As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Lethem, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375700129 ISBN 13: 9780375700125

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1998

Synopsis

What if your lover left you for, well, nothing? Literally nothing. Particle physicist Alice Coombs and her colleagues are on the cusp of an extraordinary discovery. They have created a void, a hole in the universe, a true nothingness that they have named "Lack." Philip Engstrand, a professor who studies other professors, has made a breakthrough of his own - he now understands how deeply he loves Alice. Lack, though, is no ordinary black hole: It swallows certain things - a pomegranate, argyle socks, mirrored sunglasses - but displays no appetite for a bow tie, an ice ax, or scrambled duck eggs. This is a void that displays the outlines of a personality: a nothingness that, as Philip comes to realize, utterly obsesses his beloved. Alice, it becomes apparent, has fallen out of love with Philip and in love with Lack.

About this title

Review

When is the absurd not absurd? When the story is chronicled by Jonathan Lethem. In As She Climbed Across the Table, Lethem again manages to take the strangest of set-ups and make them seem commonplace--so much so that, despite the high concepts (Motherless Brooklyn was about a Tourettes-suffering gangster/private eye and Girl in Landscape was a sci-fi coming-of-age story), his books are masterpieces of human characterisation..

The (ostensible) premise of As She Climbed Across the Table concerns the discovery of a hole in the universe by Professor Alice Coombs, and the effect of the discovery on the campus on which she works. A physicist, Coombs and her department create a hole in the universe--a hole that is defined by its complete lack of tangible qualities. As she and her department explore their discovery, they anthropomorphitise it: Alice comes to ascribe a personality to "Lack"; it is this relationship and the effect it has on Coombs' partner, Philip Engstrand (a sociologist who studies the community of academics around him), that the book revolves around. Told from Engstrand's point of view, it is a fantastic tale told without wonder--think Don DeLillo, especially White Noise, another tale of the everyday absurd set on a college campus--and it's all the richer for it. --Randy Silver

Review

"Exceptionally clever. . . . A book of compelling ideas, of intellectual conflict, of human frailty and desire. And it's funny."--Dallas Morning News

"Jonathan Lethem has succeeded in delivering a wonderland on the side of the looking glass," --San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Lethem is opening blue sky for American fiction. . . . He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncataloged species." --Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Wickedly funny." --Columbus DIspatch

"An oddball tour de force." --Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0375700129
• ISBN 13: 9780375700125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224