Customer Reviews

Radiance: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

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 existence 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.

A great and smart novel in the tradition of Gaddis and Pynchon, (with a gift for dialog straight out of the former). Funny, too, if it wasn't so painfully close to the truth concerning the nexus of the arms industry, research science off the deep end, and self-perpetuating institutions everywhere. Written well before the current war effort, making it prescient as well as radiant.

Radiance, if you didn't know better, could sound a lot like a Tom Clancy novel (man works at nuclear lab, man finds invalid data, man blows whistle, etc.) but nothing could be further from the truth. This book is all about the prose.

Reading previous reviews of this novel, you may be lead astray. The story here is quite well developed, and Scholz's obvious knowledge of the Nuclear/Defense community seems quite valid. But the story is told more as a pseudo-perspective of a data-stream mind. Characters come and go, relationships come and go--some quite rapidly. But even though this is a tale of manipulation and dominance, it is its lyrical content that makes it worth reading.

However - while the story keeps its grip through the unique story-telling, it seems labored and, at times, taken too far. I had to read some pages a few times because the stream-of-consciouness riffs actually made me drone out.

It's worth reading, and worth noting Scholz as a writer who not only shows great promise, but may define a new style in the upcoming years.

Good concept, definitely appeals to the geek in me, but I could not finish this book. There were too many sentence snippets that were supposed to recount conversations, and none are attributed to the speaker(s), so you must stop reading, go backwards, and start counting to figure out who said what. And what do they say? Not a whole hell of a lot. There are a lot of

--And

--No but,

--Wait

--What about...

etc. HUH?

I take issue with the idea that this style of writing is somehow "realistic". Who goes to meetings or talks with friends, and allows others to get out one word (two at most) before interrupting? I've never actually witnessed a conversation like that.

The page-long sentences are also a bit over the top. It strikes me that the author is indulging himself to the detriment of the reader.

Overall, I found the book too difficult to follow due to these confusing writing styles. I am not averse to following a complicated plot, or learning about an arcane technology, but I have no patience when the writer deliberately obfuscates the issue.

The story appears interesting but is plagued by overemblellishment of the language and infatuation with the dictionary.
Having come from the background the author uses for his story (High Energy Physics, research labs, grants and academia) and sharing some of his thoughts and fears, I found the notion compelling. Alas, the lassitude caused by the lack of measure in how far a sentence can be carried before stupor ensues, tired me out at page 75. Long sentences - a page-and-a-half long sentences! - without proper punctuation, meant to match the carelessness of badly constructed speech turn irritating after a while. Long, multi-person dialogs without proper indication of who says what are confusing. And speech snippets overheard during the beeline departure of the protagonist from a party (two-page-long fragments of non-sensical sentences!) are infuriating: you read them hoping for a ray of purpose to only find the meaninglessness of the whole thing.
Bottom line, opt for the Cliff notes of this book as the story may be good but the story telling is awkward and irritating.