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Ghost: A Novel

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Review of: Ghost

By: Alan P Lightman

Published: 2007

The story is aptly named "Ghost" because it gives the reader a lot to think about while showing only a glimpse of its mystery.

Like all good ghosts this apparition gives us just a peek. The "Ghost" gives David (the protagonist and the witness) only one certainty, it exists. The "Ghost" is real. David is allowed only a few seconds to witness, but the apparition leaves no room for doubt. David saw a "Ghost"

Ironically, the protagonist says that the only science he remembers from school is the Pythagorean Theorem. He says:

"The Pythagorean Theorem I still know: The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of something or other. It has to do with the sides of triangles. Would a crazy person at age forty-two be able to remember anything about the Pythagorean Theorem?"

as proof that he has not gone crazy. Pythagoras was the founder of a religion as well as a mathematician. All that David recollects is the Pythagorean Theorem, not Pythagoreanism. Pythagoreanism (the Pythagorean religion) held the human soul is as real as the human body. David has accepted the concrete mechanical concept of Pythagoras, but is not even aware of Pythagorean concept of the soul.

David is reading Edward Gibbon's "The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" while searching for a job. David mentions this, to himself, and shows that he has time on his hands and that he is using it well (the penguin press edition is published in three volumes and is a total of 3,616 pages). By selecting "The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" he shows indifference to a spiritual view (see The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume 1 (Penguin Classics), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume 2 (Penguin Classics) and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume 3 (Penguin Classics) or the single volume abridgement The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics)). Before his encounter with the "Ghost" David shows no interest in religion or the divine. He seems like the perfect skeptic.

David is not psychologically equipped to handle the consequence of his encounter with the "Ghost." What follows is a story of loneliness, quiet desperation, social ostracism and ultimately emancipation. David's emancipation comes from his ultimate acceptance of the truth that he saw with his own eyes. He saw the "Ghost" and it doesn't matter what anyone else wants to make of his vision.

I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful book. It has a "home town" appeal and a simple message of optimism that applies even to the least significant members of our society. The characters in "Ghost" are all very believable and they become like old friends.

See also:

Einstein's Dreams

Dance for Two: Essays

The Diagnosis: A Novel

A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit

Reunion : A Novel

Good Benito



Read this upbeat book for its simple message of hope.

Alan Lightman is an author who trusts that his readers can deal with complex issues. The protagonist of the novel, David Kurtzweil, experiences an unexpected career change. He ends up working at a mortuary. One day, while working, he 'sees something' when sitting with a recently deceased corpse. The press finds out about his experience and writes about it. A paranormal society contacts David and he is tested to see if he has paranormal powers. GHOST is a fascinating look at the world of science versus the world of metaphysical experience. Only a writer like Mr. Lightman can pull off such a story. If you have not read Alan Lightman you should. EINSTEIN'S DREAMS remains one of the most creative works of fiction written in our generation. High praise.

This book is written with lyrical prose reminiscent of Alice Hoffman's finest works. It isn't so much a suspense tale, or even a solid ghost story. It is about a man who experiences a phenomenon that he cannot fully define. He sees something that isn't thoroughly described - he isn't sure what he really saw.

When the story gets out that he saw something that may have been a spirit in the funeral home where he works, his life is thrown into complete upheaval. His mother, who is already a bit cold and self-centered, rejects his experience. His ex-wife, who is equally cold hearted, decided to show up, sending his life into further upheaval. I won't say more as I don't want to ruin the story.

This author has created a flawed character you come to care for. You agonize over the upheaval in his life. You hope, throughout the story, that he will end up with a happier life than the one he is leading. He becomes human in your mind. That is the mark of a story well told. I highly recommend this book.

David Kurzweil is a middling man. He is middle-aged and a former middle manager who has lost his job at a large bank and soon finds himself working as an assistant at a family-owned funeral home. Although bright and intellectually curious (he reads Hume and Descartes and attended law school for one semester), he is content to live a tranquil life in a modest, all-male apartment building, sharing quiet evenings at home and walking around a lake with his librarian girlfriend. But what happens to him one afternoon in the funeral home's slumber room --- when he believes he sees "vapor [come] out of a dead body" --- changes his life irrevocably and serves as the springboard for this thoughtful and affecting novel.

At first David is reluctant to embrace the import of his experience: "He believes that something has happened to him, but he doesn't know what it is, and he wants to explore it slowly and gingerly, like an ambiguous but riveting smile in the distance." When reports of the sighting inevitably leak to the press, he is besieged by desperate people who believe he has supernatural powers and want him to communicate with their deceased relatives and friends.

