Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger--Review

Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

Gray Planet Commentary

• A Slow and Challenging Read
• Complex–Too Complex?

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 70/100
• Literature Index: 75/100
• Magic Factor: 40/100

Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger is an interesting read and something different for Freudenberger. Lost and Wanted is written in the first person from the point of view of Helen Clapp, a well-known and respected physicist and a distinguished professor at MIT. Helen receives an unexpected and aborted phone call from her friend, Charlie, from whom she hasn’t heard in a while. Two days later Helen receives a call from Charlie’s husband, Terrence, telling her Charlie died–the day before Helen received the aborted call.

Subsequently, Helen receives and responds to occasional text messages from Charlie’s phone, which Terrence informed her is missing. This establishes a supernatural element to the plot, one that is juxtaposed to Helen’s strong belief in the science and reality of physics. But, as we learn through Helen’s many digressions into her work as a physicist, physics and reality also have their strange, contradictory, and mysterious aspects–like quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and black holes. In this manner, Freudenberger presents three very different aspects of Helen. The most important of these is her life as a scientist and physicist, a characteristic that grounds her in logic, mathematics and the scientific method. The world is a logical place and can be understood if only one looks at it closely enough, Helen believes. The second aspect of Helen is her personal life–a somewhat messy, uncertain and fuzzy experience that she struggles with defining. Helen’s third aspect is as a mother–Helen has an eight-year-old son, whom she raises alone, and who was conceived via an anonymous sperm donor.

The story proceeds in three areas as well. The first is the present time, in which Helen attempts to come to terms with the death of her friend Charlie. Helen and Charlie (who is black, Helen is white), met in college at Harvard, and were very close for many years. However, after the births of their children (Simmi, Charlie’s daughter is one year older than Helen’s son, Jack), they had less and less contact. Helen is strongly affected by Charlie’s death and it leads her to take actions that make her uncomfortable, but which are important. She speaks at Charlie’s memorial service, and she pushes for Terrence and Simmi to move into the apartment she has in her home.

Charlie’s death also creates echoes from the past. In flashbacks, Helen reminisces extensively about her relationship with Charlie over the years. She remembers events and her reactions to them that cause regret, and realizes that there were many times when both she and Charlie missed opportunities to enhance and deepen their relationship–opportunities now gone forever. These thoughts cause Helen to muse about where she is in life now and what she wants in the future.

Helen also remembers in detail her long standing and one time romantic relationship with Neel Jonnal, who was also at Harvard. After their romantic relationship ended, Neel became Helen’s collaborator on her signature contribution to physics–the Clapp-Jonnal model. Neel reappears in her life at nearly the same time that Charlie dies, providing Helen with a complicated triangle consisting of her attraction to Terrence, Neel’s return, and her own uncertainty that raising Jack alone was a good choice.

The third story arc involves the melding of the past and the present in Helen’s mind and emotions. Charlie is gone, but her family and her presence continue in Helen’s life as she sees Charlie reflected in her daughter Simmi, as well as in the sorrow, anger, and persistence of Charlie’s husband Terrence’s attempts to help his daughter through the loss of her mother while at the same time navigating his own way through his grief.

In addition, Neel, her collaborator on the most important work of her career in physics, and her first love while in college, returns to Helen’s life, moving to MIT from Cal Tech to pursue his research. This brings up the emotions of their failed relationship, complicated by the fact that Neel surprises her, first with the announcement that he will marry, then with the fact of his new wife’s pregnancy. This is especially significant since one of the complications of their early relationship was that Neel did not want children and Helen did.

Throughout all of these narratives Helen’s thoughts veer off topic frequently, into long explanations of the concepts of quantum and relativistic physics. These appear random, but they are not. They show us two things. First, these expositions of science are the essence of who Helen is–a rational and practical woman who finds solace in the predictability of science, but who, at the same time understands that science itself produces unpredictability, randomness, and mystery at its deepest levels–for example, when we enter the realm of quantum entanglement, or approach the event horizon of a black hole, or when relativistic effects create things like gravity waves.

These scientific asides provide the reader, and Helen, with a way of trying to understand how our lives and experiences are a mirror of the complexity of the physical world–how the active, ghostlike presence of Charlie is reflected by quantum entanglement (which Einstein claimed was “spooky action at a distance”), or how Neel’s return to her life so many years later is like a gravity wave touching a detector on Earth billions of years after it was created by the faraway collision of two black holes–objects we can’t even see directly.

