Customer Reviews

The Diagnosis: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

It could happen to anybody, anytime, anywhere. You take the same train to the office as you have done every working day for the past nine years. Then suddenly you lose it.

Your mind becomes a blank. You cannot remember which stop to get off at, or even where you work. Then the panic attack starts. You begin to sweat, imagining all the other commuters are looking at you. Finally reduced to a gibbering, naked wreck crouched on the floor of the train carriage, you are escorted by police out of the station to the nearest psychiatric hospital.

What happens next to Bill Chalmers, the protagonist of Alan Lightman's brilliant new novel, is even more frightening. Mistaken for a worthless vagrant headcase, he is subjected to illegal, invasive experiments, from which his brain emerges irreparably altered. He escapes, only to be mugged.

Somehow he finds his way back home and picks up the pieces of his life, his experiences a fractured, elusive memory. Like Lester Burnham in the film American Beauty, Chalmers goes into free fall from society as he knows it. Unlike Burnham, he is not given a chance to re-invent himself.

He has it all, or so he thinks: nice house in an affluent area of Boston, swish car, good job, loving family. But the price of his success means communicating with his son via e-mail - even when they are both home. It also means long hours at the office, which pushes his wife into a cyber love affair.

The similarities to American Beauty don't end there, though Lightman adds an unusual twist by cleverly working into the story the fate of Greek philosopher Socrates, a paragon of virtue in a corrupt society. Chalmers loses his job as he degenerates physically and mentally, but comes to realise there is more to life than trying to live the dream.

This is a dark story about the erosion of moral values and the high cost individuals pay for information overload in the workplace today. Erudite and philosophical, Lightman is also a skilful storyteller who captures the reader's attention from the opening paragraph. Provocative and challenging, The Diagnosis shows the fallibility of humans in the pursuit of greed and ambition.

Socrates reasoned that to "know thyself" was the key to existence in society. For Bill Chalmers, it's a voyage of discovery that proves to be a tragedy waiting to happen.

Lightman has been praised for using this novel to take a hard look at the technological dystopia that our world seems to increasingly resemble. Unfortunately, the look amounts to little more than a glance: Lightman doesn't make much of an effort to explore the ramifications of such a world. Rather, he presents a fairly straightforward narrative which is initially absorbing but eventually frustrating. It's like Kafka without heft, Orwell sans allegory.

As for the fictionalized Dialogue by Plato, I think the Amazon.com reviewer had it right: "I never did fully figure out exactly what the Socrates story and Bill's decline have to say about each other..." That's because Lightman provides no real thread between the stories, leaving a rather large metaphoric gap for the reader to bridge. It's as if the author has excused himself from his *own* Dialogue in the face of truly difficult questions -- leaving both his characters and us none the wiser for it.

According to Lightman, _The Diagnosis_ is: figure it out for yourself.

I want to begin on a note of cynicism -- if, in fact, we live in a morally bankrupt society that becomes less intelligent each year, why is the market for highly-literate novels, plays and films about our corporate dystopia so sizeable? "American Beauty" was a surprise hit and it seems that every young novelist in America has been influenced by Don DeLillo. For all the talk about our smothering popular culture, we seem to have ample wriggle room to escape into intelligent critiques of that culture. Is it that we cultural elitists just want to tut-tut those who can't see through the most shallow features of our culture?

I hold none of this against Alan Lightman or his fine book. "The Diagnosis" begins with, in my opinion, the best first chapter of the year, a Kafka-esque nightmare of lost identity amid technological chaos. From there, the book deftly changes tone several times, alternating between medical drama, corporate satire, domestic soap opera and philosophical treatise.

"The Diagnosis" lives in the same moral universe as Don DeLillo's "White Noise" and even includes two veiled references (one would have been sufficient) to that book. It falls short of DeLillo's greatness because it lacks his humor and keen social insight. Lightman's anger at contemporary America is sometimes suffocating -- every character in the book becomes a victim of his wrath.

But taken as a work of philosophy and a snapshot of our times, "The Diagnosis" is effective and (in a strange way) entertaining. Lightman gives no easy payoffs and is completely willing to leave his reader on a down note. But somewhere in this jungle of despair is a glimmer of hope ... if we can just see, feel and hear the real world beneath our virtual creation, there is salvation.