Soon David is approached by an organization known as the Society for the Second World, whose leaders think they have found an appealing Everyman to popularize their beliefs. Eventually they persuade him to submit to testing by a Dr. Tettlebeim, using a Rube Goldberg-like contraption called an "R box" --- for random number generator --- to see if his mind can influence the distribution of those numbers. He is pulled in the other direction by a skeptical college classmate, Ronald Mickleweed (the professionals in the novel, including a lawyer named Pillbeam, all have odd, almost Dickensian, names), a professor of physics at their alma mater. The investigators press their claims against each other in a series of tests that ultimately allow each side to claim that its position has been vindicated.

As troubled as David is by his sudden notoriety, his life is thrown into more turmoil when his ex-wife Bethany unexpectedly reappears in town. Their encounter revives his suppressed feelings for her and threatens to undermine his relationship with his girlfriend Ellen. What happiness David experiences is further shadowed by the childhood death of his father and his mother's failing health.

Alan Lightman, a professor of theoretical physics at M.I.T., is one of those remarkable thinkers able to bridge the worlds of science and humanism while giving equal respect to each. He takes no sides in the debate between those who believe in the paranormal and its scientific challengers, leaving it to his readers to sift through the evidence and make their choice. Still, it's fair to say his sympathies lie with those who give at least some credence to the notion of a hidden world. Lightman's observations about the possibility of that nonmaterial realm are lyrical and moving. Describing David's uncertainty about whether his experience was anything more than a visual hallucination, he writes, "At times, he has felt the world opening up around him, shifting, cracks forming in the wall of experience, and he has been poised to see through those cracks. The supernatural he cannot accept. But he does believe that there is something unseen behind common experience, some totality, which can be glimpsed only between the cracks." Lightman evokes his first novel, EINSTEIN'S DREAMS, a strikingly original meditation on the nature of time, when he quotes the eminent scientist in a similar vein: "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Lightman is an empathetic writer who sketches even his relatively minor characters with depth and subtlety. Most notable among them is Martin Shaw, the aging, fourth-generation funeral director who collects stamps and quotes William Blake and who is less concerned about the validity of David's experience than he is about the flood of business generated by the reports of the extraordinary sighting.

What Lightman does with both compassion and sensitivity in GHOST is to suggest gently to even the most skeptical among us the possibility that there's a real world beyond the one we can perceive with our senses. "The seconds and years stretch to infinity," he writes, "but a thing might be felt only at one moment. It might always be there, the world underneath and the miracle, but felt only in brief, fleeting stabs." GHOST elegantly traverses the shadowy boundary between faith and reason, belief and science, and Alan Lightman is a capable guide to that territory.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

In his powerful novel, Ghost, Alan Lightman leads his readers on an exploration of the border between two modes of perception--the scientific and the mystical. The result is a lyrical narrative of one man's journey from a state of paralysis into greater self knowledge and an increased capacity of connection to the social and material world in which he lives.

Lightman expands his reader's concept of what constitutes reality in his refusal to exile the mystical from the world of human experience. In taking a job at a funeral home, his protagonist, a man adept with numbers and committed to understanding important truths, discovers an ambiguous and ambivalent borderland in which mystical and material realities merge. After experiencing an enigmatic glimpse of the paranormal, Lightman's hero faces pressure from those dedicated to the causes of science and mysticism to overstate his assessment of the encounter.

Lightman, an MIT professor with degrees in both science and writing, uses his character's dilemma to question the human tendency to insist upon certainties where none exist. Ultimately, he suggests that, in doing so, we limit our understanding rather than increase it.

Indeed, Lightman's novel also offers interesting insight into the divide in American culture between materialists and those whose sense of reality makes room for the mystical. In particular, he manages to convey an important aspect of modern university life that contradicts the stereotype of the intelligentsia as hostile to religion. At one point, Lightman's hero finds himself at the center of a committee debate between the science and humanities faculty at a local university. Here, Lightman delineates the two camps into which many campuses divide, with science faculty insisting that the university discount and dismiss the ghostly encounter, while the spokesman for the humanities makes the case for the mystical as belonging to an important mode of perception informing the way those working in the humanities perceive the world.

In pressuring Lightman's hero to deny his experience, the forces dedicated to materialism cause him to analyze his own relationship to his memories and his understanding of his past. While we might expect such a growing sense of uncertainty to increase his protagonist's paralysis, Lightman has the reverse happen. Thus his hero's more fluid sense of self enables him to take emotional risks that deepen his satisfaction with his relationships and his life.