But Freudenberger leads her readers down the garden path in her novel by presenting the text messages from Charlie in a such a mysterious manner. Because this is a trope from many a lesser novel, we at first think Freudenberger’s novel may be like them. We think we may be reading about supernatural events and this is misleading. It is not what the story is about and it minimizes the effectiveness of what Freudenberger is really about. Helen doesn’t really believe the ghost of Charlie is sending them, but we are left with this idea for much too long in the story.

There are also times in the novel when Freudenberger presents the reader with what are clearly scenes filled with portent. But for me, these are too hazy and I am left only with uncertainty and confusion. Her metaphors and imagery don’t resonate in my mind or provide me with any sense of deeper understanding–they are only complex and unintelligible.

So I am left with mixed feelings about Lost and Wanted. I enjoyed the book, and I particularly enjoyed Freudenberger’s forays into physics and all its mysteries. The story is well told and her characters interesting and complex. But I find myself wanting to forget the almost supernatural ending with Helen’s daydream that conflates Neel and Charlie warming Helen’s freezing body and Simmi’s apparent ghostwriting of a message in the data log at the LIGO lab. When I read these, I expected an ending that would make sense to me and pull together all the people, the times, and the events of the story into one metaphysical denouement that would expand my spirit and leave me with a sense that this was a completed experience. I really expected this of Freudenberger since she had such control of her story and her characters. Instead, I was left confused and empty.

This is probably my lack, but still.

Slaughterhouse-Five Review

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Gray Planet Commentary

• So it goes
• Simple, but compelling narrative
• Absurdist, but terribly, frighteningly real

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 90/100
• Literature Index: 90/100
• Magic Factor: 75/100
• Sense of Wonder Index: 40/100

I suspect most readers either like or hate Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. They either think he is silly or profound, a doddering fool or a wizard. The same is true of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

His style is at times simplistic, even childish. His prose is sparse, his paragraphs and chapters short. He skitters from scene to scene with abandon, like a child exploring the world. He uses varieties of humor to make tolerable the horror of his subject.

And yet, the effect of this simplicity, childishness and funny stuff is a novel that is profoundly dark, filled with portent and laced by lessons the world and the people in it must learn or forever be doomed. Vonnegut is a trickster, a clever wordsmith who distracts you with a smile and then hits you with a hammer.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the Vonnegut’s topic is war, and particularly the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 25,000 civilians (although Vonnegut, writing in the 1960s, references then contemporary estimates in the hundreds of thousands–an exaggeration which emphasizes his point). Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s main character, is a POW in Dresden at the time of the bombing. Vonnegut himself was a POW in Dresden and he speaks, through Billy Pilgrim, with authority about the horrors, injustices, and terrible consequences of war.

For Vonnegut, there is no making sense of this war, nor of this bombing, nor, by extension, of the human condition. And so, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and flits back and forth throughout his life, visiting moments here and there, now and then, reflecting on the absurdity of war, the inevitability of death, the chronic sadness of life and the futility of any attempts to make sense of it all.

To add to the absurdity, Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, the Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are strange-looking creatures with their eyes in the palm of their hands so they have to hold up their open hands to view the world, as if they were saluting, or waving.

The Tralfamadorians have solved all the problems Billy sees–they simply ignore them and remember the good times. But even though Billy may want to do this, it doesn’t work for him. He cannot control his skipping through time and this results in reliving moments where he is witness to horror and death because that is what happened. There is no escape for Billy. In the unreality that Vonnegut creates where Billy moves spontaneously from one time to another and where he is a specimen in a Tralfamadorian zoo, he cannot escape the reality of his own experiences and of his own world. He is unstuck in time, but stuck in his own life and his own world as he experienced it. He cannot change it, as much as he might desire to.

That Vonnegut can create such complexity and depth of meaning with simple prose and absurd action is wizardry. We read breezily through the asynchronous events of Billy’s life, flying along through short chapters and brief paragraphs, but long before we arrive at the end, we realize that this is a tragic story, and it is our story, everyone’s story. So it goes.

Is this science fiction? Yes, but not really. There are certainly science fiction tropes here: time travel; aliens with a unique culture; even virtual space travel. But none of these are the focus of the novel as they are in real science fiction. The science fiction elements of Slaughterhouse-Five are simply plot devices, tools which Vonnegut uses to expand and elaborate his themes.

LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness creates an alien culture and uses it as a means of exploring human sexuality. For LeGuin, the story follows from the world she has created, and the story cannot exist without the science fiction element. Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five tells a mundane story of a man devastated by the experience of war and the manifestations of his trauma include experiences that he describes in science fiction terms. This enhances the unreality of Billy’s experience, and allows Vonnegut to point out how absurd his reality is–that World War II and the Dresden bombing have caused him to become unstuck in his own mind and to retreat to a fantasy of alien abduction to save his sanity. This juxtaposition of fantasy and reality and the ill-defined border between the two for Billy provides Vonnegut with a means of framing his anti-war polemic. How can it be, Vonnegut asks, that human beings can treat each other so? Do we not see the unreality and absurdity of it? Do we, like the Trafalmadorians, simply ignore it and therefore trivialize it? So it goes.

In this sense, time travel is not important to the story, it is a plot device used by Vonnegut to illustrate the profound effect that Billy Pilgrim’s war experiences have on his psyche–Billy Pilgrim is not really unstuck in time, this is just a manifestation of trauma he has experienced–his center cannot hold and his mind flits randomly from memory to memory.

Nor is the story built upon the existence of the Tralfamadorians, they are a foil to provide Billy Pilgrim with simple but effective answers to the question of how to live with his trauma–remember the good times, ignore the bad. Similarly, Billy’s kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians and his time in the Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack are Vonnegut’s method of providing Billy with some relief from his despair and confusion. On Tralfamadore, with Montana, Billy is content in a way he is not in his own world. He treats Montana with respect and is rewarded. In the zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana is the only time that Billy is content. But this contentment comes with a price–Billy is unable to change anything, because, as the Tralfamadorians explain, everything has already happened.

The result of all of this is a novel that stays in one’s mind long after reading it. Where other novels, as compelling as they may be, fade away after a few months, Slaughterhouse-Five blazes like the afterimage of actinic light on your retinas even after fifty years.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows by Poul Anderson--Review

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Poul Anderson

Gray Planet Commentary

• Starships! Planets!
• Alien Spies! Romance!

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 80/100
• Literature Index: 35/100
• Magic Factor: 85/100
• Sense of Wonder Index: 90/100

After seeing the nominations for the 2019 Nebula Awards for novels (which were dominated by fantasy books), I sought some “real” science fiction, a book with a classic science fiction sense of wonder. I thought of Poul Anderson, and then of A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. First published as a serial in Worlds of If magazine in 1974, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows was (according to Goodreads) Anderson’s seventh book in the Flandry series, and the fourth full-length novel.

I was 25 years old in 1974, just beginning my career as a psychotherapist in a community mental health clinic in rural Oregon. I was a voracious reader, consuming an average of a book every day, mostly science fiction. I was also beginning what would become a five year-long quest to be a professional science fiction writer.

I first read A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows as a serial in Worlds of If. The cover portrait of Aycharaych, Flandry’s nemesis, a Merseian agent, intrigued me immediately. The sense of wonder that Anderson invoked with his setting and descriptions made me savor each word of each sentence as I carefully turned the digest-sized pages of the magazine. When the Signet paperback came out in 1975 with Gene Szafran’s cover art depicting the beautiful and innocently seductive Kossara Vymezal, the heroine and Flandry’s love interest, I had to have it as well. I read the book again, and it was cemented in my memory as Poul Anderson’s best novel.

This is a classic Flandry story. Flandry is often compared to James Bond, but Flandry predates Bond by a few years, having first appeared in 1951. This book, in the Flandry corpus, brings to mind the Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, published in 1963.

Someone is fomenting rebellion on a remote Empire planet and Agent Flandry is dispatched to find out who and why and to bring this small piece of the Empire back into the fold. Flandry has information fed to him by his twenty-seven-year-old son, Dominic Hazeltine, on board the Hooligan, Flandry’s starship.

Flandry discusses Dennitza with the Emperor and is sent off to investigate. Before leaving, he purchases Kossara Vymezal, a young Dennitzan woman who was captured by Empire agents on Diomedes and charged with treason for rebellious activity and sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. Flandry treats her well in return for her acting as a double agent in his attempts to find out what is going on with Dennitza and Merseia.

In Flandry’s universe, interstellar travel takes weeks. During transit, both Flandry and Chives, his alien butler/partner/bodyguard, have conversations with Kossara, during which we learn the background of her life on Dennitza and what happened on Diomedes. Flandry also becomes attracted to her (although they are chaste) and Kossara often ruminates about him. Flandry suggests, and Kossara agrees, to be mind probed so Flandry can get more detail about what happened on Diomedes. This probing is handled in the novel through flashbacks from Kossara’s point of view. Using the information gathered from the mind probe, Flandry cements his control of Kossara for his own purposes, even though he internally is conflicted about using her in this manner.

