Word: lightman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this has nothing to do with relativity, but it had much to do with Einstein's contemplation of relativity. Einstein became the emblem not only of the desire to know the truth but also of the capacity to know the truth. In his 1993 novel, Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman writes, "In this world time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly...
Meanwhile the narration is uninspired, surprisingly so given the grace of Lightman's writing in Einstein's Dreams. There, his use of sparse, simple language served him well allowing him to suggest possible worlds through short, carefully chosen phrases, quick touches of color, and imaginative details. In Good Benito, however, his language falls flat and his colors seem drab...
...Lightman rushes from one scene to the next, so that most of his characters are caricatured, or at least underdeveloped. In this short novel, he progresses through thirty or so years; the resulting portrait comes across as a succession of incidents rather than a coherent narrative...
...that Lightman didn't stick with Scalopino and Sophie, for the first chapter seems to portend a successful (if not entirely original) intellectual mystery novel, with Scalopino as the fat, slightly revolting genius, whose nut is Lang's to crack, and Sophie as the romantic interest, a nut of a different flavor. In another novel, Lightman might have found better use for his more intriguing characters--Uncle Maury the gambler who tries to expiate himself by fixing the plumbing, Davis the aging, macho thesis adviser who bets bottles of vodka on his own conjectures...
...Maybe Lightman will write such a novel, one that conveys, in the enchanting prose of Einstein's Dreams, the strange culture of all-too-human physicists--a difficult task, since Lightman's style has so far shown itself much better suited to fanciful speculation than to plot and character. But the seeds are there; they just don't bear fruit in Good Benito...