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Alice est montée sur la table
Anna Karénine quitta son mari pour un fringant officier. Lady Chatterley, pour un garde-chasse. Alice Coombs, elle, plaque son petit ami pour rien… enfin presque. Comment c'est arrivé, et ce qu'a fait Philip Engstrand (l'amoureux éconduit) pour la reconquérir, tel est le point de départ de ce roman d'amour aux péripéties vertigineuses.
Alice est une spécialiste de la physique des particules. Dans son laboratoire, elle a réussi à capturer le Néant. Mais ce non-être, bien que dépourvu d'existence, semble doué d'une sorte de personnalité. Passionnément attirée par cette nullité, Alice provoque chez Philip une intense jalousie doublée d'un sentiment d'impuissance : en effet, comment battre un rival sans défauts – puisque sans qualités ?
Mélange de fantaisie débridée et de logique imperturbable, ce livre est un chef-d'œuvre d'humour et de poésie. Il s'inscrit dans la grande famille de la fiction « spéculative » qui, de Lewis Carroll à nos jours, propose par le biais de la littérature des solutions rationnelles à des problèmes totalement loufoques – à moins qu'il ne s'agisse du contraire.
Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Francis Kerline.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
88 people are currently reading
4123 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lethem
236 books2,649 followersJonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 572 reviews
July 25, 2016
Lethem’s penchant is always for the dysfunctional, for characters who have at least one screw loose and this is no different. Here he chooses academia to dramatise his vision of our dysfunctional world. Probably no one will ever write a better and more hilarious spoof of academia than Pale Fire but As She Climbed Across the Table certainly has its moments.
It’s one of those novels that is almost entirely generated by one idea. The idea is what if a physics department created a portal into another universe? This portal, known as Lack, is seemingly endowed with intelligence, rather like a cash machine in that it will reject anything put into it that it doesn’t like. It accepts all manner of things, a pomegranate, a pair of socks, the campus cat but rejects most other things. Alice, the girlfriend of the narrator, and a particles physicist becomes convinced Lack has personality and a consuming crush on her part begins. Alice has found her wonderland.
The novel is narrated by Philip, a professor of anthropology (the fact he isn’t a scientist means the science in the novel is articulated in layman’s terms and so very easy on the eye and brain). Philip and Alice enjoy a healthy relationship before Lack arrives. But once Lack is in the picture everything starts coming apart. As we all know any lack can consume light matter and turn it dark. Lack will become Philip’s arch-rival and a direct confrontation becomes inevitable.
For such an inventive and clever book it’s very easy to read. Maybe the whimsy, the romantic comedy ultimately triumphs over deeper messages and the characters are sometimes close to pantomime figures but it’s a hugely enjoyable and thought provoking read with genuine laugh out loud moments.
November 17, 2013
Virtual Reality with a Philosophical Bent
This is a re-read of one of my favourite novels. I’ve rated it five stars both times, but the rating assumes that you have a philosophical bent. If you don’t, it might come across as hopelessly abstract and removed from any reality that you know.
If you do have, it might strike you as a stimulating and amusing work of post-modern fiction.
It’s an homage to and pastiche of novels by Lethem’s immediate predecessors such as John Barth’s "The End of the Road" and Don DeLillo’s "White Noise" that deserves to stand proud in their company.
A Universe in a University Lab
Superficially, the novel is a fiction about academia.
The narrator, Philip Engstrand, is a Professor of Anthropology at the fictitious University of North California. His partner is Alice Coombs, a particle physicist who is working with Professor Soft, a Nobel Prize-winner, to create a "baby universe" or a "universe in your backyard" a la the real life theories of Edward Farhi and Alan Guth.
Within this relationship, we also have two distinct cultures: the humanities and science, although perhaps there is a point where cosmology can be seen to cross the boundary between the two, to climb across the table.
Despite the academic and scientific context, the novel is at heart a romantic comedy. Lethem’s prose is dry, but heavily ironic and humorous. Early on, Philip says to Alice:
"I feel an initial singularity…pressed against your spherical symmetry."
Scientific Detachment
Alice ignores his flippancy, preoccupied with the "false vacuum bubble" that Soft has managed to create.
For Soft has ignited a new inflationary universe in the lab, only it has stalled and failed to "detach" from this universe.
Instead, it has developed a breach or a wound akin to a wormhole that allows communication between the two worlds.
Alice refers to the breach as a portal. It’s a rabbit hole that might lead to a wonderland of her own.
Despite the objectivity of her background as a scientist, she can’t help but think of it subjectively. She’s lost the ability to "observe without consciousness", to "observe without subjective judgement". She falls in love with this thing and becomes "estranged from humanness".
Where and to what the portal leads informs the rest of the novel.
An Explosion of Metaphor
Despite the fact that they have created a baby universe, it has ceased to inflate:
"It has stopped being an ‘event’...Now it’s defined by its failure to ‘happen’. An absence. A lack."
Henceforth, this baby universe is known as "the Lack". It’s a breach, a gap, a gulf, a hub, a void. Increasingly estranged from Alice, Philip contemplates:
"The lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world. I felt a secret kinship with it."
How We Avoid Each Other
Both Philip and Alice have their own relationship with the Lack.
It's not just a cosmic void. In a way, it comes to represent the distance, the void between two humans.
If we are intimidated by the void, we will never form a relationship with whatever lies on the other side.
In order to form a relationship, we must communicate across the table, into and through the void. We must explore. We must step into the unknown. We must reach out blindly. We must take risks. We must intimate. We must offer soft intimacies. We must reveal vulnerabilities. We must risk harsh judgments and rejection. We must turn our backs on pride to win love’s rich rewards. We must overcome and defeat the suspicion and jealousy that can undermine love:
"I pictured Alice guiding blind hands to her breasts. Nipples hard like Braille."
Bizarre Love Triangle
Even once we’re "in" a relationship, it can have its own vulnerabilities. As Philip reveals:
"...when I feel distance between us, it’s like there’s something wrong between me and myself. I feel a gulf in myself."
Hence the kinship with the Lack, even though it is the cause of the distance, the gulf between Philip and Alice (unless in reality we can infer that Alice herself, her "Lack-love" is the subjective cause).
Love as a System, a Universe
Determined not to lose Alice, Philip resolves to "teach her human love again", if and whatever way he can. And so we have the set-up of the novel.
An early attempt proves to be fleeting. I want to mention it, not from a plot point of view, but so as to highlight the tongue-in-cheek earnestness with which Lethem describes the attempt:
"I crawled across the margin of floor and held her. I put my arms around her shoulders, my face in her hair. We cried together. Our bodies made one perfect thing, a topological whole, immutable, complete, hollows turned to each other, hollows in alliance. We made a system, a universe. For a moment."
Ironic as the language is, you can see a mock attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of science and the humanities.
The Metaphysical Lack
Soft and Alice discover that they can communicate with the Lack. They position a table adjacent the wormhole and slide objects and messages across it. The Lack accepts some things (which disappear) and rejects others (which remain on the table). In a way, it communicates by a binary yes/no system. Eventually, the physicists believe they’re able to infer the interests and taste of the Lack.
Philip adopts an almost Kantian approach to the Lack:
"You seem to be saying that Lack is a metaphysical phenomenon. So I should be just as qualified as you to uncover his meaning. If he is, as you say, interested in the idea of things in themselves. Meanings. Texts."
The novel shifts from physics to metaphysics.
One of the physicists proves to be a subjectivist:
"Consciousness creates reality. Only when there is a mind to consider the world is there a world. Nothing before, except potential. Potential this, potential that. The creation event, the big bang – it was the creation of enormous potential, nothing more...[There’s no world where there isn’t a mentality to consider a world…There’s just a gap…a lack.] Consciousness writes reality…wherever we look we find reality forming in response...I think there is a principle of conservation of reality. Reality is unwilling to fully exist without an observer. It can’t be bothered. Why should it?"
You have to ask whether the baby universe stalled so that somebody could look at it. It was waiting for us to catch up and observe it. Alternatively, to the extent that it might be sentient, the Lack might have stopped to observe us and develop its own meaning. And it achieved this through the portal that Alice became.
Sorry, I have to stop now, before my brain explodes. Goo goo ga joob.
Do You Love Me? Do We Love One Another?
From Alice’s point of view, perhaps then the Lack simply represented an Other with which she fell in love, and thus might have caused her to fall out of love with Philip.
However, in a way, she was also what the Lack loved. She was the Lack’s Other. She was the source of its meaning. She was the Other’s Other. She loved what the Other loved, and the Other loved her. So ultimately, love brings us back to a love of ourselves, an affirmation or validation of self.
We are each our Other’s Other. When we love one another, we love ourselves. Conversely, if we don’t love ourselves, it’s difficult to love one another.
Only when we feel affirmed or validated, can we feel love. Only then can we escape metaphysical fantasy and return to the reality of love.
I Touched Your Hand Across the Table
This is the sort of physical and metaphysical journey that Lethem takes a reader on.
I have to commend both the imaginative scope of the novel and its execution.
In it, Lethem writes with total command of subject matter, language and tone.
This novel is worth climbing across the table for.
SOUNDTRACK:
Beatles – "I am the Walrus"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI-tkI...
New Order – "Bizarre Love Triangle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uEBuq...
Frente! - "Bizarre Love Triangle" [Cover]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1c9E...
The Human League - "Don't You Want Me"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPudE8...
The Human League - "Don't You Want Me" [Live Mime]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EHpoz...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – "Do You Love Me?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJTjsV...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – "Do You Love Me?" [Live in Berlin]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XXUdu...
This is a re-read of one of my favourite novels. I’ve rated it five stars both times, but the rating assumes that you have a philosophical bent. If you don’t, it might come across as hopelessly abstract and removed from any reality that you know.
If you do have, it might strike you as a stimulating and amusing work of post-modern fiction.
It’s an homage to and pastiche of novels by Lethem’s immediate predecessors such as John Barth’s "The End of the Road" and Don DeLillo’s "White Noise" that deserves to stand proud in their company.
A Universe in a University Lab
Superficially, the novel is a fiction about academia.
