Rebecca Goldstein has written a truly ingenious and innovative new novel, one of whose many themes is the fact that true genius and innovation tend to get ignored or worse when they first appear, while mediocrity is heaped with praise. Then her book gets bashed by those same reviewers who heap their praise on the mediocre. (Though, to be fair, there have been many, many good reviews for this book. The bad have just been in more prominent places). This theme of her book has not really been talked about much so far as I've seen, but I think it is at the core of her story. The unravelling of the three brilliant physicists is as much the fault of this universal truth, as it is the fault of their tangle of intrigues, jealousies, loves, and hatreds. I can only hope it isn't also the unravelling of Goldstein.

I ran out and bought this book right after reading Daniel Mendelson's effusively glowing review in New York Magazine. I figured that any book that could make that notoriously hardened critic "burst into tears" with its sheer beauty and brilliance had to be worth taking the afternoon off for. And, boy, was I right. Goldstein's prose is so luminously hypnotic, her characters so sympathetically rendered, and the story so engrossingly original that the only breaks I took from reading were a few brief moments when I simply had to put the book down and catch my breath. Though the book intimately involves some of the biggest ideas in science (specifically, the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with Einstein's Relativity Theory) Goldstein makes these go down easy by wrapping them inside a mesmerizing and multi-tiered love story. In my case at least, this resulted in the somewhat exhilerating experience of realizing that I'd just gained a whole lot of knowledge when all I thought I was doing was indulging my lust for great fiction. This is the first book of Goldstein's that I've read (though I've been meaning to read her ever since she won a Macarthur Grant in 1996), but if this book is representative of her work in general I can't wait to read the rest!