Customer Reviews

The Metaphysical Touch: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I've read the reviews posted, and so need not rehash the plot for you yet again. I just finished this book yesterday, and wanted to weigh in on the side of the proponents of it. It's not a philosophy tract, its a novel! A novel that does cause you to stop and consider some of the philospohical questions raised by the protagonists, but it remains true to its literary purpose. The Hamlet theme is especially adroit, and I agree with the reviewer who singled out the 7 year old Martha as an especially engaging character. If you loved the movie "You've Got Mail," you'll probably NOT like this book. If you do enjoy a well-written book with realistic characters, clever dialogue and some substance between the plot lines, then do get this book. This is one of my ten best of the year, to date.

My best friend and I, who live in separate states and are in touch mostly by email, read this book at the same time. We marvelled at the intelligence of the writing, and the geniune friendship between J.D. and Pi. Many of the late night questions we ponder were addressed in M. Touch. We both felt compelled to write the author a letter of thanks for such a touching (no pun) book. But we never got around to it. Hopefully, Sylvia Brownrigg will read this review! I can't wait for her next book!!!

Another mixed bag. Like most novels not bad enough for me to close within the first 30 pages, there is something to this one. It didn't bore me--exactly--although, well, yes it did in some parts. It also didn't grip me--exactly--although, well, yes there were some surprisingly lyrical passages that did pull me in. Some of the literary and philosophical references were lost on me. I suppose I'm not as erudite as you other readers. On the other hand, you shouldn't have to be erudite to enjoy a novel. Other novels much more jam-packed with important ideas and important and/or obscure references than this one--like Umberto Eco's works, for instance--have indeed gripped me, held me, transported me. The problem here, I think, is more basic. This in fact is not a novel of ideas. It is a novel based on characterization. And I never came to much care about the main characters--okay, maybe about Pi a bit, but never about JD, and once Pi was drawn to him she lost her lustre for me too. Ultimately, the biggest problem was the most important section, the private correspondence between the two, by means of which they connect deeply and Pi falls for JD. This never rang true. It's almost as if Brownrigg wrote, "They connected deeply," instead of writing something to convey this happening. I just didn't see it. Never felt the genuine connection happening organically. And yet. And yet. It wasn't all bad. I did keep reading. There are some nice touches.

Like its protagonist, I am a former academic philosopher faced with a dilemma of how to live as a philosopher in the technological world. So I was worried that this book when I first chanced upon it would be a mirror image of my own paltry existence. What I found instead was a meditation, witty and hip (but always gentle and human), on the overcoming of absurdities and pre-fabricated relationships. While the book might have been trimmed by some fifty pages or so, and while the ending is not up to the rest of the gentle tension that the intriguing plot has built, the book as a whole nevertheless reverberates. Brownrigg is an artist in character creation and in the drawing of encounters between characters, both in virtual reality and in person. The brief scene towards the end where the main protagonist re-encounters her fellow students at Cody's in Berkeley is sheer poetry in its simplicity. This book is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in what draws us together and what makes us think in this present-day world.

The beginning of this book was slow, painfully so at times. The verbosity of the author makes it hard to get into the story. Then, as the story begins to move in and out of the email converstations things pick up and I couldn't put the book down. At that point I realized (or at least speculated) that the writing style was meant to set a tone for the story. As the book switches characters, the writing style changes subtly. In the end, I was happy I read the book and would recommend it to you.

I for one did not find the mention of "alternative lifestyles" distracting or offensive. I did, however, find the "plugs" for Dodie Smith strange and out of place.

The Metaphysical Touch should win the National Book Award. This novel's characters show us the human heart in the most authentic and affecting ways I have read since Doris Lessing, John Updike, and Jeanette Winterson. Along the way we spend time with philosophical ideas, issues of sexuality with a subltety that is all the more erotic for its nuance rather than explicitness, the intimacy of e-mail, and the way people fall in love and overcome pain. The writing is gorgeous, the story moving, so that I felt I'd been listening to Brahms. I have read this book twice - to see the beautiful layering of characters and ideas, and absorb the droll and erudite vision of our human condition. Brownrigg writes of lives worth living and connecting with a knowledge and transparency, whether of mating love, or the love of brotherhood, that John Donne would recognize. From a writer's point of view, the book has a structure as balanced and unobtrusive as a mobile made by a discreet Calder. This would also make an ideal reading group book, or book club choice, for its take on life is provocative and gentle, with a way of touching sources of pain and love in ourselves in unexpected ways. The story, from a man's point of view, and from a woman's, as well as a child's, should appeal to any reader who loves to think. Besides it was enormously fun to read.

This novel is a sly satire of the ways that intellectual life is compartmentalized in contemporary America--it is a satire of the academic world, especially. It also offers its own alternative vision of the possibilities of intellectual life outside these highly confining institutions. It concerns two people--Pi and J.D.--who are searching for meaning in an increasingly alienating and homogenized capitalist world. They find it, most amazingly, in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, of Sylvia Plath, in the drama of Hamlet and the philosophy of Kant. For these two people, the ideas in these texts come alive in ways they never can for the professional classes--especially for so-called professional thinkers. As a reader I found myself energized by the possibility of connecting to the reality and truth of the work of art, unmediated by the dead hand of authority. One of the novel's most appealing characters is a little seven year old girl named Martha who has no trouble thinking for herself and living in a world of her own stories and dreams. But the novel makes it clear that the world will conspire against this gifted child, pushing her to become just another glazed-eyed, therapy spouting conformist. I can only hope she avoids this fate; but the novel is optimistic enough to suggest that even if she falls into it for a while she can reconnect with her better self of childlike wonder.

I have now read _The Metaphysical Touch_ twice. The first time I was simply stunned by the skill of the writing and the depth and reality of the characters. I laughed out loud five or six times, especially at a description of the Baltimore waterfront that moved skilfully (almost as if in a film tracking shot) towards a hysterically funny climax. The second time I read it I could appreciate some smaller details of writerly skill and magic. Most of all the characters have stayed with me over time. They seem so real and true--I wish I could meet them, and it almost seems as though I have. J.D., one of the two main characters, is a melancholy comic masterpiece. This book will bring you great joy. I can't wait to see what Brownrigg writes next.

I bought this novel when it came out in London about a month ago and I found it really tedious. The author takes a pretty hackneyed idea (two people meeting over the internet) and goes nowhere with it. I hate to be negative but it reads like a novel that the author wrote her junior year at college and then managed to get someone to publish it.

Sometimes I''m in the mood for trashy "junk food" literature, but often I long for something more substantial. Well, I found it in this book. Satisfying both emotionally and intellectually. Incredibly well written - I learned a bit about philosophy almost by accident, as I was absorbed in the developing friendship of a very engaging pair of characthers. Lots to think about in this book - philosophy, psychology, relationships of all different sorts....I recommend this book very highly.