I highly recommend Lightman's novel and I look forward to reading this author's other works.

Other reviewers have given good plot summaries, so there is no point in duplicating what has already been done. In Ghost, Lightman explores part of the theme he began in Einstein's Dreams: the line between what is real and what is not. It reminds me in some ways of a line from an old Bob Dylan song: "and the princess and the prince discuss what's real and what is not..." Did Lightman's character see a ghost or a soul? If he didn't, what did he see? The question is never answered as the characters discuss what is real and what is not. The writing is of high quality and we get to know this lost and bewildered, Everyman. The problem is, we don't think very much of him and his humdrum existence.

He cooks up a smorgasbord of interesting characters, nicely presented with all their foibles and pokes a lot of fun at modern media who converge on this poor lost soul. The predictable end was foreshadowed. All in all, it's not a bad read, but for those who have interest in Alan Lightman, I suggest you read Einstein's Dreams which is bold, original and tough to put down.

This is a novel of ideas that works as both literary novel and pychological thriller. On the surface, it is a cautionary tale of an individual seeking to steer a true course across a sea of dogmatism. On a deeper level, there are allusions to Coleridge's THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER and an illustration of a Pythagorean Theorem. It all works together in something like a masterpiece.

Alan Lightman soars in my estimation with each new novel. One of my top five books of the year.

Over the years, I've read Alan Lightman's novels with varying degrees of enjoyment. After a couple of average outings, I thought his last novel, Reunion, was a return to form. This new novel, Ghost, continues the uptick.

Like all of Dr. Lightman's novels, not a lot happens here. The entire "plot" of this novel can be summarized by the following: a man sees something (a ghost?) and it impacts his life and that of the people around him. However, when his novels are working, like this one, it is the interior life and subtleties that keep the reader interested.

There are two things that I really like about this book. First, there are some very strong characters here. Our protagonist, David, is the heart of the novel. Fired from his long-time job at a bank, he finds a new one at, of all places, a funeral home. David is a generally solid, even-tempered kind of guy whose acceptance of the many quirky characters around him help maintain a normalcy for the reader that might otherwise be missing but is important in keeping this story believable. As part of a family that has been in the funeral business for three generations, I also have to say that Martin and Jenny, the owners of the funeral home in the novel, are a pair of great characters; perhaps the most believable funeral directors I've come across in fiction.

The second thing I really like about this book is the way it takes a balanced view of the interpretation of David's "experience." As word of the event spreads, some are quick to believe he had a supernatural experience, others try to prove he had a supernatural experience, while still others try to disprove that anything supernatural happened at all. Lightman brings out very well the underlying reality: that, no matter what the evidence presented, the vast majority of people are simply going to interpret it in a way that fits in with their previously accepted belief system. Meanwhile, David's rational nature battles throughout the novel with the fact that he know's he saw something.

This is not a perfect novel. Some of the subplots with David's mother, ex-wife and girlfriend don't seem to add much. Plus, despite Lightman's themes, his prose is not particularly energetic which adds a mystical flavor but sometimes slows things down almost to a standstill. That said, there is enough of value here for me to recommend it.

I picked this book up after reading that it was by the author of "Einstein's
Dreams", which I enjoyed very much. This too is a very creative, unique and interesting read. It explores how a man's life is thrown into chaos when he has an experience with the supernatural. It's written in a kind of stream of consciousness style. Like Einstein's dreams, it explores the concept of time. It's very different from other books you'll read and I'd bet you'd really enjoy it. It takes a little bit of time to become patient with the style in which it's written, but I thought it was a great read.

How do you describe those hints of the supernatural that sometimes creep into our daily lives for a fleeting second? We often wonder if these experiences ever even happened. No words can describe these experiences. Mr. Lightman makes a concerted effort to describe those alien feelings and incidences we sometimes have.

Endearing, and some not so endearing, characters fill his story with realism and human frailty. Vivid settings add to the ambiance. Still, things are very vague. After all, how can David, the main character, describe what he saw that is beyond description?

I know that the ambiguous quality of the book is the nature of the beast of this subject matter. However, as I read, I noticed various opportunities that lie idle. Maybe Mr. Lightman did this, because to do otherwise, would be to give the reader too many answers on a subject having no answers in this world. Although I wanted more to happen in this story, Ghost is an interesting representation of those indescribable glimpses into something beyond words.