The narrator, Philip Engstrand, is a Professor of Anthropology at the fictitious University of North California. His partner is Alice Coombs, a particle physicist who is working with Professor Soft, a Nobel Prize-winner, to create a "baby universe" or a "universe in your backyard" a la the real life theories of Edward Farhi and Alan Guth.
Within this relationship, we also have two distinct cultures: the humanities and science, although perhaps there is a point where cosmology can be seen to cross the boundary between the two, to climb across the table.
Despite the academic and scientific context, the novel is at heart a romantic comedy. Lethem’s prose is dry, but heavily ironic and humorous. Early on, Philip says to Alice:
"I feel an initial singularity…pressed against your spherical symmetry."
Scientific Detachment
Alice ignores his flippancy, preoccupied with the "false vacuum bubble" that Soft has managed to create.
For Soft has ignited a new inflationary universe in the lab, only it has stalled and failed to "detach" from this universe.
Instead, it has developed a breach or a wound akin to a wormhole that allows communication between the two worlds.
Alice refers to the breach as a portal. It’s a rabbit hole that might lead to a wonderland of her own.
Despite the objectivity of her background as a scientist, she can’t help but think of it subjectively. She’s lost the ability to "observe without consciousness", to "observe without subjective judgement". She falls in love with this thing and becomes "estranged from humanness".
Where and to what the portal leads informs the rest of the novel.
An Explosion of Metaphor
Despite the fact that they have created a baby universe, it has ceased to inflate:
"It has stopped being an ‘event’...Now it’s defined by its failure to ‘happen’. An absence. A lack."
Henceforth, this baby universe is known as "the Lack". It’s a breach, a gap, a gulf, a hub, a void. Increasingly estranged from Alice, Philip contemplates:
"The lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world. I felt a secret kinship with it."
How We Avoid Each Other
Both Philip and Alice have their own relationship with the Lack.
It's not just a cosmic void. In a way, it comes to represent the distance, the void between two humans.
If we are intimidated by the void, we will never form a relationship with whatever lies on the other side.
In order to form a relationship, we must communicate across the table, into and through the void. We must explore. We must step into the unknown. We must reach out blindly. We must take risks. We must intimate. We must offer soft intimacies. We must reveal vulnerabilities. We must risk harsh judgments and rejection. We must turn our backs on pride to win love’s rich rewards. We must overcome and defeat the suspicion and jealousy that can undermine love:
"I pictured Alice guiding blind hands to her breasts. Nipples hard like Braille."
Bizarre Love Triangle
Even once we’re "in" a relationship, it can have its own vulnerabilities. As Philip reveals:
"...when I feel distance between us, it’s like there’s something wrong between me and myself. I feel a gulf in myself."
Hence the kinship with the Lack, even though it is the cause of the distance, the gulf between Philip and Alice (unless in reality we can infer that Alice herself, her "Lack-love" is the subjective cause).
Love as a System, a Universe
Determined not to lose Alice, Philip resolves to "teach her human love again", if and whatever way he can. And so we have the set-up of the novel.
An early attempt proves to be fleeting. I want to mention it, not from a plot point of view, but so as to highlight the tongue-in-cheek earnestness with which Lethem describes the attempt:
"I crawled across the margin of floor and held her. I put my arms around her shoulders, my face in her hair. We cried together. Our bodies made one perfect thing, a topological whole, immutable, complete, hollows turned to each other, hollows in alliance. We made a system, a universe. For a moment."
Ironic as the language is, you can see a mock attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of science and the humanities.
The Metaphysical Lack
Soft and Alice discover that they can communicate with the Lack. They position a table adjacent the wormhole and slide objects and messages across it. The Lack accepts some things (which disappear) and rejects others (which remain on the table). In a way, it communicates by a binary yes/no system. Eventually, the physicists believe they’re able to infer the interests and taste of the Lack.
Philip adopts an almost Kantian approach to the Lack:
"You seem to be saying that Lack is a metaphysical phenomenon. So I should be just as qualified as you to uncover his meaning. If he is, as you say, interested in the idea of things in themselves. Meanings. Texts."
The novel shifts from physics to metaphysics.
One of the physicists proves to be a subjectivist:
"Consciousness creates reality. Only when there is a mind to consider the world is there a world. Nothing before, except potential. Potential this, potential that. The creation event, the big bang – it was the creation of enormous potential, nothing more...[There’s no world where there isn’t a mentality to consider a world…There’s just a gap…a lack.] Consciousness writes reality…wherever we look we find reality forming in response...I think there is a principle of conservation of reality. Reality is unwilling to fully exist without an observer. It can’t be bothered. Why should it?"
You have to ask whether the baby universe stalled so that somebody could look at it. It was waiting for us to catch up and observe it. Alternatively, to the extent that it might be sentient, the Lack might have stopped to observe us and develop its own meaning. And it achieved this through the portal that Alice became.
Sorry, I have to stop now, before my brain explodes. Goo goo ga joob.
Do You Love Me? Do We Love One Another?
From Alice’s point of view, perhaps then the Lack simply represented an Other with which she fell in love, and thus might have caused her to fall out of love with Philip.
However, in a way, she was also what the Lack loved. She was the Lack’s Other. She was the source of its meaning. She was the Other’s Other. She loved what the Other loved, and the Other loved her. So ultimately, love brings us back to a love of ourselves, an affirmation or validation of self.
We are each our Other’s Other. When we love one another, we love ourselves. Conversely, if we don’t love ourselves, it’s difficult to love one another.
Only when we feel affirmed or validated, can we feel love. Only then can we escape metaphysical fantasy and return to the reality of love.
I Touched Your Hand Across the Table
This is the sort of physical and metaphysical journey that Lethem takes a reader on.
I have to commend both the imaginative scope of the novel and its execution.
In it, Lethem writes with total command of subject matter, language and tone.
This novel is worth climbing across the table for.
SOUNDTRACK:
Beatles – "I am the Walrus"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI-tkI...
New Order – "Bizarre Love Triangle"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uEBuq...
Frente! - "Bizarre Love Triangle" [Cover]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1c9E...
The Human League - "Don't You Want Me"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPudE8...
The Human League - "Don't You Want Me" [Live Mime]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EHpoz...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – "Do You Love Me?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJTjsV...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – "Do You Love Me?" [Live in Berlin]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XXUdu...
January 6, 2020
-Otra forma de escribir una historia sobre el amor, que no exactamente de amor.-
Género. Novela (con un punto de partida fantástico, eso sí).
Lo que nos cuenta. En el libro Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa (publicación original: As She Climbed Across the Table, 1997) conocemos a Philip, profesor adjunto en el departamento de antropología de la Universidad de California del Norte, y a Alice, profesora adjunta especializada en física de partículas de la misma universidad. Llevan viviendo casi un año juntos y Philip piensa ya en matrimonio, pero su relación cambia cuando los físicos consiguen abrir, en las instalaciones de la universidad, un universo en miniatura al que llaman Ausencia de forma cariñosa.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
Género. Novela (con un punto de partida fantástico, eso sí).
Lo que nos cuenta. En el libro Cuando Alice se subió a la mesa (publicación original: As She Climbed Across the Table, 1997) conocemos a Philip, profesor adjunto en el departamento de antropología de la Universidad de California del Norte, y a Alice, profesora adjunta especializada en física de partículas de la misma universidad. Llevan viviendo casi un año juntos y Philip piensa ya en matrimonio, pero su relación cambia cuando los físicos consiguen abrir, en las instalaciones de la universidad, un universo en miniatura al que llaman Ausencia de forma cariñosa.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
August 15, 2008
There was a ten- or twenty-year period when literary fiction writers started to pay a lot of attention to science writing: Stoppard read Gleick's Chaos and wrote Arcadia; Richard Powers boned up on his Turing and wrote Galatea 2.2; and so on. This was well after the seventy-five-year drought that was modernism. (You can search Eliot's writing for days, trying in vain to find a single reference to the scientific upheavals of his time that isn't derisive, mystical, or silly.)
The problem is, there isn't always all that great a reason to use science as an analogy. When you read Galatea 2.2, the novel this most closely resembles (but falls well short of), you get the sense that Powers has given a thought or three to the content and not merely the form of artificial intelligence, that he respects scientists and considers their practices a way to inform oneself of human nature in a way that literature may not always cover. Stoppard might riff on Fermat, but the epistemological difficulties introduced by chaos theory are lived by the two sets of characters in Arcadia, and not just talked about or used as a metaphor for their couplings and quarrels.
This book is lighter than either of those other works, but not on purpose. I don't think Lethem really has the horsepower - no, it doesn't take horsepower, he doesn't have the dedication, or maybe interest - to allow physics to disclose its cobwebbed corners. It isn't as funny as Arcadia because it takes itself far too seriously to develop an incidental sense of humor. Instead, Lethem gives us a postmodern novel that fusses around idiotically with dialectics of absence, and then tries to send up pretentious postmodern professors who fuss around with dialectics of absence.
To make matters worse, Lethem's verbal spectacular can't even stand up to the weightless inanity of his plot here. This is an actual line from the book, describing the narrator's feelings toward his estranged physicist girlfriend who won't talk to him:
It doesn't really feel fair to quote that out of context, but yes, it is at least as bad as that most of the way through the book.
This book is short enough not to have been an utter waste of time. I really enjoyed Girl In Landscape and Motherless Brooklyn, so I was really surprised to find As She Climbed Across the Table to be such a load of crap. Don't read this if you are in danger of being disappointed by a pretty good writer - it might put you off his other, better novels.
The problem is, there isn't always all that great a reason to use science as an analogy. When you read Galatea 2.2, the novel this most closely resembles (but falls well short of), you get the sense that Powers has given a thought or three to the content and not merely the form of artificial intelligence, that he respects scientists and considers their practices a way to inform oneself of human nature in a way that literature may not always cover. Stoppard might riff on Fermat, but the epistemological difficulties introduced by chaos theory are lived by the two sets of characters in Arcadia, and not just talked about or used as a metaphor for their couplings and quarrels.
