Radiance

The novel takes place in a Department of Energy laboratory somewhere in California. The laboratory had been working in nuclear weapons research but with the end of the cold war it must find new missions to justify itself and keep the funding coming. The physicists who work there find themselves getting away from science and into politics and becoming more and more disillusioned. Every day they have to fight their way through protestors to get to work. And the protestors also find themselves disillusioned, getting nowhere. That is the plot in a nutshell. But the author executes it with intensity, energy, and a painful probing of the human spirit. Scholtz has a remarkable style--a kind of acoustic reality, I would call it--in which conversations are reported exactly as they sound, without quotation marks, words broken off, sentences broken off, hard to tell who is talking. The effect is like wandering into a large crowd of people and being inundated with fragments of speech. It is like actually being in the story as opposed to being told the story.I must say this was not an easy book to read, and I would not like to read a book of this intensity very often. Nor is there a happy ending to lighten things up. The characters are complex but dark, idealists who have lost hope in their ideals, searching frantically for something (or someone)to believe in, but never finding. A dark, painful, difficult book, but well worth reading!

As the previous review notes, this extraordinary novel is written in the style of William Gaddis...perhaps to a fault. The reader is presented with a hectic (but always well-controlled) stream of information in the form of competing signals and noises: dialogue fragments, headlines, TV and radio broadcast snippets, extracts from computer files and science reports, as well as some oldfashioned (and terribly poetic) narrative description, out of all of which the attentive reader extracts a horribly funny picture of mid-90s America. If you're read J R or A Frolic of His Own, you know the drill; if I have a complaint, it's that Scholz may have subsumed his own voice (whatever that proves to be) in emulation of the late master Gaddis. Here the characters are involved with a science lab (obviously modeled after Livermore), so long entwined with the defense industry that actual research is perpetually set aside in favor of generating "test results" (rigged, if necessary) that keep the Pentagon trillions rolling in. Never fear: we meet real characters here, flawed, loving, struggling. Buy this book! I'd hate to see Scholz imitating Gaddis in another unfortunate area, that being sales.

A great and smart novel in the tradition of Gaddis and Pynchon, (with a gift for dialog straight out of the former). Funny, too, if it wasn't so painfully close to the truth concerning the nexus of the arms industry, research science off the deep end, and self-perpetuating institutions everywhere. Written well before the current war effort, making it prescient as well as radiant.

A wonderfully written novel that shows what has become of "big" science in the nuclear age better than any other I have seen. Scholz clearly articulates how research has become a self-perpetuating quest for technology as a product, whose teams are constantly forced to justify their existance with whatever data they can-- no matter how specious. Strong characters and vivid prose as well. All in all, enormously entertaining, and enormously informative: what every good and important book should be.

A wonderfully written novel that shows what has become of "big" science in the nuclear age better than any other I have seen. Scholz clearly articulates how research has become a self-perpetuating quest for technology as a product, whose teams are constantly forced to justify their existence with whatever data they can-- no matter how specious. Strong characters and vivid prose as well. All in all, enormously entertaining, and enormously informative: what every good and important book should be.