As She Climbed Across the Table

In an enclosed world of an American university, anthropology professor Philip Engstrand finds that his particle physicist girlfriend, Alice, has become obsessed with the latest experiment in the sinister physics complex, the creation of a void, which comes to be called 'Lack'. Engstrand gradually realizes that Alice has fallen in love with Lack and the novel follows his increasingly desperate attempts to win her back, helped or hindered by the physicist Professor Soft, the blind duo Evan and Garth, the attractive therapist Cynthia Jalter and the enigmatic deconstructionist Georges de Tooth. Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn has written a sardonic, multi-layered fable about the pretences of the academic world. While real events happen distantly outside the campus, Lethem's characters argue about the role of the observer in their blinkered disciplines, while simultaneously either spying on or snubbing each other. Lethem also pokes fun at the 'lack' of understanding in codependant relationships and in poor verbal communication. Ultimately he also asks how we can possibly know anything about the universe apart from our own 'mappings'. Lethem's Nobel prize seeking physicists, in their attempt to probe our origins, actually create a tacky parallel world, not even worthy of Alice in Wonderland, which reflects back the worst aspects of its creators. The virtual world of the Lack is, in fact, inhuman, a non-event. A host of playful references parade through these pages, including Freud, Derrida, Lacan, Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Frankinstein and Don Quixote, ironically reflecting back the metaphysical problems which obsess the characters. Lethem's spare, economic prose tells a timely tale which reflects on the failure of science to give ultimate answers about the human condition and which pleads for closeness in a social world grown narcissistic, cold and empty as the universe. (Kirkus UK)