This book is lighter than either of those other works, but not on purpose. I don't think Lethem really has the horsepower - no, it doesn't take horsepower, he doesn't have the dedication, or maybe interest - to allow physics to disclose its cobwebbed corners. It isn't as funny as Arcadia because it takes itself far too seriously to develop an incidental sense of humor. Instead, Lethem gives us a postmodern novel that fusses around idiotically with dialectics of absence, and then tries to send up pretentious postmodern professors who fuss around with dialectics of absence.
To make matters worse, Lethem's verbal spectacular can't even stand up to the weightless inanity of his plot here. This is an actual line from the book, describing the narrator's feelings toward his estranged physicist girlfriend who won't talk to him:
My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.
It doesn't really feel fair to quote that out of context, but yes, it is at least as bad as that most of the way through the book.
This book is short enough not to have been an utter waste of time. I really enjoyed Girl In Landscape and Motherless Brooklyn, so I was really surprised to find As She Climbed Across the Table to be such a load of crap. Don't read this if you are in danger of being disappointed by a pretty good writer - it might put you off his other, better novels.
December 16, 2021
Very clever central conceit – a man loses his lover to a black hole of nothingness – executed stylishly. Lethem has enough tricks up his sleeve to maintain the tongue-in-cheek blend of love story and scientific wankery.
September 30, 2010
My twin loathed As She Climbed Across The Table. We discussed her reasons why years ago and I can't recall how she put it (better than my swiss cheese in a rat trap memory ever could, no doubt. Y'know, there's holes. I miss the basics. Yeah, I suck at analogies). I'd ask her, but she hates Lethem, and gets mad whenever I try and get her to read Girl in Landscape.
I liked it because ultimately I understood that it was a nobody is getting what they need/want love relationship. Lethem got it and I felt I could get it in those terms. A black hole. Right. Yeah, the academic science achievers could feel as cold as their laboratories and laboratory rats. I wouldn't have been in love with either Alice or Philip or Lack (or maybe the lack. I've been in love with what I thought was there that wasn't ever there). It always annoys the shit out of me to read about how great some chick looked with her hair blowing in the wind and a sun dress. That means nothing to me. Still... Lethem explained why someone else pined for that to me better than any relationship anyone has ever told me about in one-sided after the fact explanations. I gotta wonder if all explanations are just whatever someone can come up with to explain what didn't work. If someone can do better than that then I'm sold.
Ian McEwan's Enduring Love comes to mind now. It depressed me to think of being in love with that chick but still I got it. All I ask is to be able to get on another's love wavelength. I'll never get love.
I liked it because ultimately I understood that it was a nobody is getting what they need/want love relationship. Lethem got it and I felt I could get it in those terms. A black hole. Right. Yeah, the academic science achievers could feel as cold as their laboratories and laboratory rats. I wouldn't have been in love with either Alice or Philip or Lack (or maybe the lack. I've been in love with what I thought was there that wasn't ever there). It always annoys the shit out of me to read about how great some chick looked with her hair blowing in the wind and a sun dress. That means nothing to me. Still... Lethem explained why someone else pined for that to me better than any relationship anyone has ever told me about in one-sided after the fact explanations. I gotta wonder if all explanations are just whatever someone can come up with to explain what didn't work. If someone can do better than that then I'm sold.
Ian McEwan's Enduring Love comes to mind now. It depressed me to think of being in love with that chick but still I got it. All I ask is to be able to get on another's love wavelength. I'll never get love.
April 14, 2025
Mr. Lethem's slim novel about unrequited love, a love triangle consisting of a professor couple, and literally nothing.
Philip and Alice who love too much. Philip loves Alice but she loves Lack- which is a seductive nothingness.
It's a beautiful meditation on love and the loyalties that keep people together filled with humor and a riff on science fiction (Philip K Dick comes to mind, literally) and surreal love stories.
Philip and Alice who love too much. Philip loves Alice but she loves Lack- which is a seductive nothingness.
It's a beautiful meditation on love and the loyalties that keep people together filled with humor and a riff on science fiction (Philip K Dick comes to mind, literally) and surreal love stories.
March 26, 2018
Video Review
Follows in the tradition of the best science fiction to picture the way a ground-breaking discovery messes up the life of a likeably dysfunctional professor, and the microcosm of his campus. It made me afraid I'd laugh in public places. It moved me. The dialogue was so good it hurt. I feel like climbing up that table myself.
Follows in the tradition of the best science fiction to picture the way a ground-breaking discovery messes up the life of a likeably dysfunctional professor, and the microcosm of his campus. It made me afraid I'd laugh in public places. It moved me. The dialogue was so good it hurt. I feel like climbing up that table myself.
February 8, 2014
This book has everything I usually love. Literary fiction. Weird metaphoric writing. Symbolism. Unrequited love. Physics. And yet...
I hated it. I hated every page, every character, every piece of dialogue. I hated how every line was an unsubtle metaphor, I hated how I couldn't tell if the lack of subtlety was intentional or not. Everyone kept saying things that sounded deep at first pass, but didn't mean anything, just paragraphs of literary nonsense and fake physics. I can tell it's supposed to be satire and my friend described it as "fun", but it was too bleak, the people too weak and disturbed, the entire world too skewed. It reminded me of that part of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice goes to the home with the awful pepper cooks and the pig baby that won't stop screaming.
I kept waiting for the click, the next chapter, the moment when it would transform into a delight. The story became a meta-representation of my own experience reading it. There had to be something there, something more to all this nothing. I needed it to give me something, to pay back my continued attention, a reward for my diligence. Instead, it just sat on my desk, silent and waiting, until I forced myself to pick it up again. I wanted to be a person who loved this book. I tried harder, forced myself to read it from different perspectives. Nothing worked. I couldn't stop thinking about it, but I felt like I lacked the language necessary to properly articulate my feelings. Then I realized I was acting out the central conceit of the story in an increasingly recursive loop between myself and it, and hated it even more for putting me in a position that forced me to recognize its objective merits.
Can a book deserve both one and five stars? Would it even deserve five stars if I could be that person, or am I so fascinated by my own loathing that I've overestimated it's quality? I think I'm projecting all these issues onto something too insubstantial to support them. I don't know. I hated Alice in Wonderland and I hate this book.
I hated it. I hated every page, every character, every piece of dialogue. I hated how every line was an unsubtle metaphor, I hated how I couldn't tell if the lack of subtlety was intentional or not. Everyone kept saying things that sounded deep at first pass, but didn't mean anything, just paragraphs of literary nonsense and fake physics. I can tell it's supposed to be satire and my friend described it as "fun", but it was too bleak, the people too weak and disturbed, the entire world too skewed. It reminded me of that part of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice goes to the home with the awful pepper cooks and the pig baby that won't stop screaming.
I kept waiting for the click, the next chapter, the moment when it would transform into a delight. The story became a meta-representation of my own experience reading it. There had to be something there, something more to all this nothing. I needed it to give me something, to pay back my continued attention, a reward for my diligence. Instead, it just sat on my desk, silent and waiting, until I forced myself to pick it up again. I wanted to be a person who loved this book. I tried harder, forced myself to read it from different perspectives. Nothing worked. I couldn't stop thinking about it, but I felt like I lacked the language necessary to properly articulate my feelings. Then I realized I was acting out the central conceit of the story in an increasingly recursive loop between myself and it, and hated it even more for putting me in a position that forced me to recognize its objective merits.
Can a book deserve both one and five stars? Would it even deserve five stars if I could be that person, or am I so fascinated by my own loathing that I've overestimated it's quality? I think I'm projecting all these issues onto something too insubstantial to support them. I don't know. I hated Alice in Wonderland and I hate this book.
May 16, 2023
09/2011
Intellectually fascinating. Not the warmest or most likable - but it's a book about a void, "a lack." Impressed as always with Lethem's blend of sci fi and literature.
Intellectually fascinating. Not the warmest or most likable - but it's a book about a void, "a lack." Impressed as always with Lethem's blend of sci fi and literature.
March 3, 2025
As She Climbed Across the Table is a science fiction novel by author Jonathan Lethem, who is best known for The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, the latter of which was made into a star-studded and apparently underrated Hollywood movie with the same name. Though Lethem is known for these contemporary fiction novels, he has also written several science fiction entries, of which this is one.
The story follows a group of physicists who open up a parallel universe as an experiment at their university physics facility. One of the creators of the new universe is Professor Alice Coombs, who is currently in a relationship with fellow Professor Philip Engstrand, of the university's anthropology department. It is soon revealed that the new universe is a sort of personality, which comes to be known as Lack (because of its sheer lack of any substance or definition). Things can be thrown at the boundary of Lack, and some things are rejected while others are accepted and disappear from the lab.
Alice bizarrely falls in love with Lack, to the great dismay of Engstrand, and he spends the rest of the book trying to win her back, all the while navigating a cast of quirky characters, like the blind friends Evan and Garth, a visiting Italian physicist named Braxia, and a strange rogue Professor named Georges De Tooth. During this time, Alice is trying to offer herself to Lack and, having been rejected by it, trying change herself to be more impressive to it so it will love her as she loves it and eventually accept her into its unknown reaches.
This was an interesting read. If I could describe Lethem's books in one word, I'd say they're "quirky". They can be dry, but there's an underlying friendliness and silliness to them, and they can be quite funny at times. In this one, the two blind friends initially annoyed me due to their spastic and obsessive personalities, but they eventually grew on me and I came to love them somewhat. The ending in this one was also pretty good, and I thought it was a fitting and satisfying way to end the story.
Overall, this is worth a read if you're into speculative science fiction that has something interesting to say. This one definitely does, particularly about the futility and guesswork that is sometimes inherent in bleeding edge scientific research, and on the topic of unrequited love and love in general.
It's not a perfect book, but in my opinion it's worth checking out.
The story follows a group of physicists who open up a parallel universe as an experiment at their university physics facility. One of the creators of the new universe is Professor Alice Coombs, who is currently in a relationship with fellow Professor Philip Engstrand, of the university's anthropology department. It is soon revealed that the new universe is a sort of personality, which comes to be known as Lack (because of its sheer lack of any substance or definition). Things can be thrown at the boundary of Lack, and some things are rejected while others are accepted and disappear from the lab.
