Customer Reviews

As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel.

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I have all of Jonathan Lethem's novels, I bought them several years ago with the intent of eventually getting to them. Well eventually has become "now" and this is my first exposure to his work and I have to say . . . it's certainly original. The premise here is that Philip, a professor, is dating a physics professor named Alice. Her department manages to conjure up a type of black hole that tends to be a bit selective in what it wants to devour. Alice sees this as a sign of intelligence and begins to fall in love with it, leaving poor Philip behind. What transpires at that point is the epitome of a bizarre love triangle, with Philip trying to win back Alice even as she tries to get the black hole (now named "Lack") to love her in return. To Lethem's credit he makes this odd premise actually work within the context of the story, so that the characters come across as people and not complete lunatics. Sometimes they don't come off as real people, just strings of dialogue bouncing back and forth, but it feels real enough that I can buy it. Even the two blind guys who show up and start to live in his apartment don't really feel out of place. To my mind, there were two ways Lethem could have screwed this up, one by making the whole scenario just too cute to believe, or by going the other route and drowning us all in dry physics discussions, overstraining itself trying to make the point. Thankfully, he strides a nice middle ground, acknowledging that the situation is absurd without making fun of the characters and using quantum physics in a way that it he can comment on relationships between people and show how there really isn't any difference at all. The end gets a bit weird but there was probably no other way to end it. Not really a campus novel so much as a bizarre romance novel set on campus, it reads quickly (I finished it in a few hours, fortunately he doesn't belabor the point, doing what he has to do and getting out) and goes down easy, raising a lot of interesting points along the way. Not for the people looking for Harlequin books, but if you're looking for something just a little bit off kilter without totally plunging into the murky world of the avant-garde, this may be the book for you. This bodes well for the rest of his oeuvre.

I read an interview once where Lethem suggested that with "Girl in Landscape" he started writing "true" novels, and that in his work before he felt his characters weren't quite real-- just devices controlled by some overarching clever design. This may be too harsh a criticism, perhaps, (and mind you, those are Lethem's words not mine) but it does seem especially true of this novel.

"As She Climbed Across the Table" is a very clever book. And it's also a novel of ideas, as well as a parody of "the college novel". It's funny occasionally, and it will make you think. But it is not especially true. I'm not speaking of the science fiction elements of the plot here, I'm talking about the characters and their relationships. They're flat. And they're slaves to Lethem's clever design.

At three stars, this book is worth reading, especially if you're a fan of Lethem. But if you've just heard of the author and you're looking something to be your first read, I'd start elsewhere-- "Girl in Landscape" or "Motherless Brookyn". If you've got a hankering for a good college novel, I'd try something else as well-- perhaps Francine Prose's "Blue Angel" or (if you didn't have to read it in college) Kingley Amis' "Lucky Jim".

I purchased this book the day it was released because I loved both of Lethem's earlier novels and his short stories, despite the fact that the subject matter of AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE didn't pique my interest at all. However, Lethem's handling of the subject is brilliant, taking an extremely implausible scenario (boy loves girl, boy loses girl to literally Nothing...) and makes it beatifully, hilariously, painfully real. The characters are very well rounded and the dialog is witty and touching. Thinking back on it, I would have liked to have spent more time with Alice before Lack came into the picture, to get a feel for why Phillip cares about her so deeply, but that is a minor quibble. I loved how Lack himself becomes such a strong character, despite the fact that he is devoid of, well, everything. Lack touches everyone that comes into contact with him, changing them forever. Easily the best novel I've read this year.

It wasn't awful; it had it's good points: some striking metaphors, a couple of really fresh and interesting characters. But overall, it was shallow and full of holes.

The "physics" were mythical to say the least -- but not whimsical enough to be jarryesque. The semiotics were downright dumb. The psychology was glib. And the characters were mostly flat and as dull as a good deal of the prose.

Oh well. There were the two blind co-dependants who captured the heart and the imagination and who would have made a good book in themselves. And, like I said, Lethem does show off a talent for metaphor.

But that's the trouble with so much contemporary fiction: the authors show very specialized talent and no respect for their own higher sensibilities.

Don't be fooled by suspiciously similar 1-star reviews! This is a very good book. Lethem collides the worlds of poststructuralist metaphysics and physics in a very entertaining and thought-provoking way, and manages to be quite funny in the process. I thought his style is a little derivative of Don DeLillo's (minimalist observations hinting at much deeper resonances beneath the mundane), but I didn't mind since the whole thing was so well done. Contrary to what an earlier reader said, Lethem clearly knows physics--and philosophy--quite well, and if you have any interest in either of those subjects, you should consider this book. It is short but very tasty.

