Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Stephanie listened to their Terrace Stories and wondered which parts were true. The truth was overrated, she realized. Knowing that certain parts were fiction, this was what filled her body with an unexpected warmth. It was love, to recognize the inventions and inconsistencies that make a person whole.

Usually, it's a good book that breaks my review streak. Bad reviews, of course, are notoriously fun to write, and mid reviews can be a little dull but have a predictable structure ("Here's what happened, here's what's good, here's what's not"). But reviewing a really good book, that's harder. Because you want to capture what spoke to you about a particular work, knowing that you won't be able to, that in fact you might actually turn people off if you get it wrong. But I'm reviewing Terrace Story anyway, because it's one of the best books I've read this year, even if I'm not sure I can say why.

Terrace Story is a novel, not a collection of short stories, but structurally, it's broken up into four sections, three of which--Terrace, Folly, and Fortress--can almost, if not quite, be read as standalone pieces. The final section, Cantilever, wraps up the story chronologically, but what is that story? There are spoilers below, mostly for the first section.

The first section, Terrace, is about a young couple, Annie and Edward, and their toddler, Rose. The young family rents a tiny apartment and all is rainbows and butterflies, at first. One day, Stephanie, a friend of Annie's from work, visits, and opens a door that leads to a large, beautiful terrace that, somehow, neither Annie nor Edward had noticed before. They go outside, share some maybe true, maybe not tales they call "terrace stories", etc. But when she leaves, the terrace goes with her--the door leads, once again, to a closet. So, like anyone in too small a space would do, Annie and Edward invite Stephanie over more and more often, integrating her more and more deeply into their family. All is well until one day Edward tells a story about a perfect date that never happened, a story that invents a new origin for Rose's name, a date that, Annie is sure, he went on with Stephanie. In a linear sense, they both know this is impossible, but somehow Stephanie begins filling more and more spaces in their lives, especially in her growing closeness to Rose. It culminates in Stephanie slowly, but unknowingly, taking over Annie's job. On the day Annie is fired, she invites Stephanie over for reasons she doesn't quite understand. And this time, while Annie is preparing food in the kitchen, Stephanie walks out to the terrace with Edward and Rosie, and closes the door from the outside, leaving Annie alone with only the closet.

Terrace sets the stage for the rest of the book so discussing what happens is needed but it's a shame in a way. Because the world Leichter has built up to this point doesn't feel like one where a woman would, through no fault of her own, lose her family in an instant. And Annie's story, in some ways, repeats throughout the novel: women in situations they didn't create or ask for being visited by tragedy, loss, and loneliness for reasons they can't--and won't--understand.

Folly tells the story of Annie's parents, George and Lydia, as they attend a funeral--for someone neither of them can remember--which leads to another funeral which leads to affairs, distance, heartbreak, etc. I won't go into a lot of detail except to say that the portrait of marital dissolution in this section really struck me as truthful, building the eventual infidelities gradually so there's never a moment where a character is forced into a crisis--it's just a slow process of distance from one person and closeness to another.

Fortress is when I realized that, like Leichter's excellent first novel Temporary, Terrace Story is really a story of space. Here we learn about Stephanie's power which is, maybe you've guessed, the ability to create space at will. I wondered throughout the first section if Stephanie knew she was creating the terrace, and as it turns out, she did. As a child, she tries to hide her power but it seeps out--a nightmare rearranges her house, a playground trip leads to zoning violations, and when her parents realize what's happening, they do the worst possible thing: they get scared. So when Stephanie's toddler sister walks into the road and is hit by a car while Stephanie is watching, her parents whisper and wonder, did she do it, make the sidewalk wider, the road narrower? At college, she makes a friend, her first friend, Will, who, without going into detail, is on my permanent literary shitlist for being one of those guys who thinks they know everything and can't keep a secret.

The last section, Cantilever, is set in the future, once earth is nearly uninhabitable, and draws the various threads in the first three stories together. Rosie, the now-grown baby from Terrace, runs intake for new residents of what first seems like a space station but turns out to be more of a, uh, spacetime station. Parts of this section confused me but the last few pages paid off in a way I didn't see coming.

While it's never stated explicitly, I think Leichter, throughout the book, is playing a bit of a physics game with the reader. The stories are connected through a couple laws of physics: namely that space and time are the same thing, and that matter can never be created or destroyed. Stephanie sees her power as the ability to create space where there was no space before; but throughout there are nods to a darker idea: namely that Stephanie isn't creating space so much as taking it from somewhere else, that the time-in-space she spends with Will, with Annie, with Edward, represents a loss to someplace, or someone, else. Death haunts all the stories (maybe it haunts all stories, eh?) in the form of dead children, funerals, extinctions--crows are long extinct in the otherwise seemingly ordinary first part, and Lydia is an extinction scientist/writer(?)--and eventually, the Earth itself.

