Word: scalopino
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...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...
...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...
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