Alice bizarrely falls in love with Lack, to the great dismay of Engstrand, and he spends the rest of the book trying to win her back, all the while navigating a cast of quirky characters, like the blind friends Evan and Garth, a visiting Italian physicist named Braxia, and a strange rogue Professor named Georges De Tooth. During this time, Alice is trying to offer herself to Lack and, having been rejected by it, trying change herself to be more impressive to it so it will love her as she loves it and eventually accept her into its unknown reaches.
This was an interesting read. If I could describe Lethem's books in one word, I'd say they're "quirky". They can be dry, but there's an underlying friendliness and silliness to them, and they can be quite funny at times. In this one, the two blind friends initially annoyed me due to their spastic and obsessive personalities, but they eventually grew on me and I came to love them somewhat. The ending in this one was also pretty good, and I thought it was a fitting and satisfying way to end the story.
Overall, this is worth a read if you're into speculative science fiction that has something interesting to say. This one definitely does, particularly about the futility and guesswork that is sometimes inherent in bleeding edge scientific research, and on the topic of unrequited love and love in general.
It's not a perfect book, but in my opinion it's worth checking out.
September 11, 2008
A quick two-day break from Ulysses because I didn't want to lug it around by bike last Monday, and was way too underslept for Joyce today.
As She Climbed Across the Table is the most and least science-ish of the early quartet of Lethem science fiction novels before he redefined himself with Motherless Brooklyn. Most in that the plot derives from a university physics experiment, and least in that beyond being the catalyst, the science is pretty thin. Either way, it rarely feels like genre fiction, and is more directly a satire of academia, and an examination of attachments. Like other Lethem of the era, it's brisk and entertaining, but the more contemporary reality-grounded setting and characters make it somewhat less imaginatively strange and compelling as the work that preceded it. And the endlessly garrulous protagonist, clearly as amused by his own cleverness as Lethem seems to have been when penning his dialogue (to be sure, his quips are amusing), can get tiresome. I'm not convinced I'd want to hang out with the guy for long, so I feel somewhat less for his plight. Even so, the novel does get back points where those prior novels did, in following its logic headlong into the utterly bizarre where needed. But then, perhaps it loses points for the attendant lack of restraint. In this case, it's especially glaring, as those bits represent a rather unexpected shift in tone and style.
As She Climbed Across the Table is the most and least science-ish of the early quartet of Lethem science fiction novels before he redefined himself with Motherless Brooklyn. Most in that the plot derives from a university physics experiment, and least in that beyond being the catalyst, the science is pretty thin. Either way, it rarely feels like genre fiction, and is more directly a satire of academia, and an examination of attachments. Like other Lethem of the era, it's brisk and entertaining, but the more contemporary reality-grounded setting and characters make it somewhat less imaginatively strange and compelling as the work that preceded it. And the endlessly garrulous protagonist, clearly as amused by his own cleverness as Lethem seems to have been when penning his dialogue (to be sure, his quips are amusing), can get tiresome. I'm not convinced I'd want to hang out with the guy for long, so I feel somewhat less for his plight. Even so, the novel does get back points where those prior novels did, in following its logic headlong into the utterly bizarre where needed. But then, perhaps it loses points for the attendant lack of restraint. In this case, it's especially glaring, as those bits represent a rather unexpected shift in tone and style.
November 6, 2011
Recommended for English major types only.
This is a "literary" novel that borrows from science fiction, rather than the other way around. (You get sentences like, "the lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world," and, "We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him …") Which isn't a criticism or a particular selling point (I love both), more of warning: you have to read it according to the right genre conventions or you'll probably come out hating it.
Tonally, it's a balance of poetic, ironic, and this weirdly restrained hysterical absurdism. I can't stand over-the-top satire; I prefer absurdism delivered with a straight face, and that's what Lethem does. He targets academia with the vitriol and the wry fondness of having been there, done that.
This both is and isn't a character-driven novel. Lethem gets zero points for naturalistic, well-rounded character development, but a perfect score for investigating basic conditions of romantic relationships in a way that's thorough, jarring, and honest. I loved that. It's also short and doesn't waste words.
(In a way, this novel reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: academics trying to study a phenomenon that can't be studied, and really only learn the limits of their own knowledge.)
This is a "literary" novel that borrows from science fiction, rather than the other way around. (You get sentences like, "the lack was obviously an explosion of metaphor into a literal world," and, "We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him …") Which isn't a criticism or a particular selling point (I love both), more of warning: you have to read it according to the right genre conventions or you'll probably come out hating it.
Tonally, it's a balance of poetic, ironic, and this weirdly restrained hysterical absurdism. I can't stand over-the-top satire; I prefer absurdism delivered with a straight face, and that's what Lethem does. He targets academia with the vitriol and the wry fondness of having been there, done that.
This both is and isn't a character-driven novel. Lethem gets zero points for naturalistic, well-rounded character development, but a perfect score for investigating basic conditions of romantic relationships in a way that's thorough, jarring, and honest. I loved that. It's also short and doesn't waste words.
(In a way, this novel reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: academics trying to study a phenomenon that can't be studied, and really only learn the limits of their own knowledge.)
September 28, 2017
I found this book a bit weird, crazy and funny at times. I was confused as to what the heck these people were thinking. I think they all need their heads examined. LOL
May 29, 2008
Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table is two books in one: a parable about love and obsession, and a sharp satire of academia. It is narrated by Phillip Engstrand, a sociology professor who talks entirely too much. Phillip tells us the story of Lack, a hole in the universe opened by an accident of physics, and of the various academics who find themselves drawn in by it (pun probably intended).
Phillip's lover, Alice, is one such academic. She is a particle physicist who is entranced by what she perceives as Lack's personality- that is, his preference for some objects over others, and his seeming rejection of her. As the story progresses her obsession becomes more pronounced and more painful, sending ripples of cause and effect through Phillip and the entire campus as our protagonist tries first to win her back, and then to simply understand.
As She Climbed Across the Table was billed in most reviews I read as a satire, and it certainly is. At times, in fact, the satirical elements of the story seemed heavy-handed to me, as though Lethem was just wallowing around and being impressed by his own cleverness. And make no mistake- Lethem is definitely impressed with himself. His writing is showy almost to the point of being irritating, if you're the sort of person who's irritated by that kind of thing. He uses obscure words where perfectly common ones would have been more effective, and his characters occasionally turn into nothing more than mouthpieces for his witty dialogue.
When he succeeds he is dazzling, as with some of his subtle reminders that academia always ends up eating itself, and there are enough of these successful moments to keep the reader going. His points are often brought home by the secondary characters, most of whom are more charming and interesting than the protagonist. I was always glad to see Evan and Garth, Lethem's blind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, make an appearance.
I also saw the book billed as a comic novel, but I honestly didn't see it. There are lines and situations that made me chuckle, sure, but they didn't seem to live up to the "laugh out loud hilarious" reviews I'd read. If no one had told me I wouldn't have known that the book was supposed to be comic. Perhaps Lethem didn't know either.
The second level of the novel, the part that gets lost, is a story of the people on campus and how they are affected by Lack's arrival. This is the story I thought I was going to be reading when I opened the book, and I ultimately ended up sad when it wasn't there. It covers all the bases- the selfish nature of being in love, obsession, self-image, etc.- but ultimately in what feels like a very shallow way. More than once I found myself wishing that the story was told from Alice's point of view or, honestly, from anyone but Phillip's. But, alas, the book was never supposed to be about this story. It's merely a vehicle for the satire.
As She Climbed Across the Table reads very quickly, and for that reason alone I'm not sorry I read it. Had I invested more time, I probably would have been a lot more annoyed. Read it if you enjoy satire more than the average bear, or if you're looking for something quick to fill the space between other books. At the very least it managed to pique my interest in Lethem's other books, and I'm hoping that in his later works he manages to live up to the potential this one showed.
Phillip's lover, Alice, is one such academic. She is a particle physicist who is entranced by what she perceives as Lack's personality- that is, his preference for some objects over others, and his seeming rejection of her. As the story progresses her obsession becomes more pronounced and more painful, sending ripples of cause and effect through Phillip and the entire campus as our protagonist tries first to win her back, and then to simply understand.
As She Climbed Across the Table was billed in most reviews I read as a satire, and it certainly is. At times, in fact, the satirical elements of the story seemed heavy-handed to me, as though Lethem was just wallowing around and being impressed by his own cleverness. And make no mistake- Lethem is definitely impressed with himself. His writing is showy almost to the point of being irritating, if you're the sort of person who's irritated by that kind of thing. He uses obscure words where perfectly common ones would have been more effective, and his characters occasionally turn into nothing more than mouthpieces for his witty dialogue.
When he succeeds he is dazzling, as with some of his subtle reminders that academia always ends up eating itself, and there are enough of these successful moments to keep the reader going. His points are often brought home by the secondary characters, most of whom are more charming and interesting than the protagonist. I was always glad to see Evan and Garth, Lethem's blind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, make an appearance.
I also saw the book billed as a comic novel, but I honestly didn't see it. There are lines and situations that made me chuckle, sure, but they didn't seem to live up to the "laugh out loud hilarious" reviews I'd read. If no one had told me I wouldn't have known that the book was supposed to be comic. Perhaps Lethem didn't know either.
The second level of the novel, the part that gets lost, is a story of the people on campus and how they are affected by Lack's arrival. This is the story I thought I was going to be reading when I opened the book, and I ultimately ended up sad when it wasn't there. It covers all the bases- the selfish nature of being in love, obsession, self-image, etc.- but ultimately in what feels like a very shallow way. More than once I found myself wishing that the story was told from Alice's point of view or, honestly, from anyone but Phillip's. But, alas, the book was never supposed to be about this story. It's merely a vehicle for the satire.
As She Climbed Across the Table reads very quickly, and for that reason alone I'm not sorry I read it. Had I invested more time, I probably would have been a lot more annoyed. Read it if you enjoy satire more than the average bear, or if you're looking for something quick to fill the space between other books. At the very least it managed to pique my interest in Lethem's other books, and I'm hoping that in his later works he manages to live up to the potential this one showed.