And yet, Leichter finds a way to eke out hope for her characters. When I finished the last section, I was unsure if I liked the ending which is (tonal spoiler, is that a thing?) really lovely and almost optimistic, but it's aged well in my mind: maybe there is a happier ending out there, but god knows if we'll ever find it.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Kid turned and faced him.

What you want me to believe, said Western, is that you came here to help her in some way.

Help her in what way? She's dead.

When she was alive.

Jesus. How do I know? You see a figure drifting off the screen and you pick up the phone. How do you know that the call of the coletit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of thing that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

What did she know?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get a hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing. Jesus.

Bobby Western has been a lot of things. Right now he's a salvage diver, plumbing the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to ransack wrecks and tinker with pipelines. Once upon a time he was a student of physics, a mathematical whizkid who received his genius from his father, a Manhattan Project engineer, and who was yet in the shadow of his even more brilliant sister, Alicia. After that, he was a race car driver, a profession that put him in a coma. When he emerged from this coma, Bobby discovered that Alicia--his greatest love, his soulmate in perhaps the most literal sense--had committed suicide. The Passenger's companion novel, Stella Maris, is her story; this is Bobby's, although Alicia is here too, in the form of italicized flashbacks in which she faces her own hallucinatory attendants: a crude, disfigured figure called the Thalidomide Kid and a troop of Vaudevillean goblins.

When The Passenger begins, Bobby has been sent to scout a plane crash in the Gulf, the kind with moldering corpses inside. There's no sign of entry on the plane, but the black box is missing, and one of the passengers seems to be, too. Bobby makes a few quick investigations, finding little; but shortly after he finds himself the subject of a mysterious investigation: he's menaced by agents of unknown affiliation, his apartment is ransacked, his car and bank account are seized with no explanation, his fellow diver is killed under mysterious circumstances. Are Bobby's pursuers connected with the crashed plane? Or are their interests related to Bobby's father, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, helping to usher the world into an age of atomic cataclysm?

The Passenger's refusal to bring these mysteries to a satisfying conclusion seemed like an affront to me personally. Maybe there are answers in Stella Maris, but I doubt it. So one must think of the plane crash as a symbol: a symbol, perhaps, of Bobby, who survives his wreck and his coma but emerges into a world that is missing its most important soul, and which refuses now to make any sense. Alicia, perhaps, is the passenger of the title, whose significance is reduced in death to a mere absence, and whom Bobby spends the entire book fretting that he will forget. (For what its worth, in the post-Game of Thrones era, sibling incest seems too anodyne to be shocking, even a kind of literary cliche.) Amd the forces of grief and despair that pursue him can not even be named, much less mollified.

And yet, I found Bobby's dives to be some of the most interesting and engrossing parts of the novel. Much has been made of McCarthy's newfound interest in physics and mathematics, apparently gathered from his friendship with quark-discoverer Murry Gell-Mann and a connection with the research department at the University of New Mexico. But McCarthy's interests haven't changed, it seems to me; he's still the Gnostic, terrified by the world's indifference and unknowability. Mathematics is, like diving, another way of plumbing the deaths, searching for a truth that will not be made known. As the Thalidomide Kid tells Bobby--who sees him also, like a kind of dispensation--"Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing."

The Passenger is an awfully strange book, even for McCarthy. On one level it's sort of an espionage novel, a classic noir of the man who got into deep. But in practice it's mostly talky, composed of a dozen or so lengthy conversations: with down-and-outs from New Orleans to Knoxville, with Bobby's shrewd private investigator, with his fellow divers, with a friend of Alicia's from the period of her commitment. One of Bobby's interlocutors is a trans escort named Debussy Fields (LOL) who is touchingly and sympathetically drawn in a way I really would not have expected McCarthy to have in him. But all these conversations, all these parts--diver driver mathematician apparition--have difficulty cohering. The Paassenger could only be a late period work. It reminds me of those late Shakespeare plays in which he stopped bothering trying to make sense to anybody but himself.

