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.