Word: ressler
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Back in the late 1950s, Stuart Ressler was one of the eager young scientists trying to crack the genetic code of the DNA molecule. In the mid-'80s, he works the night shift for a computer billing outfit in Brooklyn. What brought Ressler to this dead-end job? That is only one of the questions posed and answered by this demanding, dazzling novel. Also on display are two love stories, two intertwined narratives, vast erudition and a white-knuckled, suspense-filled investigation into the meaning of life...
...approaching 30, falls in love with Todd, four years her junior, and, in a different way, with Dr. Ressler, who is entering his 50s and who "came as close as anyone I've ever met to demonstrate that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete." With Todd now vanished and Ressler gone, she impulsively quits her job to record the months the three of them spent together -- talking all night while the computers whirred, enjoying a snowbound weekend in New Hampshire -- and to find out what happened...
These two strands of story coil around each other, and the suspicion gradually arises that more than one narrator has been at work here. But the sources are less important than the patterns and the possibilities of meaning hiding within them. The movement begins with Ressler in 1957, fresh from graduate school at age 25, arriving at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign to join Cyfer, a research team assembled to crack the genetic code of the DNA molecule. The infant field is electric with excitement; scarcely four years have passed since Crick and Watson proposed the double- helix...
...surface, the solution looks like a question of decoding, the kind of feat that leads to the discovery of buried treasure in The Gold Bug. But Ressler is not so sure: "We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us. Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand." Further complicating his quest for pure knowledge, Ressler falls in love with Jeanette Koss, four years his senior, a married member of the Cyfer team. She gives him a present, a well-worn recording of the Goldberg...
...four main characters of the novel -- Jan and Todd, Jeanette and Ressler -- describe some dazzling, antiphonal permutations on their own. Both women are, for different reasons, unable to bear children; they are dedicated or interested onlookers at the mysteries of generation. Both men can be accounted failures, Ressler because he left a brilliant career and Todd because he lacks the nerve to begin one. But each is a welcome rarity in contemporary fiction: an intelligent, interesting and sympathetic actor in the drama of daily life...