But it's a Cormac book, no doubt, and who else is going to give you a book like that? Who else is going to give you those sentences? The language is plainspoken and hushed, with fewer forays into the OED, but the rhythm of those words is unmistakable, inimitable. And though the mathematics, it seems to me, betrays a dilettante's eye, they give a new language, perhaps even a better one, to ideas that have troubled McCarthy's books for a long time. We've had a long time to live with books like Blood Meridian, even The Road. Something tells me that we'll have to live with this one a little longer to really see it as it is.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

In the early twentieth century, two theories emerged from the world of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. They are, in very crude and reductive terms, descriptions of what happens to the world at scales that are very large and very small, respectively. Planets curving spacetime, electrons existing in numerous possible states at once. Both of them revolutionized the way we understand the reality in which we live, and many of the same names were involved in developing them both, but they also confronted us with the limits of our own understanding. Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World is a quasi-fictional novel about the geniuses that ushered in these new sciences, and were confronted by these limits.

The first section, "Prussian Blue" is almost entire non-fictional. (In fact, while reading it, I sort of marveled at the assertion on the book's jacket that it combines fact and fiction, assuming that the fiction was extremely well concealed.) This section is about cyanide, a compound that makes up both the brilliant paint color that gives the section its title, and the poisonous gas that the Nazis pumped into the chambers of the concentration camps. It's a meditation on the way that atrocity and progress often go hand in hand, and it slips effortlessly from place to place and moment to moment, finding the hidden connections between unlikely subjects: Fritz Haber, Napoleon Bonaparte, the destruction of the North American bison. "Prussian Blue" sets the tone for the book as a whole, which plays fast--but not loose--with history.

It also sets the tone for the next section, "Schwarzschild's Singularity," about the physicist who discovers the existence of black hole. When he makes his discovery, Schwarzschild is at the German Army's Russian front in World War I, suffering from a crippling autoimmune disorder called pemphigus. Illness and war are burdens that fall on nearly all of the geniuses collected in Labatut's book; Heisenberg, we'll discover, suffers from disfiguring allergies, Schrodinger from tuberculosis that leaves him confined to a sanatorium for years. Like these two, Schwarzschild comes to his discoveries nearly by pure mathematics, rather than experimentation or observation, and like them discovery comes mysteriously, almost as epiphany. And like them, Schwarzschild is haunted by the implications of his discovery. These black holes, if Schwarzschild's calculations are correct, are rapacious voids that crush whatever comes into their path, even light. They are encircled by an invisible line past which annihilation is mathematically certain, and from which not even information can escape; it cannot, in any real sense, be known. For Schwarzschild, the black hole finds its analogs in his open sores, and in visions of Europe heading for cataclysm: 

If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will--millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space--unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland. Courant tried to appease him; he said that he saw no signs of the apocalypse Schwarszchild feared, and that surely there would be nothing worse than the war they were mired in. He reminded Schwarzschild that the human soul was a greater mystery than any mathematical enigma, and that it was unwise to project the findings of physics into such far-flung realms as psychology. But Schwarzschild was inconsolable. He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing to do about it. Because the singularity sent forth no warnings.

The center of the book, however, is the title piece, which tells the story of the figures at the center of the dispute over quantum mechanics: de Broglie, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger. As the book progresses, its fictional elements come to the forefront; the physical and intellectual torments of Heisenberg and Schrodinger seem almost entirely invented. Though these two are rivals, they share the torments of Schwarzschild: the sickness, the fear of war, the fear of the limits that emerge from their calculations. In the sanatorium, Schwarzschild falls in love with a tuberculosis-ridden teenager who shares his passion for Buddhist scripture, and there he devises his famous wave equation to describe the nature of subatomic particles. The wave function is strange; it seems to describe another world, or a number of them, yet Schrodinger remains sure that the subatomic world can be described and predicted just as the mechanical one can.

It's Heisenberg who discovers the truth: Schrodinger's wave equation describes the electron's numerous possible states, which it occupies simultaneously, only "choosing" one of these possibilities when it is measured by human observation. (Physicists: you can let me know what's wrong with my description in the comment section below.) What's more, there is a limit to what you can simultaneously observe about it; if you collapse the wave function, determine its position, you can not know its velocity; if you determine its velocity, you cannot know its position. What Heisenberg demonstrated is that there is a fundamental limit to how much we can understand about the world--not just an experimental or mechanical limit, but a fundamental one, baked into the very fabric of the universe. Like Schwarzschild, he too is tortured by the implications of this, a science that has led not to understanding but the knowledge of what cannot be understood.

Heisenberg makes these discoveries when, in one of the book's most remarkable passages, he's forced to drink a glass of absinthe by knifepoint by a bar patron who insists that scientists like him have led the world to be impossible to understand. He wants the scientist, too, to be disoriented; ironically, it is this flight of drunkenness and hallucination--complete with a vision of the horrors of nuclear war--that leads Heisenberg to shake the possibility of a knowable world from its pedestal. The limit that Schwarzschild finds in the deepest reaches of impossible space, Heisenberg discovers at the smallest and most fundamental levels of reality as we live it.

