THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502010393
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
GOOD BENITO
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Pantheon. 215 pp. $21.
IF A PHYSICIST were to write a novel, what would it be like?
Given some facility with language, the author might employ a laconic style. The protagonist, of course, would be a scientist whose home laboratory becomes the springboard to a brilliant career. Perhaps, too, the hero would have some ``scientific'' sensibility, yet be neither a number-crunching clod nor a word-gushing sniffer of flowers but instead one who lives in a rarer air than the rest of us and keeps it largely to himself. Love would be a problem. Excitement over a new discovery would fit; love of person, though, might not compute.
In his second novel, Alan Lightman, who teaches physics and writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has produced such a work, albeit rather better than the much reduced scenario offered above. Lightman's point-of-view character is Bennett Lang, a young physicist who, at the beginning of Good Benito, has just been hired at fictional Leominster College in Baltimore. In welcoming him to campus, the dean charges him with the task of discovering and disseminating the notes of the senior physics professor, one Scalapino, who has a reputation for brilliance but no publications.
The episode has all sorts of potentially delicious elements that are never developed: intrigue, Scalapino's attractive but devoted daughter, the collaboration between senior and junior professors. Yet when it ends - as all episodes seem to do - abruptly, Scalapino, daughter and dean disappear from the narrative. This is, at it turns out, the end of the apprenticeship.
For the beginning Lightman turns to Bennett's early years. None of the standard identity signposts means much to the boy. His father is almost totally silent, a neutron of a man who adds weight to the family nucleus but carries no charge. His mother, largely ineffectual, seeks solace in a clandestine affair. Only the maid, Florida, offers him anything like affection.
Two things matter: science and scientific relationships. Lightman constructs a personality sometimes dominated by a friend or lab partner or professor, but for whom, after a period and some growth, the relationship no longer sustains. The dissolution of relations, continuing forward to Bennett's marriage, lends an overall tone of astringent melancholy - the sorrows of young Benito. As such, the novel seems fully conventional.
Where it makes its mark, however, is in tracking Bennett's thinking process. American fiction has few serious scientists among its characters. Quacks, megalomaniacs and earnest physicians dominate the landscape, as well as a few adventurous researchers messing around with dinosaur genes. But it is a great void in the literature that science as practiced by scientists gets so little belletristic attention. In Lightman's book, when Bennett works on an advanced problem - or even on a gadget at home - the novel moves with greater intensity than when other people are around.
Bennett finds calculation and the rush of process toward new knowledge beautiful. This scientific aesthetic has many of the features of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as ``flow'' in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. As a graduate student, Bennett struggles for a year with a complex problem whose error he cannot detect. Then, in the shower, it comes to him: ``He sank down on the tiles, with the water pouring over his head, and saw his error as well as the entire solution to his problem. . . The answer appeared in his mind as a beautiful curve and he tingled and shivered. It had to be right.''
This simple and elegant expression captures the thrill of discovery within a solitary thinker in a way that few writers have. Such moments give this spare, elliptical book its life. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University. by CNB