7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Science Makes Sense, but Life Does Not., February 14, 2000
This review is from: Good Benito (Paperback)
Alan Lightman has written a series of vignettes about the passage of an idealistic youth into not-very-rewarding adulthood. Although Benito (as his best friend John dubbed him) has success in theoretical science, it is not matched when it comes to his personal encounters later in life, where relentless bad fortune is visited upon him as he grows older.
Possibly because I grew up similarly in the warm grasp of science, I thoroughly enjoyed Bennett's childhood experiences and his close friendship with John, who shared his interests. Later, Bennito was most at home in the detached world of mathematics, where a clean sheet of white paper and a pencil opened the magical doors to his creativity. He naturally was led to a career in science, which provided him with all the satisfactions and rewards he seemed to need.
But it did not prepare him to share his life with other people. Nor did his meager interactions with his parents, particularly his father, give him a good foundation for life. Lightman suggests that to be successful in physics, one must be obsessed by it until age forty. Benito was. And it paid off careerwise. But there is still the last half of one's life to be lived. Benito found a wife, a beautifully sensitive creature, but she was not really meant for this world. Their relationship developed promisingly at first. But then what happened? What makes people act in self-destructive ways? A lack of preparation in youth, perhaps. But whose fault, or responsibility, is it?
I liked this book mostly for its insights into the creative process. In describing Bennett's brilliant teacher Davis, Lightman wrote: "...It seemed to Bennett that Davis took more pleasure in being wrong [about scientific problems] than in being right. When he was wrong, he learned something new."
Ultimately, however, Bennett's story left me with an inner vacant feeling, almost as if I had witnessed the sacrifice of an beautiful idealistic youth upon the altar of science.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Benito is a superpartner to Einstein's Dreams, September 26, 2002
Good Benito seems to have been somehow overlooked amid the attention to other Alan Lightman greats like Einstein's Dreams and The Diagnosis. That's unfortunate, since Benito shares equally with those two books in its ability to linger and continue growing larger in your mind long after reading it. This one has the curious twist of centering on an alter ego of the author, as with Orson Scott Card's "Lost Boys," with parallels eerily close enough to make you wonder how much or how little the author is taking liberties with biographical experiences. To see for yourself, compare fictional Bennett Long's breakthrough in globular cluster dynamics in Benito, with real-life Alan Lightman's breakthrough in globular cluster dynamics in the Review of Modern Physics (Volume 50, page 437, published 1978).
As such, the novel stands as much a creative quasi-autobiography as an apological defense for leaving a profession in physics. For Bennett strives constantly for a rational universe capable of becoming well-understood. But while his study of physics delightfully rewards this instinct, the vicissitudes of human life and the mysteries of human behavior are far more ambiguous and troubling. This plays out almost in a series of vignettes not unlike Einstein's Dreams in structure, with serial encounters and comraderies punctuated by modernist episodes of detail-laden solitude. A pot-smoking MIT roommate, a brilliant but estranged childhood friend, a gambling-addicted uncle, a compassionate nanny, and a harried astronomer, among others, all puzzle Bennett with their irrational motivations. The novel is book-ended by the most notable subjects: the last is a beautiful and talented but implacably narcissist lover, while it begins with the most incomprehensible of all possible crazies in Bennett's world: a great physicist devoid of ego. The cumulative exploration of the limits of human reason is tied up nicely at the conclusion, wherein Bennett and his nephew float on a fishing boat amid an incoming fog and test their reactions to feeling lost in the blank shroud of human existence. Lightman's writing style conveys profound insight with sparse dialogue offset by revealing details of action and form. The questions it raises are subtle to the point of seeming to arise spontaneously in the reader's mind. An obliquely haunting story.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally!--a thinking man's hero, February 23, 1999
This review is from: Good Benito (Paperback)
A great break from frilly, over-written fiction, this book is beautifully written and wonderfully imaginative. Benito is a real charcter--finally someone that the intelligent portion of the population can identify with. I liked it very much and plan to read it again.
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