Maybe we, the great anti-consumer consumers, are the hope. Even if we aren't, thinking so makes us feel good.

Clearly, it is currently chic to "like" this book. The National Book Foundation had Lightman's latest up as a nominee for the 2000 National Book Award for fiction. I eagerly read THE DIAGNOSIS with great anticipation. I was again disappointed with the "literary" reviews from "serious" reviewers. This book is awful. Is there a kind way to put it?

I am at a loss to find the "brilliance" in this novel. There are moments of intense description that show flashes of real talent. Maybe even a remarkable talent. But not near enough of them to salvage the plot, the characters - the book. E-mails (complete with headers) are used throughout the novel, this is an okay device, but the messages which (I guess) were to be more realistic with misspellings and typos were so ridiculous as to be obnoxious. If I received e-mails with typos like those depicted as "normal" in this book from MY attorney, MY physician, etc... I would clearly look elsewhere. Hasn't Mr. Lightman heard of spell check? Does he really think NOBODY uses it? I found this very distracting and it actually achieved the opposite by making the e-mails almost parodies and very unrealistic.

The story rises and falls, rises and falls, ultimately going - nowhere. THE DIAGNOSIS is actually a collection of paragraphs, some of which were actually penned with great skill. However, this book goes nowhere. Literally, nowhere. I am trying to write this ever so carefully as to not give anything away but I am now thinking, what could I possibly give away? There's certainly no suspense, no characters that you invest your emotions in, and in the end, you'll be glad you didn't try to get too close. It is one thing for a novel to not have a resolution, I can accept that (and do all the time). What I cannot understand from a book nominated for a National Book Award is a story with not only no resolution, but one with no resolutions of its dozen or more sub-plots. None of which ever really developed and of those that kept me mildly curious - no resolution! What was the purpose?

I think about having read some truly great novels (Of Human Bondage, Look Homeward Angel, even On The Road!) and then think back on this book and wonder what Somerset Maugham, especially, would have said about such a novel being recognized as a National Book Award nominee. I can only imagine. It is a bit frightning to me actually to think this is being considered great fiction by some. Are we entering another one of those periods where writers have to write something off-the-wall, breaking all the rules, using cheap device tricks to get noticed, while writing truly poor stories? And then have the publishing house hype it so that reviewers are afraid to be considered fogeys if they don't at least *pretend* they loved it?

Summed up: This book belongs on remainder tables, not in lights as a National Book Award nominee. Harsh? I know. But my gosh, THE DIAGNOSIS is awful.

The reviews of this novel have seemed mixed, and that caused me to re-analyze the book prior to writing a review. My initial reaction to The Diagnosis was very positive -- I found the characters were very realistic depictions of the classes of people we see every day. The fictional dialogue of Plato, evidently causes most readers to search for some connection to Bill and his story. I think the connection is there (esp. in the relationships between fathers and sons), but the more important point seems to be the very ambition of Lightman to attempt a connection.

In rethinking the book, I began to imagine that this novel was being read by someone in the year 2020. From that perspective, how would it be viewed? It seems that as an allegorical tale that ties the problems of the present to the lessons of the past, there is some significant substance here. The reader of 20 years from now would probably wonder why so much time was spent on useless email (since they will only have useful email in the future, I am sure) and why no accurate diagnosis could ever be found. Surely, then, it is all metaphor and there is no diagnosis for what afflicts us as a society now -- for we are in the middle of it and don't have the perspective of time or distance yet.

My bottom line is that The Diagnosis is worth reading now, and may be worth even more to your children.

It's amusing to see so many reviewers harping on the lack of resolution in Lightman's new novel as well as the author's ample use of misspelled e-mails and the Socrates/Anytus sub-plot. "The Diagnosis" is not a conventional novel (i.e. one in which all things culminate in a Aesop-like moral). Nor is Lightman's style meant to sketch a literal picture of our times. The details are there, to be sure, but they are laid out as impressions, not clinical descriptions. Thus, the horribly misspelled e-mails symbolize (a key word here) the rushed and reckless nature of modern communication, the Anytus sub-plot functions to propose questions, not answer them (a successful embodiment of the Socratic method), and the non-resolutions are meant to provoke further thought. Some readers seem to completely by-pass the novel's intention in a frantic search for the information buried in Lightman's novel. In a very real sense, they are committing the same crime as the protagonist himself. The Socrates of Plato's "Republic" rarely supplies answers. Instead, he poses penetrating questions that are meant to arouse further contemplation. Lightman does the same here. His book is one long (but entertaining) Socratic question: "If a man is stripped of all his external points of reference, than what is left?" It is a question we Bill Chalmers of the world would be well served by pondering.

