Nell Freudenberger

I’m left a little flat by this one. I was attracted to the book by the idea of the main character, a female astrophysicist at the top of her field, and by the mystery of messages she’s been receiving from her college best friend after her friend’s death. And despite the fact that I got something valuable out of the book, my interest in the story never really peaked — it plateaued and faded. I kept waiting for the big payoff, but I never really felt it.

The main character is Helen show more Clapp. She’s a single mom with a seven year old son named Jack, conceived through anonymous donor insemination . She holds a professorship at MIT in astrophysics, and she’s plugged in and participating at the highest levels of particle physics and cosmology.

Helen had been very close to her best friend in college, Charlie (short for Charlotte). Charlie pursued a very different career path, in acting and then in television production. She also appears to have been successful in her field and had a happy family life with her husband Terrence and eight year old daughter, Simmi.

But Charlie’s health had been a problem since her time in college with Helen. She was eventually diagnosed with lupus and experienced some severe flare-ups. Finally, with her health deteriorating, she decided, with the help of a sympathetic doctor, to take her own life.

Helen had fallen out of close contact with Charlie, and her death came as a shock. Then, adding to the shock, she began to receive messages from Charlie’s phone. The messages were personal and pointed, which piqued Helen’s interest and feelings, despite her knowing that Charlie was gone.

The main tension in the story concerns the mystery of the source of the messages and the impact they have on Helen. Helen is a scientist. Scientists don’t believe in ghosts. They certainly believe in a lot of odd and difficult to comprehend things, but not ghosts.

But her relationship with Charlie, and, as the story, unfolds, with Terrence and Simmi, compels Helen to take the messages to heart. They keep her relationship with Charlie alive, even though she knows they can’t be coming from Charlie herself.

By contrast with Helen, her son Jack and Charlie’s daughter Simmi try to find a way to somehow feel Charlie’s presence or even communicate with her. Helen has even unwittingly given them encouragement with a story of an experiment in which physicists tried to exploit quantum mechanical effects to produce messages from beyond the grave.

Helen has described what physicists do as “the study of forces,” and she finds herself now at the play of a whole network of emotional forces — her own, her son’s, Charlie’s daughter’s, Charlie’s husband’s, . . . — all moving her in directions contrary to the inertial path of her astrophysicist self.

The heart of the story is compelling. It goes beyond the experience of loss, to a big question about what Helen refers to, in another context, as “the human scale.” In all our professions of knowledge and scientific understanding, where does the human scale fit in — the human experience of life, death, attachment, grief, and all the rest that make that human scale matter?

It’s an inspiring question for the story, but, really, it’s only in pulling back and thinking about the story that I felt those compelling questions. I wasn’t as gripped by the dramatic movement of the story itself. In part, I suppose I was waiting for a resolution that I never got, which is fair enough — stories that hit such topics probably shouldn’t have clear resolutions. But this, in my reading, trailed off more than it really finished, even accepting that it might rightly end with an unanswered mystery. show less

The dissident in question is a controversial Chinese artist, who comes to California on an exchange programme, living with a local family and giving art classes at a girls' school during his stay. But the story is at least as much about the family he stays with, well-off but dysfunctional, and their extended circle. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, many of the same themes run through both halves of the story - art, creation and fakery, the closeness and simultaneous tension of show more family relationships, intergenerational misunderstandings, reality and image, and the role of chance in defining your life.

At the same time, the story is not at all heavy - it's very readable, and funny. The use of language to differentiate the characters is another delight - the prissy, short-story writing older sister is very precise and hates cliche, the dissident speaks precise but slightly formal and long-winded sentences. This lifts the story and stops it being dominated by its symbology - for example, the father of the family could be a real stereotype, the psychology professor who has no idea how to interact with his wife or children, but he is drawn with accuracy, economy and wit.

The only fault, for me, was the final chapter, which tried to tie up at least a couple of loose ends, but felt like a cop-out - a tacked-on happy ending which didn't follow on from what came before. But as that was only the last three pages, I only docked it half a point. show less

Co-parenting a teenager on an extreme scale: Nathalie, a French scientist, is researching coral in Tahiti, while her ex-husband Stephen, a cardiologist, battles COVID in a New York hospital, and his wife Kate, a high school teacher, worries through her pregnancy. Pia leaves Tahiti for New York with an agenda of her own: though both her parents think she is eager to return to her friends at the Lycee, she actually plans to collect some specialized equipment to help Tahitian Raffi with a bold show more plan to discourage deep-sea mining that could affect the coral. The story is not told in linear fashion: first comes a phone call from Kate to Nathalie, telling her that Pia is missing, then their stories are filled in, hopscotch fashion. Pia meets one of Kate's students, Athyna, a high school senior with anxiety, and briefly impersonates her; Athyna proves the key to letting the adults in on Pia's secret flight back to Tahiti.

Quotes

It's weird how when you're a kid you can think something for a long time after it's logical....and then suddenly realize, Oh right, no. (Pia, 130)

You can't choose what you remember. (Pia, 195)

It's weird how the wrong things get remembered. (Pia, 197) show less

How are we supposed to feel when we learn of the death of a friend who had slowly drifted out of our day-to-day life? As Nell Freudenberger shows in her latest novel, it's complicated.

Helen Clapp and Charlotte "Charlie" Boyce were as close as it is possible for two people to be when they were students at Harvard despite being as different as chalk and cheese. Helen is a studious science nerd from a white working-class family, while Charlie is supermodel-level gorgeous, the only child in an show more affluent African-American family. After college, they drifted apart: Helen stayed in academia, eventually landing at MIT as a professor of physics; Charlie moved to L.A. to work as a television producer, where she married a surfer dude and had a daughter, Simmi. Helen remained single but had a son, Jack.

Helen and Charlie haven't spoken for some time when Helen unexpectedly gets a cryptic text message from Charlie. Before she has a chance to follow up on this unexpected communication, Charlie's husband calls to tell her that Charlie has died — before the text message was sent. What's going on here?

That question seems as though it will be the heart of a modern-day ghost story, but in the end the answer is less important than what Helen learns about herself, about friendship, and about grief. As she struggles to process her emotions and remembers the high and low points of her and Charlie's friendship, Helen expresses herself using the language she is most comfortable with: physics. I really struggled with these bits, as I have the most rudimentary of science backgrounds. I still felt able to enjoy the story but I'm sure someone who could relate to the scientific concepts would feel a much deeper connection to the story.

Once I gave myself permission to stop trying to make the scientific connections, I found myself absorbed in Helen's journey of re-discovery. The ways in which she interacts with the people around her who also knew Charlie felt completely organic, and her need to re-interpret her memories of Charlie through the lens of new information learned after her death was compelling. As Helen muses at Charlie's memorial service, "... love was particular even though it was directed at the same person, that we hadn't lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today." show less