January 30, 2024
Excellent novel that I was very lucky to find a copy of in the romance section (lol) of Thryft in the now-shut Peace Center.
I found myself annotating unprompted; in a pretty ironic/perhaps appropriate twist, I found it more challenging to comprehend than any novel I've read in the past year and yet compelled to comprehend it. It's an extremely pretentious novel that references a lot of academic jargon and politics -- that's the kind of book I like, but might be off-putting to others. In my view, Jonathan Lethem takes an interesting prompt and responds with a novel with even more dimensions, puzzling themes, and theories plausible enough to be fun to consider than I could have anticipated. Chapter 27 was my particular favorite. Despite its esoteric nature, it's also a human book about love.
I found myself annotating unprompted; in a pretty ironic/perhaps appropriate twist, I found it more challenging to comprehend than any novel I've read in the past year and yet compelled to comprehend it. It's an extremely pretentious novel that references a lot of academic jargon and politics -- that's the kind of book I like, but might be off-putting to others. In my view, Jonathan Lethem takes an interesting prompt and responds with a novel with even more dimensions, puzzling themes, and theories plausible enough to be fun to consider than I could have anticipated. Chapter 27 was my particular favorite. Despite its esoteric nature, it's also a human book about love.
May 5, 2025
Jonathan Lethem is quite an inventive author. Even better the second time around.
4.5 ⭐️
4.5 ⭐️
December 4, 2023
no book should contain the words “something happened to my penis”
September 15, 2013
for better (and of course, definitely worse) I was in New York City around the turn of the millenium. one of the appeals of city life is the illusion it gives of "centrality." certain Manhattan movie theatres have day-before national release distribution of motion pictures (I saw Sophia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION a day before Michigan and Arizona); every once in a grand while a internationally-renowned celebrity walks non-chalantly past you on the sidewalk; author readings; Central Park and Bryant Park concerts and screenings; planned media events. By merely living on that oddly shaped 8 x 22 mile shaft called Man-hattan, you can almost pretend to yourself that you yourself are an important VIP, that your thoughts, readings, friendship circles and whatnot are part of some grand intercontinental network, that you are a tastemaker, that your recommendations in cabs and at the Hudson Hotel bar will be overheard and passed along the great chain of people-to-people information.
as far as literature goes, Motherless Brooklyn was one of those set-in-New-York, released-first-in-New-York authorial event-incidents that mark the grand metropolitan life. people Paul Auster and Jennifer Egan are in many ways simultaneously part of the social fabric of the city they document, and if you're just off the Southwest Airlines flight from Portland, you can far more impress any suitable females if you actually recognize Auster or DeLillo. I passed Woody Allen on the street and disdained him. the support crew shot me a look of worship. but sometimes the phenomenoa goes both ways. what can you do with three people on the subway have 'Motherless Brooklyn' out? how do you react to two hours of conversation at a Lexington Avenue Starbucks about JL? possibly you blowback--i.e., you pooh-pooh the perfectly competent book.
I'm almost suspected my current 3-star *** on Brooklyn is a result of all that. didn't I speed-read through it? wasn't it a majority-decision bookclub choice (always a recipe for insipidity)? for whatever reason, even though I haven't seen a copy of the book for some years I ranked it at 3. Girl in Landscape wasn't that a somewhat understated but subtly delightful 4? again, agh, I don't have a copy off-hand. have to safe-rank it at the 3 and await getting another dog-eared copy. Fortress of Solitude, on the other hand, probably a high-3 regardless. some passages that are authorial reminscence rather than authorial construction. ding-ding points on that.
the point of all this long-winded meandering is that I think I'm 'compensation' rating this at the 5. if I cheated Lethem out of a 1/3rd star on Brooklyn and possibly as much as the full star on Girl, I guess that adds up to the 4.2 or 4.3 this book deserves and counter-ways to the full 5. this would put Lethem at the apparently appropriate 3.75 or whatever, and although it opens up the possibility I will later up-rate Girl and then ease down here, for now, we'll hold it at the 5.
arguments for 5:
*light, 'post-modern' piece; no heavy going anywhere, no
*literary form of a Wes Anderson movie; literary form of I-heart-Huckabees 'existential detective' motifs
*very skillful (shouldn't be under-rated) mixing of genres: campus novel meets pomo-philo piece meets light allegory
*numerous allegorial rereads: substitute 'love' 'death' 'chance' 'time' 'sex' 'ravine' 'adulthood' for Lack and you have, voila, seven new novels!
arguments for 4 or below:
* short, just 224 pages
* treatment of post-modernism vs. physics as top negative reviewer on entry notse has been handled--and with more depth/complexity
* Lethem edges close to shocking but never quite crosses over?
so, here's the 5 for now, prone to a possibly slight edge-down to 4, but under no circumstances a 3; a strong, short, punchy Lethem.
as far as literature goes, Motherless Brooklyn was one of those set-in-New-York, released-first-in-New-York authorial event-incidents that mark the grand metropolitan life. people Paul Auster and Jennifer Egan are in many ways simultaneously part of the social fabric of the city they document, and if you're just off the Southwest Airlines flight from Portland, you can far more impress any suitable females if you actually recognize Auster or DeLillo. I passed Woody Allen on the street and disdained him. the support crew shot me a look of worship. but sometimes the phenomenoa goes both ways. what can you do with three people on the subway have 'Motherless Brooklyn' out? how do you react to two hours of conversation at a Lexington Avenue Starbucks about JL? possibly you blowback--i.e., you pooh-pooh the perfectly competent book.
I'm almost suspected my current 3-star *** on Brooklyn is a result of all that. didn't I speed-read through it? wasn't it a majority-decision bookclub choice (always a recipe for insipidity)? for whatever reason, even though I haven't seen a copy of the book for some years I ranked it at 3. Girl in Landscape wasn't that a somewhat understated but subtly delightful 4? again, agh, I don't have a copy off-hand. have to safe-rank it at the 3 and await getting another dog-eared copy. Fortress of Solitude, on the other hand, probably a high-3 regardless. some passages that are authorial reminscence rather than authorial construction. ding-ding points on that.
the point of all this long-winded meandering is that I think I'm 'compensation' rating this at the 5. if I cheated Lethem out of a 1/3rd star on Brooklyn and possibly as much as the full star on Girl, I guess that adds up to the 4.2 or 4.3 this book deserves and counter-ways to the full 5. this would put Lethem at the apparently appropriate 3.75 or whatever, and although it opens up the possibility I will later up-rate Girl and then ease down here, for now, we'll hold it at the 5.
arguments for 5:
*light, 'post-modern' piece; no heavy going anywhere, no
*literary form of a Wes Anderson movie; literary form of I-heart-Huckabees 'existential detective' motifs
*very skillful (shouldn't be under-rated) mixing of genres: campus novel meets pomo-philo piece meets light allegory
*numerous allegorial rereads: substitute 'love' 'death' 'chance' 'time' 'sex' 'ravine' 'adulthood' for Lack and you have, voila, seven new novels!
arguments for 4 or below:
* short, just 224 pages
* treatment of post-modernism vs. physics as top negative reviewer on entry notse has been handled--and with more depth/complexity
* Lethem edges close to shocking but never quite crosses over?
so, here's the 5 for now, prone to a possibly slight edge-down to 4, but under no circumstances a 3; a strong, short, punchy Lethem.
August 1, 2008
I'm not one of those people who read every book by my favorite authors, although I probably should. Having loved both 'Motherless Brooklyn' and 'Fortress of Solitude' (and I seriously mean loved), I really couldn't resist this post-modern love story with Lethem's attendant literary trickery.
The story is a bizarre love triangle, with the twist that the third side is represented by a curious cosmological entity named only "Lack." Tongue in cheek existential feminism, anyone?
There is so much going on here, it's dizzying. And because of that its just too much. Like a bright child who wants to dazzle all the time, ASCAT (for short) fizzles a bit. A breezy style hides the complexity, but there's just a bit of unfocusedness that makes this not-quite-a-gem.
Still, love/haters of academia and Lethem fanboy/girls will absolutely love this.
The story is a bizarre love triangle, with the twist that the third side is represented by a curious cosmological entity named only "Lack." Tongue in cheek existential feminism, anyone?
There is so much going on here, it's dizzying. And because of that its just too much. Like a bright child who wants to dazzle all the time, ASCAT (for short) fizzles a bit. A breezy style hides the complexity, but there's just a bit of unfocusedness that makes this not-quite-a-gem.
Still, love/haters of academia and Lethem fanboy/girls will absolutely love this.
June 29, 2007
This was a thoroughly good novel. As irritated as pseudoscience usually makes me, Lethem did a good job of not taking it seriously enough for me to want to strangle him. Plus some of it was kind of cool - the idea of using nerve-blind people as a unique kind of observer, for example. I wish the book had broken my heart more, but I suppose it's meant to be more funny than heartbreaking.
October 25, 2018
Read the full review on my Blog Let's Geek: https://lets-geek.blogspot.com/2018/1...
I probably am too dumb for this book. Heavy on philosophy and science.
Did you ever read a book, and once you put it down, you asked yourself: What the hell did I just read? That is what I thought when reading As She Climbed Across the Table.
Total Rating: 2.8/10
Originality: 5/10
Language: 2/10
Atmosphere: 2/10
Characters: 4/10
World building: 2/10
Fun: 2/10
Predictability: 2/10
Believable: 2/10
Relevancy: 4/10
Cover: 3/10
Genre: SciFi, Love Story
For You if you like: Philosophical, highly sophisticated writing
Time It Took Me To Read: approx. 1.5 hours
“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
This book is heavy on philosophy - not something I usually go for, and therefore maybe didn't enjoy as much as other readers would.
THE BOOK:
The novel tells a story of academia. Phillip, a Anthropology professor, tells the story from his point of view. His partner Alice is a particle physicist in the same university. The worlds of humanities and science collide. One day, Professor Soft created some sort of universe, a wormhole in his lab, the centre of the story.
