A Change of Heart

books:


	• As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel Jonathan Lethem Vintage, 1998 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Change of Heart

I read As She Climbed Across the Table four or five years ago and thought it was cute but I didn't really connect with it. It felt stuffy in a way, and I couldn't understand some of the character motivations. At first I thought it was a flaw on the author's part, but since then I've come back round to reading Lethem books again, and so I re-read this one. This time I couldn't believe how sad and funny this book is, how accurate a picture of academics it sketches. I think the book was always this good, but I hadn't had the right experiences in life yet to understand it. I'd read it before I was ready. Now, after college and a few heartbreaks of my own, I completely get it. Identity is a fiction, but we try desperately to fill our own lack with things, preferences and dislikes, people, friends, families, lovers. A sad truth to confront, but I see the emptiness there, and why love is so important to fill it. I'm glad I gave this book another go round.

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Hilarious and Fun

I am an avid reader of Jonathan Lethem and have been happy with many of his novels (ie Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, Girl in Landscape) though less impressed with some of his others. This particular story is really fantastic. The narrator is fabulously flawed, sharp witted, slightly egocentric but very much in love. Discovering he is the other man to a scientific experiment throws him into a great depression and gives him the drive to win back his lover.

Unlike many of Lethems other novels which take themselves very seriously this novel is fun, it's a quick read and it's very clever.

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Scholarly wisdom

I'm not sure what to think of Jonathan Lethem these days - each work I read by him is, for a time, effortless, close to perfect, and then finds itself veering into a land of bad bad choices. Reading his The Fortress of Solitude, I was left to wonder what the book would have been like if it were simply kept as its electrifying first half, instead of allowed to wander, halfheartedly, into its characters' imagined futures. A similar sensation takes hold in As She Climbed Across The Table - it's not that what becomes of its characters is bad, per se, as much as it is simply ignorant of the novel's wondeful strengths. The book doesn't conclude, per se, doesn't quite complete its central love story - a bizarre love triangle in which Alice, the main character's girlfriend, is drawn away by a hyperactive physics blackhole called Lack - nor does it quite fulfill it, as a first glance at its ambiguous, artsy ending might assume. That's an interesting choice, to be certain, but it also ignores what the book does right. That's because As She Climbed... is effortless not as a love story, but as a breezy satire on academic life. It trots in a revolving door of bizarre academic types, each using Lack - which is, clearly and repeatedly stated, a giant nothing - as a springboard to represent their own attempts at fulfillment, their own need to "get" a situation. Its characters - named in bizarro Pynchon-esque monikers like Georges DeTooth, Dr. Soft, Carmo Braxia, Gavin Flapcloth (!) - are then a wild evocation of pretention in action, a goofy take on collegiate pretentions. There's not much of a sense about Philip Engstrand, a pleasant enough lovestruck protagonist, but its love story itself is a bit of a pleasantry meant to present the lack in its characters' own self-images that make its lunacy possible. All of that leaves this novel breezy, easy to read, fun, and not much of anything. Still, its goofiness is a treasure, especially climaxing in the actions and reactions around DeTooth, the wigged, deluded deconstructionist who explains to a physicist that his response to Lack is to, "compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will consist of only the word 'lack.'" The physicist's response is to start vomiting.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.

The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a novel of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.

Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as "American Magical Realism."

From the Hardcover edition.

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