Book report: As She Climbed across the Table, by Jonathan Lethem

Book report: As She Climbed acrossthe Table, by Jonathan Lethem

I am a theoretical physicist by training, if not by job. I love reading about the origins of the universe, cosmology, particle physics, and so forth. But I never dreamed these things could be part of a novel that isn’t science fiction.

“As She Climbed across the Table” is a love story, in fact a love triangle. Alice is a physicist, one of the scientists studying – well, they don’t really know what it is. It seems to be a gap, a void, in our universe that they call the Lack. Alice is fascinated by the Lack. So fascinated that she’s actually, well, in love with it.

This dismays her actual boyfriend Philip, a professor at the same college as Alice, but not a scientist. He has no idea what the Lack is either, but he does know that it’s replaced him in Alice’s eyes.

From this spins a wonderful tale of unrequited love of several kinds. The experiments to try to determine just what the Lack is are both funny and intriguing. So is the rest of the cast, including two bickering men who are blind (or are they?), the discoverer of the Lack (who has no idea what, if anything, he’s accomplished), a woman Philip tries not to pick up in a bar (who aims to replace Alice), and any number of absurd academics (or is that redundant?).

I’m tempted to use the name Alice as a fulcrum to compare “As She Climbed across the Table” with “Alice in Wonderland,” but I don’t want to force the pieces of one puzzle into the frame of another. Still, by the end of this zippy read, you’ll find yourself plunged into at least three universes, and will simultaneously have *no* idea what just happened, yet understand *exactly* what just happened. It’s a Heisenberg’s kittycat kind of book.

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