Word: bennette
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...since this book reads much more like a novel than did Lightman's 1993 book Einstein's Dreams, a series of fictional meditations on time. It seems probable that Good Benito is, like many first novels, fairly autobiographical, since the book tells the story of a physicist, Bennett Lang, who grows up in Memphis, Tennessee and then comes to the East Coast, while Lightman grew up in Memphis and teaches physics at M.I.T. But the real reason the book feels so much like a first novel is that Good Benito is clumsily written, trying to cover too much ground...
...outset of the novel, Bennett is hired by Leominster College, ostensibly to teach physics but also to try to ferret out the insights of the genius physicist Scalopino, who has published nothing and yet, according to rumor, keeps scores of brilliant results in files full of near undecipherable notes...
...Bennett gradually gains the trust of Scalopino and his daughter Sophie, fails nonetheless to understand the notes and convinces Scalopino to work with him on a new problem. The two of them arrive at a solution, only to discover that the same result (albeit less elegantly achieved) has been published already in a foreign journal...
...first chapter. After that, we never hear anything about Scalopino or Sophie again; the novel switches back to Bennett's Memphis boyhood. We meet Florida, the Black housekeeper who shows Bennett more love than does his father, distant and scarred by memories of war, or his mother, prone to fainting spells, insomnia and compulsive eating. We also meet John, Bennett's best friend, with whom Bennett builds clever contraptions...
...Bennett progresses through school, falling in love with algebra and studying math on his own at home. He talks with his rabbi. In high school he has an affair with a drama teacher. Then he goes to college, learns a lot of physics, befriends another physics student who turns into a drug addict, goes to graduate school, learns more physics, finishes his doctorate and marries an artist. The marriage deteriorates, and the book ends...