Originality: 5/10
Have you ever read a book that made you feel too dumb? This is one of those. And this is not necessarily a bad thing - maybe I AM too dumb. I am no phycisist; I don't like philosophy, and I
Language: 2/10
This is one of the most confusing use of prose I ever read. I am sure some people loved and enjoyed it, but I did not get the humour or irony. I was probably too dumb.
"I feel an initial singularity…pressed against your spherical symmetry."
“My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.”
... What?
So you see, the narrating style is very unique. Maybe that is your thing.
However, what is inexcusable, is the amount of time people used each other's first names when speaking to each other. I noticed I find it weird calling my husband by his name, because I do it so rarely unless I speak about him. That is how rarely I call him. But here, it is a literal ping ping.
"Philip!"
"Alice."
"Philip..."
Atmosphere: 2/10
This novel is very weird indeed. I did feel a very complex love story behind the confusing narrative.
Characters: 4/10
I did not understand the character's motivation, not did I particularly liked them. Alice's scientific background and pragmatism she should have does not match the illogical emotionally driven decisions she makes,
World building: 2/10
Physics and science are at the core of this world - two topics I do not know much about, so yeah, maybe not a good book pick.
Fun: 2/10
I really did not enjoy it. I was hoping of a short-ish science fiction novel, but ended up with a philosophy and metaphor heavy story that needed complete focus. I can see that others enjoy the prose - but I did not. However I did not HATE what I have read, it did not make me angry, therefore it still deserves some points. I was almost annoyed at it, because I felt like I should like it, but I just didn't.
Predictability: 2/10
I don't even know what the hell was happening.
Believable: 2/10
Everything was so weird, I did not believe or get most of it.
Relevancy: 4/10
I feel that I have read something incredibly relevant, I just cannot figure out what it is.
Cover: 3/10
Total Verdict: 2.8/10
Part of me thinks this book deserves a better rating, but I can't help it that I did not like it. I am sure some readers will absolutely adore this book. So if whatever I have said tickles your fancy, you should check it out.
Read the full review on my Blog Let's Geek: https://lets-geek.blogspot.com/2018/1...
I probably am too dumb for this book. Heavy on philosophy and science.
Did you ever read a book, and once you put it down, you asked yourself: What the hell did I just read? That is what I thought when reading As She Climbed Across the Table.
Total Rating: 2.8/10
Originality: 5/10
Language: 2/10
Atmosphere: 2/10
Characters: 4/10
World building: 2/10
Fun: 2/10
Predictability: 2/10
Believable: 2/10
Relevancy: 4/10
Cover: 3/10
Genre: SciFi, Love Story
For You if you like: Philosophical, highly sophisticated writing
Time It Took Me To Read: approx. 1.5 hours
“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
This book is heavy on philosophy - not something I usually go for, and therefore maybe didn't enjoy as much as other readers would.
THE BOOK:
The novel tells a story of academia. Phillip, a Anthropology professor, tells the story from his point of view. His partner Alice is a particle physicist in the same university. The worlds of humanities and science collide. One day, Professor Soft created some sort of universe, a wormhole in his lab, the centre of the story.
Originality: 5/10
Have you ever read a book that made you feel too dumb? This is one of those. And this is not necessarily a bad thing - maybe I AM too dumb. I am no phycisist; I don't like philosophy, and I
Language: 2/10
This is one of the most confusing use of prose I ever read. I am sure some people loved and enjoyed it, but I did not get the humour or irony. I was probably too dumb.
"I feel an initial singularity…pressed against your spherical symmetry."
“My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.”
... What?
So you see, the narrating style is very unique. Maybe that is your thing.
However, what is inexcusable, is the amount of time people used each other's first names when speaking to each other. I noticed I find it weird calling my husband by his name, because I do it so rarely unless I speak about him. That is how rarely I call him. But here, it is a literal ping ping.
"Philip!"
"Alice."
"Philip..."
Atmosphere: 2/10
This novel is very weird indeed. I did feel a very complex love story behind the confusing narrative.
Characters: 4/10
I did not understand the character's motivation, not did I particularly liked them. Alice's scientific background and pragmatism she should have does not match the illogical emotionally driven decisions she makes,
World building: 2/10
Physics and science are at the core of this world - two topics I do not know much about, so yeah, maybe not a good book pick.
Fun: 2/10
I really did not enjoy it. I was hoping of a short-ish science fiction novel, but ended up with a philosophy and metaphor heavy story that needed complete focus. I can see that others enjoy the prose - but I did not. However I did not HATE what I have read, it did not make me angry, therefore it still deserves some points. I was almost annoyed at it, because I felt like I should like it, but I just didn't.
Predictability: 2/10
I don't even know what the hell was happening.
Believable: 2/10
Everything was so weird, I did not believe or get most of it.
Relevancy: 4/10
I feel that I have read something incredibly relevant, I just cannot figure out what it is.
Cover: 3/10
Total Verdict: 2.8/10
Part of me thinks this book deserves a better rating, but I can't help it that I did not like it. I am sure some readers will absolutely adore this book. So if whatever I have said tickles your fancy, you should check it out.
Read the full review on my Blog Let's Geek: https://lets-geek.blogspot.com/2018/1...
January 15, 2022
Een hele prestatie van Lethem om iets van zulke quantumfysische proporties als een zwart gat te bestrijken op een lekker menselijk niveau. Een driehoeksverhouding tussen een antropoloog, een fysicus en de afwezigheid van alle materie is uiteindelijk vooral best geinig.
Lethem had wat meer kunnen doen met de theorie dan een hoofdstukje kauwgumgebouwen en pistache-ijsfonteinen, maar soms moet al die fijnmazige doordenkerij niet. Ook is de inclusie van blinde personen wat klungelig, stereotyperend en mystifiërend gedaan.
Voor zij die dus dikke brokken filosofie verwachten, had het fantastische, wilde concept uitgewerkter gemogen. Maar mooie, want korte en heldere, zinnen en scènes. In geval van "oei, een zwart gat op tafel, wat nu!", zoek niet verder voor je handleiding.
Groetjes,
Arthur
Lethem had wat meer kunnen doen met de theorie dan een hoofdstukje kauwgumgebouwen en pistache-ijsfonteinen, maar soms moet al die fijnmazige doordenkerij niet. Ook is de inclusie van blinde personen wat klungelig, stereotyperend en mystifiërend gedaan.
Voor zij die dus dikke brokken filosofie verwachten, had het fantastische, wilde concept uitgewerkter gemogen. Maar mooie, want korte en heldere, zinnen en scènes. In geval van "oei, een zwart gat op tafel, wat nu!", zoek niet verder voor je handleiding.
Groetjes,
Arthur
August 15, 2023
Antropologo conoce a fisica pero el experimento que se desarrolla en la universidad llega a absorber completamente sus vidas.
Universos propios, universos ajenos... Donde es posible reencontrarse?
Fantástico relato con los guiños a la niña que entró en un País de Maravillas.
Universos propios, universos ajenos... Donde es posible reencontrarse?
Fantástico relato con los guiños a la niña que entró en un País de Maravillas.
February 22, 2012
At times this book amused me, and at times it annoyed me. I think it is a book best read in the years right after its publication, because it feels now, a dozen years on, to be too caught up in a trend that may have overstayed its welcome: the literary exploration of the scientific. Unlike more conventional science-fiction that might take on a bit of the far-out or futuristic in its exploration of themes, this is a story that is about the story of physics and the physics of story. It is wrapped up in itself in a way that gives rise to things both interesting and a bit claustrophobic. It will not stop. It runs almost perpetually on its own cleverness. It failed to be as fun as it was trying to be, and that's too bad, because I think Lethem is a good writer and has worked out some interesting ideas here. But I also don't want to read novels about notions. I want to be more interested in characters than this kind of satire can allow me to do. I want motivations not to be stand-ins for something other than true, explicable, understandable desires. Not all the time, but at least half the time, and more than half the time, I didn't really know why anyone in this novel wanted any of the things that made them go. They were all just parts of a machine that was intended to move a certain way and to keep me interested by how dizzy it made me. But then when I stopped looking at it, I kind of wished I hadn't eaten all that cotton candy.
February 11, 2018
Such a great premise, but I feel the author utterly botched it. It has an "observer problem" in that, once you read the book, you find out it sucks.
The main character was so annoying it was very hard not to fling the book across the room. FYI - if you're an insecure, needy guy who blathers constantly to make up for his insecurity, it's not self-effacing to admit you're blathering to make up for your insecurity. It's annoying. Period.
And the ending? I won't "spoil it" for you because I'm sincerely hoping you do NOT read this book. It's awful.
The main character was so annoying it was very hard not to fling the book across the room. FYI - if you're an insecure, needy guy who blathers constantly to make up for his insecurity, it's not self-effacing to admit you're blathering to make up for your insecurity. It's annoying. Period.
And the ending? I won't "spoil it" for you because I'm sincerely hoping you do NOT read this book. It's awful.
December 6, 2016
It occurred to me as I got ready to write this post that As She Climbed Across The Table and The Pretty Good Jim's Journal Treasury are actually flip sides of the same storytelling coin.
Both of them (wait, here's the clever bit) are about nothing, after all: As She Climbed is about a woman who falls in love with a black hole, while Jim's Journal is a comic strip about more or less nothing at all: the minutiae of Jim's life, literally: in many strips he talks about cooking a hot dog, or watching his cat play with a leaf.
What makes them so interesting is how the two entirely-disparate works demonstrate good and bad writing -- As She Climbed being (mostly) bad (in a way) and Jim being somehow mostly good.
As She Climbed Across The Table is lowkey scifi: set in an unnamed college, it follows Phillip, whose girlfriend Alice is a physicist. At the outset of the story, a colleague of Alice's creates a sort of universe that 'fails to detach,' and creates a black hole of sorts in the lab: it doesn't suck everything in, but selectively takes some things and not others. Alice, studying it, falls in love with the black hole and out of love with Phillip, and the story is mostly Phillip's attempts to understand what is going on.
