FROM THE PUBLISHER: While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time." "When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition. SYNOPSIS Alan Lightman's first novel, Einstein's Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it "at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel creates "a magical, metaphysical realm . . . FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly The author of Einstein's Dreams has made a darkly affecting book out of what seems at first to be unpromising material. Bill Chalmers is an executive at an "information company" in Boston who on his way to work one day forgets completely who he is, what he does or where he is supposed to be going. After a number of nightmarish experiences, in which he rapidly becomes a homeless bum, he awakens in a hospital, more or less his old self--except that his body is beginning to turn numb. So far, this approximates a conventional "breakdown under the pressures of civilization" story (and Lightman is particularly good at evoking the impersonal horrors of contemporary urban life). But the progress of Chalmers's ordeal is much stranger, richer and more weirdly comic than that. He sees a doctor who can offer only infinite tests, a psychiatrist who seems equally at a loss. Wife Melissa, conducting a cyber affair with a professor (e-mails figure extensively in the book, the kind of typos we all commit rendered with malicious glee), begins to fall apart, taking to drink as Bill gets worse. Eventually confined to a wheelchair, Bill senses that his son, Alex, a computer geek, is growing apart from him. When he's fired by his employers, Bill sues them for unfair dismissal of a sick man. All this is conveyed in scenes that show a subtly calibrated mastery of comic timing, emphasizing contemporary heedlessness and a helpless anger. The ending, as Chalmers draws increasingly inward, seeing himself only as a brain stem in an utterly dysfunctional body, carries haunting echoes of a similar passage at the conclusion of James Joyce's The Dead. Lightman's masterly study of early 21st-century angst is marred only slightly by a series of episodes from the trial and hemlock poisoning of Socrates, first called up as an e-lesson by Alex, then read by him and Melissa to Bill as he sinks further into desuetude. Vivid as these scenes are, their link with the present is extremely tenuous. Is Lightman saying that things were just as bad 2,000 years before cell phones and traffic jams, or is he imparting some hidden Socratic instruction?

Despite its overuse, the term Kafkaesque is the best one-word summation of this book, in which physicist and novelist Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) traces the gradual deterioration of his protagonist's body and the concomitant disintegration of his work, family, and social life.  Pantheon Books 0-679-43615-4 / 9780679436157
Hardcover As New  New York 

Price: 15.75 USD