I read As She Climbed Across the Table four or five years ago and thought it was cute but I didn't really connect with it. It felt stuffy in a way, and I couldn't understand some of the character motivations. At first I thought it was a flaw on the author's part, but since then I've come back round to reading Lethem books again, and so I re-read this one. This time I couldn't believe how sad and funny this book is, how accurate a picture of academics it sketches. I think the book was always this good, but I hadn't had the right experiences in life yet to understand it. I'd read it before I was ready. Now, after college and a few heartbreaks of my own, I completely get it. Identity is a fiction, but we try desperately to fill our own lack with things, preferences and dislikes, people, friends, families, lovers. A sad truth to confront, but I see the emptiness there, and why love is so important to fill it. I'm glad I gave this book another go round.

As a big fan of Lethem's recent work (Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude; collections of essays) I gave this story a try. I liked it but for reasons totally different then why I like other works of his that I have read. Usually I connect strongly to the main character in the other books because of something I have in common with them (i.e. living in the neighborhood they do; being a frustrated comic book fan). In this case the protagonist an I have very little in common but I still felt drawn into the story and really enjoyed it from the beginning. Not to give too much away but the bizarre love triangle that Lethem creates is a fun twist on both the romance and sci-fi genres. If this had been my first Lethem book I might not have read more because it would not have blown me away, but for fans of his work this is a great early work that shows a writer really developing his craft and a unique viewpoint.

(We're a London-based bookgroup of science editors/publishers; these are comments from several of the members)

1) As She Climbed Across the Table is a rather unusual book. I think I was taking it too seriously for at least the first half of the book and didn't really look at it from the right angle (but then I didn't expect it to get so surreal). In general, it investigates people's realities and how their reality may change through the eyes of others. It's all about perception. A very interesting end indeed, and I thought for hours about what it might mean and how it might change how I look at my life. The thought that I could quite easily not exist blew my mind. The Blind Men drove me totally mad, as did Alice, for a lot of the book. But the Blind Men's parallel world at the end of the book, and the way Alice's Lack turned on its head near the end, was fabulous! Suddenly I really got it - even if we were talking about three realities (and more), which hurt my brain to contemplate. Mind bending and amusing, there's never been a book quite like it.

2) I liked the way the chapters were so short that they enabled you to get snapshots of what was happening in the narrator's life without getting bogged down in lots of descriptive detail. I thought the descriptions of the different disciplines within the university, and how they interacted, very interesting, and I liked the way the narrator used his abilities to cross the interdisciplinary barriers to make ideas comprehensible to the others (not just to characters in the book). I found the ideas presented in the book very thought-provoking and would be interested in reading further work by the author. The physicist was irritating to me but well presented in terms of character, as were the two blind men.

3) I really didn't enjoy it all that much. It's not that it was too weird for me, more that I really didn't see the point to it. The basic idea was interesting but I don't feel he developed it particularly well. I couldn't care about the characters and so I had little interest in knowing what was going to happen to them. That said, it gets 10/10 for memorable endings (it's up there 'Perfume' and 'After many a summer dies the swan' on that score).

A friend of mine who is a writer slide me the book to read... He said at the time that it was one of those books that people like myself (A chemist) could really appreciate. I took his word for it and dove in... I won't give a synopsis, since that is above, but I will say that the book paints and interesting portrait of what it means to be in a relationship in "modern" times. At times very funny, at times very emotional, but always profound in an introspective sort of way... Writen in a very clear concise style, I would really say read this... I have yet to pick up any of his other books, but I am now very curious about Gun, With Occasional Music...

You are about to enter The Lethem Zone. In this soap opera spun in a cyclotron, Philip, an academia anthropologist, is in love with Alice, a particle physicist. But Alice is in love with Lack, a void in space, a rather benign black hole that sits on a table sucking in what it likes and spitting out what it doesn't. The hard-nosed head of the physics department, Professor Soft, is jealous of Alice, so he enlists the charismatic Italian Carmo Braxia to reclaim Lack under the guise of grand unification. Meanwhile, the libidinous pyschoanalyst, Cynthia Janger, tries to seduce Philip away from Alice. But Philip joins up with Lack to win over Alice together. It all concludes in a kind of Oedipus-over-easy happy ending in which our hero mistakes the love of a mother for the love of a lover, proving that you can't judge a void by looking at the cover. If this all sounds loony, it is just a normal day in Brooklyn for Jonathan Lethem, an author with one of the most fertile imaginations in authordom. Although it is not his best work, "As She Climbed Across the Table" is a good read, full of Lethem's unhinged humor and dead-on scientific satire, right down to Evan and Garth, the quantum roommates. As a companion piece, I recommend Lee Smolin's "The Life of the Cosmos." Like "As She Climbed Across the Table," it speculates a Darwinian evolution of universes connected by black holes. You may find it somewhat difficult to distinguish Smolin's serious metaphysics from Lethem's hyperbolic humor. The latter is infinitely more fun.