Jim's Journal meanwhile is the story of Jim, a quiet guy who goes to college, then graduates (maybe? it's not clear) and gets a job at a copy shop. Eventually Jim gets married and then goes to work at a grocery store. Recurring characters include Jim's college roommates Tony and Steve, and a couple of coworkers and classmates and a few of Jim's relatives.
The shtick, as it were, for Jim, is that the comic is adamantly about nothing:
There's lots more than that.
So the thing is, Jim's Journal is actually more... compelling reading, I'm going to say: compelling, in a weird way. Because with As She Climbed, for most of the book, I found myself not really caring about what happened to those people.
Part of it may simply be the characters. Like the pampered rich jerks in The Nest, Phillip and Alice seem part of a world I don't care about, and one which seems troubled only by its own peculiar, and largely self-inflicted, troubles. It's hard for me to care about the troubles of a rich person. Money may not make you happy, but it removes obstacles to happiness and helps cope with troubles.
Sweetie and I were discussing this once, and here was how I pointed it out. Her dad and her (now deceased) stepmom live in Oakland. We live in Wisconsin. When her stepmom died, she really wanted to go to the funeral, but it was pretty expensive and ultimately we decided it wasn't something we could afford. Having more money wouldn't have saved her stepmom, but it would have helped ease Sweetie's mind about what to do. If you are rich and your child gets sick or your girlfriend leaves you, money might not buy them back -- but at least you don't also have to worry about getting evicted or having your car repossessed.
And the troubles Phillip and Alice have are not troubles that are universal, or that could be cared about; maybe it's partly the unreality of the situation -- she falls in love with a black hole, after all -- but it's also partly that these are people about whom we are given little reason to care. Most of their relationship exists for us because we are told it exists for us; the black hole is created, and Alice falls in love, in about chapter 1, and we barely know these two and are barely given any reason to care about them. Phillip is falling apart, but we only understand why because he tells us it's making him fall apart. So a couple of academics, who we're told had a great relationship, ran into trouble when one essentially got superdevoted to her job. OK now what?
Jim, on the other hand, lives the kind of life we all basically live, only he lives it better. It's not even a life of quiet desperation. It's a life of quiet contentment. Literally the most important thing we learn about Jim is that he got married, and that is covered in one strip. He also takes a cross country trip in which very little is related about the trip itself. (He takes two I think, and both are similarly banal.)
There's a touch of Jim in me, I think; I'm a guy who at times likes the regular, the little stuff. I have staunchly defended chain restaurants, for example, because sometimes I just want to know what I'm getting and don't feel like having an adventure; for all the parts of me that wanted to go to Morocco and eat a sheep's eyeball, there are a lot of offsetting parts of me who look back on a day spent sitting on the beach near the zoo, watching Mr F and Mr Bunches splash around and think that was one of the most perfect days I could've had. When I'm not reading books about women who fall in love with black holes, I'm re-re-re-watching Seinfeld episodes. So I can empathize with Jim.
But the bigger part of it is that with Jim, the story was somehow compelling despite being aggressively anti-narrative. Whenever something exciting seems like it might happen to Jim (like the brief episode where a woman seems to be flirting with Jim in the copy shop, and Ruth, his wife happens to meet her) the story shies away from it; Jim and his friends take trips to small towns or go see movies, try to write a script for a sitcom for a few days, talk about actresses they like, but nothing ever happens, and yet the story keeps moving along, somehow, without it even intending to be a story. Nobody seems to end up better off or worse off; when the strip ended Jim was married but living basically the same life; Tony was still single and flitting from exciting goal to exciting goal -- he last wanted to be an astronaut but at one point was superexcited about the world of telemarketing. We don't even know what Steve does, and yet all of them felt real to me.
There's a lesson there, for storytelling. It's not that characters have to be likeable or stories have to be exciting. Jim is a blank slate, really; he's neither likeable nor unlikeable, really. Tony is unlikeable, Ruth is likeable, Steve is neutral, but overall these are characters about whom we know little (and probably read more into the tea leaves we are given than might be warranted.)(Which, let's not underestimate that: to the extent that we are filling in the blanks ourselves, Jim's Journal helps us create the story in a way that makes the neutral feel personal, not a bad trick.)
Phillip and Alice seem likeable enough for people I don't care about, as well. And their story is much more interesting; who wouldn't be caught up in a black hole with international scientists pushing cats into it and everybody and their brother trying to crawl through it? But the story itself never grows very compelling, despite all that going on, because I just didn't care, in the end, about Phillip and Alice and the rest.
Jim and Ruth and Tony and Steve make us care about them -- like or dislike -- so their boring stories become more interesting than Phillip and Alice's story, which is exciting but feels completely unrelatable. Hearing what happened to Phillip and Alice is like reading about Kim Kardashian's jewelry heist: momentarily interesting, maybe, but of no importance in my life and nothing I can really care about for very long.
It might have been different if Phillip and Alice's relationship was more real; maybe Lethem could've let the relationship grow and not move so quickly into the black hole stuff, brought it along a bit more. Like All The Birds In The Sky, which it reminded me of, Lethem seems to not trust his characters to carry the story, and instead has to keep throwing events at us, papering over the relationships and emotions and drives of his characters, packing the story full of quirkiness. But that's just a trick to keep you reading when you would otherwise not; if you think about the great stories that you love, or at least if I think about the great stories that I love, even the most momentous stories have characters who made you want to find out what good (or bad) things happen to them. If the characters don't feel real, or aren't someone you care about one way or the other, packing a ton of story around them ultimately won't help. Even The Lord Of The Rings spent a ton of time on character; by the end, the friendship between Frodo and Sam is astounding, and the way the characters grow and interact helps make that story more than just a swords-and-sorcery bland epic. But As She Climbed (and All The Birds, for that matter) have characters that could've been interesting, only they weren't, so the story seemed to suffer.
That's surprising for me, because two of Lethem's earlier books I read -- Girl In Landscape and You Don't Love Me Yet -- were compelling and featured great characters, people whose lives were similarly out-of-touch with mine (a girl on another planet, in the first, and a woman who works in a performance art piece and has a rock band in the second, as examples) but they felt real and I wanted to know how things went. But there's none of that life in As She Climbed -- and Jim's Journal is packed full of it.
The only reason I'm not feeling completely ripped off by As She Climbed is that Lethem manages to make the finale of the book so amazing that it somewhat rescues the rest of the book; about 80% of As She Climbed is basically dreary; it's just more internal academia with tell-don't-show characterization. But the ending to the story, which I won't spoil, saves the book and moves it from a must-avoid to a you-should-probably-read-it-sometime. (It's lucky for Lethem the book is short, and at least pleasantly written; I wouldn't recommend people read it otherwise but it'll be quick work and the work you do to get to the ending is worth the payoff.)
As for Jim's Journal? I think people should read that, too, although it's a more polarizing work; it's the kind of thing where people either instantly love it or instantly hate it, mostly, and if you don't like it it's almost impossible to explain why it's so good to people who love it. There were strips in the book where I laughed out loud even though I could never have explained to anyone why they were funny to me.
Overall, as I said, it's interesting to contrast the two books: Jim's intense effort to be about nothing at all ends up making the characters feel more alive and universal, and drives an anti-narrative into being, while As She Climbed's intense effort to turn nothing into a story has the exact opposite effect, as if the black hole sucked in all the interesting parts of the story but left the dry words on the page behind, stripped of any meaning.
While I was writing this, I was thinking about some other things I read or saw that seemed to help make this point. The other night I watched The Foot Fist Way, a goofy story about a small town mini-mall tae kwon do teacher whose wife keeps cheating on him and who gets to at one point meet his hero, a loser-ish B-movie karate guy, with the inevitably disappointing result. At the end of the movie, I got a little emotional-feeling about the main character, despite the fact that he is mostly unlikeable and would be considered a loser by pretty much everyone who meets him; the movie made me care about what was happening to him and his weird little sad life, and I got invested in it enough that when it ended, I was genuinely emotionally affected.
The other thing was We Are Become Pals, a weirdly awesome story by the duo who used to write A Softer World. As the blurb on the Tumblr reads, it's a story about two friends. I read it a long time ago and still remember it -- not for the plot, which was kind of fantastical and involved I think explosions and the like -- but for the friendship between the two main characters. Having read it nearly two years ago, I still have a good feeling about it, even though I can't remember the plot at all.
Those are examples of stories that trusted their characters more than the plot. You've got to have some reason to care about a story, and that reason is always the characters in the story. All the bells and whistles, all the blind men and sexy therapists and student protests and lab cats and office parties and the like in the world can't make you care about a story, while the complete lack of all of those things is no impediment to caring.
Both of them (wait, here's the clever bit) are about nothing, after all: As She Climbed is about a woman who falls in love with a black hole, while Jim's Journal is a comic strip about more or less nothing at all: the minutiae of Jim's life, literally: in many strips he talks about cooking a hot dog, or watching his cat play with a leaf.
What makes them so interesting is how the two entirely-disparate works demonstrate good and bad writing -- As She Climbed being (mostly) bad (in a way) and Jim being somehow mostly good.
As She Climbed Across The Table is lowkey scifi: set in an unnamed college, it follows Phillip, whose girlfriend Alice is a physicist. At the outset of the story, a colleague of Alice's creates a sort of universe that 'fails to detach,' and creates a black hole of sorts in the lab: it doesn't suck everything in, but selectively takes some things and not others. Alice, studying it, falls in love with the black hole and out of love with Phillip, and the story is mostly Phillip's attempts to understand what is going on.
Jim's Journal meanwhile is the story of Jim, a quiet guy who goes to college, then graduates (maybe? it's not clear) and gets a job at a copy shop. Eventually Jim gets married and then goes to work at a grocery store. Recurring characters include Jim's college roommates Tony and Steve, and a couple of coworkers and classmates and a few of Jim's relatives.
The shtick, as it were, for Jim, is that the comic is adamantly about nothing:
There's lots more than that.
So the thing is, Jim's Journal is actually more... compelling reading, I'm going to say: compelling, in a weird way. Because with As She Climbed, for most of the book, I found myself not really caring about what happened to those people.
