`Properties Of Light' is a twisting, elusive novel

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"Properties Of Light: A Novel Of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics"

by Rebecca Goldstein

Houghton Mifflin, $23

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I eventually learned - though I still can't say for sure if the book warrants this much attention - to understand Rebecca Goldstein's fourth, and surely, most convoluted novel by reading it out loud, or at least just barely under my breath.

The interior considerations and extrapolations of its protagonist Justin Childs can make sense for stretches at a time, but they seldom stay long on any one subject. They also twist, with odd logic from one subject to another. Sentence segments resurface just a line or two later, pushed like a twig, or a log, in a stream or a coruscating river.

As text on a page, this sometimes became maddening to me, an ever-deepening well of consideration between developments. As interior monologue, though, or a dramatic play simply not labeled as such, the words assert power to make their own shapes, and their own significances.

And for Justin Childs, interior monologues hold him together when other forces cannot. More accurately, emotion expressed through these monologues bind him, since he is rejected in love, stripped of the physics that gave him shape before love did and stripped of his mentor in physics. That mentor is Dr. Samuel Mallach, a shunned academic who's quietly managed to step within a few feet of that Holy Grail in physics: unification of quantum mechanics with Einstein's relativity theory. Childs proposes to meet with Mallach, and shoulder-to-shoulder make those last few steps (the exact math, in other words) for the cup.

"Mallach" translates from the Hebrew as "angel," though considering Dr. Mallach's re-interpretation of elemental existence, and the reception his theories garner from colleagues, "Moloch," fire god of the Ammonites, also comes to mind. We know that "Mallach" means "angel" because Dr. Mallach explains this to Justin Childs, and the reader, along with the family joke that "the machers (movers, shakers) are no mallachs."

Justin Childs also has a college roommate named Zeno. You may not be terribly surprised to learn that Zeno has a problem with a paradox, and a problem with motion. Other proper names, place names and street names stem from this sophisticatedly punning arrangement, each straining the narrative as the reader first absorbs the reference, then waits for the figurative second shoe to drop.

"The passage of time is nothing real, but a projection from our inner worlds. . ." Childs comments. "Time is static, the flow unreal: It is Einstein's truth, and it is the truth. The flow of moments, which seems so relentless and so real, which seems to carry off one's every treasure, leaving one spilled open like a chest upon the waves: unreal, unreal."

Within the narrative, Childs hovers at a scene for apparent eternities (especially at the window of Dana Mallach, his lost love and Dr. Mallach's daughter). He flows from a seeming-past to a seeming-present, and pixelizes himself into the subatomic particles present anywhere he turns his limited omniscience.

Goldstein, sadly, hasn't quite figured out how to take her prose along on this essence-shifting. If text in italics on a single page represents two conversations on two different subjects between two different sets of speakers, confusion seems unavoidable amongst those of us trapped inside the linear illusion. We can chase after Justin Childs in his self-constructed, self-inflated and singularly scintillating balloon universe - but we can't quite grab for the string.