I had the same feelings reading the Diagnosis that I had reading Alice in Wonderland...wonderful, scary, funny, improbabale...but at the same time totally possible. Bill Chalmers gets on the commuter train in Boston and soon finds he doesn't know his destination or the seventh digit of his phone number. Horrible things happen as he falls down his rabbit hole. I was swept up in this novel and kept thinking about how fried my own brain becomes from information overload, and trying to do too many things at once. Bill's son's addiction to the internet is something I see in me and most of my friends. Alan Lightman is a Kafka for 2000. When you finish reading the Diagnosis, and you should read the Diagnosis, read or re-read, Thoreau...we all need to relax.

This is a novel about the numbing our of lives. What is our disease? We don't know. What is the cure? There is no cure.

Is this the price we pay for the guilt we feel for never being man enough? How is it that we fail in the midst of success? We are sick, but what is the disease? What is the diagnosis? Where is the pain? It is not physical. We feel it in our minds and in our souls. We are tired, weary. We know the prognosis--it is death, of course--but what is the cause?

In this tortured comédie noire, Professsor Alan Lightman gives us his vision of the materialistic horror that is our lives, the information and subsistence overload that is suffocating us to death. Bill Chalmers, second level management cog, begins to unravel. First his memory goes, and then is recovered, but then the numbness sets in, in his fingers, his legs. And it advances. We watch as he fills up with bile, bile, everything is bile.

We are angry, but like Bill Chalmers we cannot lash out. We are married to the corporation, as Chalmers is to Plymouth where he "processes information." We do not learn that he does anything more specific. It doesn't matter what the information is. He processes it. The company's motto is "The maximum information in the minimum time." The vagueness of the content of their information mirrors the emptiness of our lives. More information for what? Faster for what? To what end? We do not know.

The doctors, who would diagnosis us, Lightman assures us, are like gleeful clowns in their vast ignorance, playing with their high tech toys, a cyclotron for PET scans, a "cell separator...like a portable washing machine...," spinning dials and writing articles for the Annals of Psychosomatic Disease, comparing notes with colleagues over the Internet, by cell phone. Meanwhile the patient is but a curiosity, a subject for examination and study.

Lightman uses the empty dialogue of our lives for comedic effect. We say nothing to one another and we answer with nothing, although sometimes we cry out, and life goes on. Chalmers's wife is numbing herself with alcohol while she conducts a bloodless affair by e-mail. Like Chalmers and his wife, we are estranged from life itself. "He hated the mall the same way he hated himself, except that he hated himself more because he was a part of the mall and he knew it" (pp. 343-344). Yes, the mall and our vast hunger to consume are symptoms of our disease.

Chalmers is angry (as his shrink Dr. Kripke so astutely discerns, although that is all he discerns). Chalmers cries out in his mind: "I'm going to break every machine on this planet...I'm going to rip the phones out of the wall" (p. 303, no exclamation marks). But he never has and he never will, and that is "the problem" that has become "an illness."

How real is Lightman's "diagnosis" of our society? Consider this, the fastest growing class of disease in this country is autoimmune disease, e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, etc., diseases of unclear cause in which the body is apparently assaulting itself. (Compare Lightman's delineation on p. 274).

Juxtaposed among the pages is a tale of the last days of Socrates and of one of the men who condemned him. Somehow Anytus, the ancient Greek, and Chalmers, the American, are brothers in their strange failure amid the trappings of worldly success. Anytus killed Socrates, the flower of Grecian civilization. Chalmers is killing himself. Why? Again, they do not know. We have a stupendous wealth of information, but all of it is useless, as Mrs. Stumm, the wife of one of the information executives, tells Chalmers as she waves a hand at a stack of papers, "What is this crap?...Useless. This stuff is useless." (p. 255). She speaks the truth, but they cannot hear it.