On Diomedes, Kossara realizes that she was duped by her supposed allies and that Flandry is right–Dennitza is being manipulated by outside forces to rebel against the Empire. She and Flandry head to Dennitza to put things right. Along the way, they decide to marry after all is resolved. But the novel ends tragically in surprising ways that teach us more about Flandry’s character as he reacts to the events that unfold.

Anderson is very good at developing his plot and basing events on the historical and cultural conditions in the universe he has created. He provides extensive depth for his characters, their worlds, and the conflicts they face. Even though there is a lot of exposition, it flows well and much of the exposition serves to create the otherworldly sense of wonder that drove much of my reading when I was younger and still thrills me today. Anderson’s unorthodox style also enhances this feeling. Reading Anderson, one feels this is no common writer, but someone special, who speaks only of extraordinary things. An example:

“Day broke windless and freezing cold. The sun stood in a rainbow ring and ice crackled along the shores of Lake Stoyan. Zorkagrad lay silent under bitter blue, as if killed. From time to time thunders drifted across its roofs, arrivals and departures of spacecraft. They gleamed meteoric. Sometimes, too, airships whistled by, armored vehicles rumbled, boots slammed on pavement. About noon, one such vessel and one such march brought Bodin Miyatovich home.”

And another:

“Glory brimmed the dark, stars in glittering flocks and Milky Way shoals, faerie-remote glimmer of nebulae and a few sister galaxies”

This unique style, vintage Anderson, is extant in a plethora of images and descriptions, where he appears to give agency to objects around us:

Closer by, the Elena flowed eastward, oceanward; barges plodded and boats danced upon it. Here in the middle of the Kazan, she could not see the crater walls which those streams clove.

and

“Waterborne shipping crowded docks and bay.”

In these examples, Anderson gives life-like motivations and agency to inanimate objects. This is partly an active tense technique. For example, this last sentence might more normally be written: “The docks were crowded with shipping.”

It is also interesting to note, given today’s fascination with the Russian disruption of our media, the following paragraph:

“… discussions about how to “resolve mutual difficulties” and assure the Imperium that the Roidhunate has never had any desire to interfere in domestic affairs of the Empire—when everybody knows how gleefully Merseian agents have swarmed through every one of our camps, trying their eternally damnedest to keep our family fight going.”

Forty-five years ago, in an interstellar science fiction novel, Anderson is describing foreign influencers who instigate dissension by inciting existing social conflicts.

Re-reading books I have read long ago (in this case, 45 years ago) is always interesting. Sometimes they are as good or better than I remember, at other times they seem old and clunky or I find them uninteresting and impossible to read. A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows may not have generated quite the magic it did when I was 25 years old, but the sense of wonder is still there and I am still entranced by Anderson’s style.

I highly recommend this book.

Book Review: Lost Cat by Caroline Paul Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton

Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology

by Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton

Gray Planet Commentary

• Cute, but mostly pointless book about a cat who wanders the neighborhood.

Gray Planet Indices

• Good Book Index: 50/100
• Literature Index: 25/100
• Magic Factor: 20/100

Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, by Caroline Paul, illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton, is a short, kind of cute, illustrated book about Caroline Paul’s cats, Tibula and Fibula. The cats are litter mates, but very different. Paul is injured when she crash lands an experimental plane, and she endures a long convalescence in her home, cared for by Wendy MacNaughton. While Paul is convalescing, Fibby disappears for a few weeks and then returns unharmed. Depressed and physically limited by her injuries, Paul becomes obsessed with discovering where Fibby had spent his time and why.

Paul’s obsession results in consulting psychics, pet detectives, and using GPS receivers and cameras attached to Fibby’s collar, in an attempt to find where and with whom Fibby spent the missing time. It’s all kind of cute and Paul does try to put some meat into the story by associating her obsession with Fibby’s escapades with the depression that accompanies her convalescence and by showing us that the resolution of these problems requires engagement with her neighbors—actually talking to people and being nice. But although it rings true, I just didn’t care much. I only finished the book because it was so short and the pages flew by filled with MacNaughton’s nice illustrations.

Forty years ago, when I had my own tomcat who disappeared for days at a time, I might have cared a little more, but now, not so much.