Radiance: A Novel [Paperback]

Carter Scholz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2003

Born from the threat of nuclear weapons comes a program to build an impenetrable defense against them. The technical obstacles are enormous, the costs exorbitant, and the results dubious. Philip Quine didn’t come to the Lab to work on weapons, but his expertise with X-rays leads him to Superbright, in theory an orbital battle-station to shoot down missiles, in reality little more than spotty test data. Superbright is only the beginning, as Quine is drawn further away from the pure physics he set out to do and deeper into the machinations of those who would use the Lab for their own monetary or ideological advantage. Radiance is a brilliant and entertaining exposé of the way in which the bright hopes and fond dreams of talented
scientists are turned on the grindstone of political expediency until all that remains are the rough deceptions of self and nation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Carter Scholz has made a difficult subject highly relevant and entertaining with Radiance, his debut novel investigating the darkness at the heart of the nuclear defense industry. With the eye of an insider, Scholz focuses this daring work on a California nuclear testing lab in the mid-1990s and declassifies the motivations and manipulations of its senior planners. The novel follows Philip Quine, a reluctant weapons research scientist whose whistle-blowing report on lab data falsification leads to his promotion as interim lab director. As Quine gradually discovers the defense industry's deep-seated deceptions and self-sustaining tactics, the novel turns its attention to human nature and the unspoken drives and fears that propel us to contention.

An excellent novel on all counts, Radiance succeeds most notably due to Scholz's extensive research and use of detail. He provides plenty of complex scientific information, and in his hands it's accessible and fascinating. A gallery of well-developed characters helps dramatize the novel's revelations and illuminate the varying backgrounds and beliefs of those influencing defense policy. A part-time composer of electronic music, Scholz has an ear for dialogue and sound, which is made evident by his musical prose and use of realistic punctuation. Intricate and dark, Radiance is saturated with fragmented transmissions, signs, and conversations that may well resemble puzzle pieces. Where these puzzle pieces intersect we see an intertwining of fates and a bleak future. On the other hand, all that information could just be minutiae distracting us from the obvious and unavoidable. Either way, it's one more reason to investigate Radiance. --Ross Doll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in an intrepid nuclear weapons research and testing station in the middle of the desert, complete with protest banners and swinging police truncheons, this wannabe political satire treads all too familiar ground, despite the talented Scholz's inventive, high-energy prose. Leo Highet, director of the lab, derides his colleagues and hopes to build an incredibly powerful weapon, dubbed Radiance. Working under him is x-ray expert Philip Quine, harassed by public outcry and political backbiting on all sides, his sense of inconsequence so massive he can neither produce adequate research nor think critically about the dubious work he is doing. In the parking lot outside the facility, he meets a protester and falls in love with her; at home, he fights with his girlfriend, who is cheating on him. Meanwhile, defense spending rolls ahead, but the development of Radiance is unaccountably stalled. What is fascinating here is Scholz's stylistic knack for creating a clipped system-speak, derived from the blips and burps of conversation. Relations between characters are cold and unfulfilling, and character development is registered only by the protagonists' sudden shifts in situation: without much ado, they are hired and fired or start affairs and end them. Scholz's writing crackles with energy, intelligence and dark humor, but readers will recognize tones and topics heavily based on Pynchon, DeLillo et al., and wish Scholz had struck out a little farther on his own. (Feb.)Forecast: A strong endorsement from Jonathan Lethem should attract a cultish audience to this promising if unsatisfying debut.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Picador (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312311362
• ISBN-13: 978-0312311360
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,632,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intense, Demanding, Powerful, Worth Reading, August 6, 2002

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Radiance: A Novel (Hardcover)

The novel takes place in a Department of Energy laboratory somewhere in California. The laboratory had been working in nuclear weapons research but with the end of the cold war it must find new missions to justify itself and keep the funding coming. The physicists who work there find themselves getting away from science and into politics and becoming more and more disillusioned. Every day they have to fight their way through protestors to get to work. And the protestors also find themselves disillusioned, getting nowhere. That is the plot in a nutshell. But the author executes it with intensity, energy, and a painful probing of the human spirit.
Scholtz has a remarkable style--a kind of acoustic reality, I would call it--in which conversations are reported exactly as they sound, without quotation marks, words broken off, sentences broken off, hard to tell who is talking. The effect is like wandering into a large crowd of people and being inundated with fragments of speech. It is like actually being in the story as opposed to being told the story.
I must say this was not an easy book to read, and I would not like to read a book of this intensity very often. Nor is there a happy ending to lighten things up. The characters are complex but dark, idealists who have lost hope in their ideals, searching frantically for something (or someone)to believe in, but never finding. A dark, painful, difficult book, but well worth reading!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Radiance is Radiant, February 22, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Radiance: A Novel (Hardcover)

A wonderfully written novel that shows what has become of "big" science in the nuclear age better than any other I have seen. Scholz clearly articulates how research has become a self-perpetuating quest for technology as a product, whose teams are constantly forced to justify their existance with whatever data they can-- no matter how specious. Strong characters and vivid prose as well. All in all, enormously entertaining, and enormously informative: what every good and important book should be.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picking up the baton, June 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Radiance: A Novel (Hardcover)

As the previous review notes, this extraordinary novel is written in the style of William Gaddis...perhaps to a fault. The reader is presented with a hectic (but always well-controlled) stream of information in the form of competing signals and noises: dialogue fragments, headlines, TV and radio broadcast snippets, extracts from computer files and science reports, as well as some oldfashioned (and terribly poetic) narrative description, out of all of which the attentive reader extracts a horribly funny picture of mid-90s America. If you're read J R or A Frolic of His Own, you know the drill; if I have a complaint, it's that Scholz may have subsumed his own voice (whatever that proves to be) in emulation of the late master Gaddis. Here the characters are involved with a science lab (obviously modeled after Livermore), so long entwined with the defense industry that actual research is perpetually set aside in favor of generating "test results" (rigged, if necessary) that keep the Pentagon trillions rolling in. Never fear: we meet real characters here, flawed, loving, struggling. Buy this book! I'd hate to see Scholz imitating Gaddis in another unfortunate area, that being sales.