Amazon.com Review
In the bravura opening chapter of Alan Lightman's novel
The Diagnosis, a nameless horror befalls Boston businessman Bill Chalmers in the hubbub of his morning commute. As he jostles his way aboard the train and makes cell-phone calls to check last-minute details on his morning meeting (for Bill is punctilious), a realization surfaces in his brain, "like a trapped bubble of air rising from the bottom of a deep pond." He has forgotten where he's going. All he can remember is his anxious urgency and his company's creed, "The maximum information in the minimum time." Acutely aware that he's got a 9:15 appointment, but recalling only the first six digits of his phone number, Bill helplessly gazes out the window. "Trees flew by like flailing arms.... Railroad tracks fluttered by like matchsticks. Trees, white and gray clapboard houses with paint peeling off, junkyards with stacks of flaccid tires." Lightman's Kafka pastiche is as pitch perfect as his verbal music: note the rhyming
x sounds in
stacks and
flaccid (which is not pronounced "flassid").
Terrifyingly soon, Bill is mad, homeless, beaten, and experimented on by comically evil doctors. He recovers and reunites with his family, but inexorably, mysterious paralysis ensues. Doctors try to diagnose him. Coworkers offer empty condolences and plot to steal his fast-track job. His wife seeks consolation with a passionate virtual lover on the Internet, a professor she's never met in the flesh. His teenage son triumphantly hacks into AOL's Plato Online, and Bill's last days are counterpointed with the trial of Socrates and his troubled, rich inquisitor Anytus. Instead of the real story, we get a second shimmering Lightman fable. Anytus's strife with his rebel son, a Socrates supporter, parallels Bill's grief as his son is distanced from him by illness.
Though I felt glimmerings of understanding from time to time, I never did fully figure out exactly what the Socrates story and Bill's decline have to say about each other, nor what Bill's paralysis says about modern times. I implore a smarter reader to explain it to me in the customer comments below. But I can tell you that every character is resonant, and every sensory particular is exquisitely precise, as in Lightman's biggest hit, the Italo Calvino pastiche Einstein's Dreams. --Tim Appelo
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The author of Einstein's Dreams has made a darkly affecting book out of what seems at first to be unpromising material. Bill Chalmers is an executive at an "information company" in Boston who on his way to work one day forgets completely who he is, what he does or where he is supposed to be going. After a number of nightmarish experiences, in which he rapidly becomes a homeless bum, he awakens in a hospital, more or less his old selfDexcept that his body is beginning to turn numb. So far, this approximates a conventional "breakdown under the pressures of civilization" story (and Lightman is particularly good at evoking the impersonal horrors of contemporary urban life). But the progress of Chalmers's ordeal is much stranger, richer and more weirdly comic than that. He sees a doctor who can offer only infinite tests, a psychiatrist who seems equally at a loss. Wife Melissa, conducting a cyber affair with a professor (e-mails figure extensively in the book, the kind of typos we all commit rendered with malicious glee), begins to fall apart, taking to drink as Bill gets worse. Eventually confined to a wheelchair, Bill senses that his son, Alex, a computer geek, is growing apart from him. When he's fired by his employers, Bill sues them for unfair dismissal of a sick man. All this is conveyed in scenes that show a subtly calibrated mastery of comic timing, emphasizing contemporary heedlessness and a helpless anger. The ending, as Chalmers draws increasingly inward, seeing himself only as a brain stem in an utterly dysfunctional body, carries haunting echoes of a similar passage at the conclusion of James Joyce's The Dead. Lightman's masterly study of early 21st-century angst is marred only slightly by a series of episodes from the trial and hemlock poisoning of Socrates, first called up as an e-lesson by Alex, then read by him and Melissa to Bill as he sinks further into desuetude. Vivid as these scenes are, their link with the present is extremely tenuous. Is Lightman saying that things were just as bad 2,000 years before cell phones and traffic jams, or is he imparting some hidden Socratic instruction?
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