When We Cease to Understand the World shows, better than anything I've ever read, the true size and scope of the revolution the study of physics brought to the world in the early 20th century. It draws a parallel between these momentous revelations and the wars that twice brought Europe into ruin, another place at which our understanding founders. Its methods--mixing fact and fiction without marking the boundaries between--seem of a piece with its subject, as if suggesting that where knowledge and measurement falter, only intuition and imagination can bridge the gap. It's a book that brings not just genius, but the paradox at the heart of reality, down to a human scale.

A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A couple of years ago, I started reading A Brief History of Time. I didn't get very far before I realized that I was totally not going to be able to comprehend the book. I was happy to hear that Hawking was working on an updated version with illustrations, a version that was supposed to be more accessible.

While Briefer is more accessible, parts of it are still quite complex. I had a good high school science teacher, so I had a working knowledge of some of the early theories of quantum mechanics. However, when Hawking started putting two or three of these theories together, trying to show how a unified theory of the universe might work, I felt out of my element. Needless to say, I re-read a lot of paragraphs. But for the most part, Hawking did a excellent job of explaining unbelievably complex theories. Also, his ruminations about the universe's need (or lack thereof) for a creator was really interesting.

Toward the end of the book, Hawking made me feel a little better about my apparent lack of knowledge about our universe, saying, "In Newton's time, it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in broad strokes. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible." Thanks for that, Mr Hawking.

With help from Leonard Mlodinow, a scientist who has written for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Hawking reworks his classic for the better, with plenty of nerd humor sprinkled throughout. The glossary at the end was extremely helpful, and the brief biographies about Galileo, Newton, and Einstein taught me something new about each man, such as Isaac Newton was a royal dick.

I would have been interested in knowing how much of the content of this book was original to Hawking, or is he merely explaining complex theories in his own cogent way. Also, I am interested in the process by which Hawking wrote the book, and to what extent Mlodinow was involved.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

It's true, I haven't posted anything in over a month now. But, not to worry dear friends, for I have returned, and with a vengeance. Best watch your back, Chris. There's a new sheriff in town.

As it turns out, Bill Bryson writes more than just great travelogues. A Short History of Nearly Everything is a sort of science primer, giving a brief but thorough introduction to almost every field of popular science. He says that he set out to make scientific knowledge accessible to those people (most of us) who were stuck with completely dull, unreadable textbooks in high school and college. He certainly does a great job putting huge, unapproachable concepts and figures in perfectly understandalbe perspective.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Each section gives a history of a certain branch of the scientific world, as well as a brief summary and explanation of its basic tenets. The book moves as chronologically as is possible, while still maintaining clear divisions for the many different “–ologies.” He starts with the Big Bang, age of the Universe, our place in it, and finishes with the evolution of man and a chapter on massive extinctions that are taking place today. In between the book is packed with an unbelievable amount of information – completely readable information – on geology, paleontology, earth science, climatology, evolution, physics, particle physics, of all things, biology, zoology… I could go on. What struck me most was the unseen politics of the scientific world. There have been some serious words exchanged over whether a type of rock belongs to one geological era or the next and personal attacks of character made over fossil classification. Also, Sir Isaac Newton was apparently a complete nutcase. He’s reported to have stuck a nine inch hatpin in between his eye and the socket, pushing it as far back as it would go until it met resistance, just to see what might happen.

Bryson spent years traveling the globe to meet with the authorities (major and minor) in each of these fields, trying to get as much of a handle on each of their areas of expertise as he could before writing this book. What results is a book that has a bibliography with well over 250 entries, not to mention the informal interviews, which is completely and absolutely accessible by someone with no background in scientific education whatsoever. And all this without losing his unique tone and style; it’s still funny, which is quite a feat when your subject matter includes such topics as mitochondrial DNA genetics, carbon and radioactive dating techniques, and tectonic plate theory. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the book is very dense. It took me weeks to get through it just because there is so much information to absorb – I underlined practically the entire text. But it’s definitely worth the effort. I can’t count how many times I set the book in my lap just to look up and say “wow,” to absolutely no one, or annoyed the hell out of my girlfriend by tapping her on the shoulder and recounting some scientific tidbit that I found fascinating, mostly when she was trying to sleep.

As an environmental studies student who's fascinated by evolution, this is one of my new favorites. I plan to keep it close at hand as a reference from now on. If you don’t care much for any branch of the sciences, this book is probably not for you. If you’d like to get a better understanding of the broad range of scientific information out there, then, by all means, read it.