Lightman's art owes something to the imagination of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, in the latter chapters, and something to the spirit of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 throughout. There are shades and echos of the black humor of Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West. This is a fine novel with a strong sense of the spiritual emptiness of our corporate existence. One senses that Lightman feels that in love there is a flicker of hope, but that is all. The mind goes, like the mind of Chalmers's mother, and with it, the possibility of love. Or perhaps there is a moment of redemption in the intense experience of the minutia of our lives, as when Chalmers studies and lovingly draws the leaf he sees outside his bedroom window.

Only this and nothing more interrupts the bleak and lonely landscape of Lightman's vision.

The opening chapter is frightening and compelling, but beyond that it was, for me, a tough read. The author doesn't seem to have much sympathy for any of his characters. I didn't either. The wife, Melissa, seems real if not appealing and the son is appealing but not very real. Bill seems to have no personality, no inner drive except to keep going, no moral center, no core of any sort. Is that the point? In my experience most victims of modern society, business, technology, whatever, have a stronger core (often badly flawed) than Bill. Bill doesn't seem to like his meaningless job, but that hardly differentiates him from millions of others and hardly makes him sympathetic. I felt as if I were watching a robot melt down -- fascinating in its way but hardly the subject of great fiction. My curiosity in finding out Bill's ultimate fate was more idle than fueled by any interest in Bill. I really don't think you need to suffer a debilitating illness to figure out that your life is dull and silly.
I got tired of reading his e-mails long before he did, and I guess his high-powered business colleagues had not discovered spell checking -- the misspellings were irritating and a stupid device (to indicate what?).
I actually found the Plato material far more interesting than Bill's story but found only superficial parallels with the main story. It's a relatively short book, but it took me forever to get through it.
Maybe it's time to call a halt to fiction based on "life in modern society is hell and technology rules." It is and it does, but been there, read that.
Well written, I must say.

I was very disappointed by this novel. While the concept behind it is important and timely, Mr. Lightman's writing is uneven and careless - something I would never have expected from the author of the beautifully written "Einstein's Dreams."

The effort required to stay with this story of a man being compressed out of existence by materialistic, yuppie values was almost too much. A major source of irritation was the 50+ emails Lightman has used. Why he includes the full text of every email, including all the extraneous header information, is a bit of a puzzle. It strikes me as the type of thing a student would do when trying to pump up the word count in an essay they don't want to write. Worse, perhaps, the emails are full of typos and misspellings regardless of whether they are from the main character's young son, a company CEO or a specialist in neurological disorders. If this was meant as a sarcastic commentary on the absence of quality in our modern, interpersonal skills, 2 or 3 examples would have sufficed. By the 10th (or 50th) example, it is the quality of the book itself that becomes questionable.

As for the overall quality of the book, Lightman's writing displays a surprising lack of care from the very first page. No matter where you are in the book, you're never more than a page or two away from some indication of Lightman's inability to identify with his characters or the situations he places them in. Lightman's description of how the main character is affected by the mysterious ailment afflicting him (going completely numb, beginning with the hands and feet) constantly stretches credibility. There are too many points in the story in which you've just been told that the main character has lost all feeling in some extremity only to find him using it a few pages later. Can you imagine using a computer keyboard if you had no feeling in your hands? Or walking around on completely numb feet?

Of course, this is fiction, and you expect there might be moments where "realism" will be stretched to accommodate the story. So, maybe you can forgive walking on numb feet..., but the manner in which Lightman dispenses with realism does nothing for this story and, in the end, it leads me to conclude that he never really cared about any of it. How else can you explain things like a passage (one of many examples) in which the protagonist is driving in very slow, bumper-to-bumper traffic, has to slam on the brakes and is thrown against the dashboard? That he would be "thrown" at all is stretching things, but even so, how could Lightman have imagined this without realizing that the character wouldn't hit the dashboard but the steering wheel?

In a rather ironic sense, buying and reading this book will make you guilty of perpetuating the social illness Mr. Lightman is attempting to expose: spending time and money on things that lack true quality and satisfy no needs of the human heart.