Part of it may simply be the characters. Like the pampered rich jerks in The Nest, Phillip and Alice seem part of a world I don't care about, and one which seems troubled only by its own peculiar, and largely self-inflicted, troubles. It's hard for me to care about the troubles of a rich person. Money may not make you happy, but it removes obstacles to happiness and helps cope with troubles.
Sweetie and I were discussing this once, and here was how I pointed it out. Her dad and her (now deceased) stepmom live in Oakland. We live in Wisconsin. When her stepmom died, she really wanted to go to the funeral, but it was pretty expensive and ultimately we decided it wasn't something we could afford. Having more money wouldn't have saved her stepmom, but it would have helped ease Sweetie's mind about what to do. If you are rich and your child gets sick or your girlfriend leaves you, money might not buy them back -- but at least you don't also have to worry about getting evicted or having your car repossessed.
And the troubles Phillip and Alice have are not troubles that are universal, or that could be cared about; maybe it's partly the unreality of the situation -- she falls in love with a black hole, after all -- but it's also partly that these are people about whom we are given little reason to care. Most of their relationship exists for us because we are told it exists for us; the black hole is created, and Alice falls in love, in about chapter 1, and we barely know these two and are barely given any reason to care about them. Phillip is falling apart, but we only understand why because he tells us it's making him fall apart. So a couple of academics, who we're told had a great relationship, ran into trouble when one essentially got superdevoted to her job. OK now what?
Jim, on the other hand, lives the kind of life we all basically live, only he lives it better. It's not even a life of quiet desperation. It's a life of quiet contentment. Literally the most important thing we learn about Jim is that he got married, and that is covered in one strip. He also takes a cross country trip in which very little is related about the trip itself. (He takes two I think, and both are similarly banal.)
There's a touch of Jim in me, I think; I'm a guy who at times likes the regular, the little stuff. I have staunchly defended chain restaurants, for example, because sometimes I just want to know what I'm getting and don't feel like having an adventure; for all the parts of me that wanted to go to Morocco and eat a sheep's eyeball, there are a lot of offsetting parts of me who look back on a day spent sitting on the beach near the zoo, watching Mr F and Mr Bunches splash around and think that was one of the most perfect days I could've had. When I'm not reading books about women who fall in love with black holes, I'm re-re-re-watching Seinfeld episodes. So I can empathize with Jim.
But the bigger part of it is that with Jim, the story was somehow compelling despite being aggressively anti-narrative. Whenever something exciting seems like it might happen to Jim (like the brief episode where a woman seems to be flirting with Jim in the copy shop, and Ruth, his wife happens to meet her) the story shies away from it; Jim and his friends take trips to small towns or go see movies, try to write a script for a sitcom for a few days, talk about actresses they like, but nothing ever happens, and yet the story keeps moving along, somehow, without it even intending to be a story. Nobody seems to end up better off or worse off; when the strip ended Jim was married but living basically the same life; Tony was still single and flitting from exciting goal to exciting goal -- he last wanted to be an astronaut but at one point was superexcited about the world of telemarketing. We don't even know what Steve does, and yet all of them felt real to me.
There's a lesson there, for storytelling. It's not that characters have to be likeable or stories have to be exciting. Jim is a blank slate, really; he's neither likeable nor unlikeable, really. Tony is unlikeable, Ruth is likeable, Steve is neutral, but overall these are characters about whom we know little (and probably read more into the tea leaves we are given than might be warranted.)(Which, let's not underestimate that: to the extent that we are filling in the blanks ourselves, Jim's Journal helps us create the story in a way that makes the neutral feel personal, not a bad trick.)
Phillip and Alice seem likeable enough for people I don't care about, as well. And their story is much more interesting; who wouldn't be caught up in a black hole with international scientists pushing cats into it and everybody and their brother trying to crawl through it? But the story itself never grows very compelling, despite all that going on, because I just didn't care, in the end, about Phillip and Alice and the rest.
Jim and Ruth and Tony and Steve make us care about them -- like or dislike -- so their boring stories become more interesting than Phillip and Alice's story, which is exciting but feels completely unrelatable. Hearing what happened to Phillip and Alice is like reading about Kim Kardashian's jewelry heist: momentarily interesting, maybe, but of no importance in my life and nothing I can really care about for very long.
It might have been different if Phillip and Alice's relationship was more real; maybe Lethem could've let the relationship grow and not move so quickly into the black hole stuff, brought it along a bit more. Like All The Birds In The Sky, which it reminded me of, Lethem seems to not trust his characters to carry the story, and instead has to keep throwing events at us, papering over the relationships and emotions and drives of his characters, packing the story full of quirkiness. But that's just a trick to keep you reading when you would otherwise not; if you think about the great stories that you love, or at least if I think about the great stories that I love, even the most momentous stories have characters who made you want to find out what good (or bad) things happen to them. If the characters don't feel real, or aren't someone you care about one way or the other, packing a ton of story around them ultimately won't help. Even The Lord Of The Rings spent a ton of time on character; by the end, the friendship between Frodo and Sam is astounding, and the way the characters grow and interact helps make that story more than just a swords-and-sorcery bland epic. But As She Climbed (and All The Birds, for that matter) have characters that could've been interesting, only they weren't, so the story seemed to suffer.
That's surprising for me, because two of Lethem's earlier books I read -- Girl In Landscape and You Don't Love Me Yet -- were compelling and featured great characters, people whose lives were similarly out-of-touch with mine (a girl on another planet, in the first, and a woman who works in a performance art piece and has a rock band in the second, as examples) but they felt real and I wanted to know how things went. But there's none of that life in As She Climbed -- and Jim's Journal is packed full of it.
The only reason I'm not feeling completely ripped off by As She Climbed is that Lethem manages to make the finale of the book so amazing that it somewhat rescues the rest of the book; about 80% of As She Climbed is basically dreary; it's just more internal academia with tell-don't-show characterization. But the ending to the story, which I won't spoil, saves the book and moves it from a must-avoid to a you-should-probably-read-it-sometime. (It's lucky for Lethem the book is short, and at least pleasantly written; I wouldn't recommend people read it otherwise but it'll be quick work and the work you do to get to the ending is worth the payoff.)
As for Jim's Journal? I think people should read that, too, although it's a more polarizing work; it's the kind of thing where people either instantly love it or instantly hate it, mostly, and if you don't like it it's almost impossible to explain why it's so good to people who love it. There were strips in the book where I laughed out loud even though I could never have explained to anyone why they were funny to me.
Overall, as I said, it's interesting to contrast the two books: Jim's intense effort to be about nothing at all ends up making the characters feel more alive and universal, and drives an anti-narrative into being, while As She Climbed's intense effort to turn nothing into a story has the exact opposite effect, as if the black hole sucked in all the interesting parts of the story but left the dry words on the page behind, stripped of any meaning.
While I was writing this, I was thinking about some other things I read or saw that seemed to help make this point. The other night I watched The Foot Fist Way, a goofy story about a small town mini-mall tae kwon do teacher whose wife keeps cheating on him and who gets to at one point meet his hero, a loser-ish B-movie karate guy, with the inevitably disappointing result. At the end of the movie, I got a little emotional-feeling about the main character, despite the fact that he is mostly unlikeable and would be considered a loser by pretty much everyone who meets him; the movie made me care about what was happening to him and his weird little sad life, and I got invested in it enough that when it ended, I was genuinely emotionally affected.
The other thing was We Are Become Pals, a weirdly awesome story by the duo who used to write A Softer World. As the blurb on the Tumblr reads, it's a story about two friends. I read it a long time ago and still remember it -- not for the plot, which was kind of fantastical and involved I think explosions and the like -- but for the friendship between the two main characters. Having read it nearly two years ago, I still have a good feeling about it, even though I can't remember the plot at all.
Those are examples of stories that trusted their characters more than the plot. You've got to have some reason to care about a story, and that reason is always the characters in the story. All the bells and whistles, all the blind men and sexy therapists and student protests and lab cats and office parties and the like in the world can't make you care about a story, while the complete lack of all of those things is no impediment to caring.
August 9, 2022
Creo que a Dick le gustaría esta novela porque es de ciencia ficción pero también es una historia de amor.
June 10, 2011
Every so often I take breaks from horror, less so now, but still...and Lethem is such a talented writer, I thought I'd check this book out. Great premise behind this unusual love triangle between man/woman/psychics experiment and exceptional writing, but it fell a bit flat for me, because the characters were not really likeable, they were compelling enough and quirky and odd and perfectly fitted within the story, but not the kind of characters your heart breaks for, if that makes sense. Just a bit too cartoonishly eccentric or preciously academic or something and typically I like academia satire, James Hynes is excellent at that. If star ratings here were more flexible this would be a solid 3.5 book. Read it for the writing, Lethem can do amazing things with words.
September 14, 2011
Ésta es hasta el momento mi novela del año.
Me llegó como un regalo absolutamente inesperado luego de años buscándola. Una novela corta o un cuento largo. Las primeras páginas son casi incomprensibles, incluso para aquellos clavados en gatos de Schrödinger y teorías de universos paralelos. Luego entiendes el movimiento de Lethem para convertir la historia de Alice es una historia que va entre una fábula sci-fi y una parábola geek, sobre el amor, la necesidad y sentido del afecto, sobre el reflejo, el otro como conducto hacia nosotros mismo, el otro como saco para endilgar demonios, odiar hasta amar, amar hasta odiar, y de vuelta, siempre a sí mismo, una lección entrañable...
Me llegó como un regalo absolutamente inesperado luego de años buscándola. Una novela corta o un cuento largo. Las primeras páginas son casi incomprensibles, incluso para aquellos clavados en gatos de Schrödinger y teorías de universos paralelos. Luego entiendes el movimiento de Lethem para convertir la historia de Alice es una historia que va entre una fábula sci-fi y una parábola geek, sobre el amor, la necesidad y sentido del afecto, sobre el reflejo, el otro como conducto hacia nosotros mismo, el otro como saco para endilgar demonios, odiar hasta amar, amar hasta odiar, y de vuelta, siempre a sí mismo, una lección entrañable...
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