From Library Journal
Despite its overuse, the term Kafkaesque is the best one-word summation of this book, in which physicist and novelist Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) traces the gradual deterioration of his protagonist's body and the concomitant disintegration of his work, family, and social life. One morning while riding the subway to work, Bill Chalmers forgets where he is going or who he is. All he can remember is his company's motto: "The maximum information in the minimum time." This tale of Chalmers's nightmarish search for a diagnosis for his condition is a true literary heir of Kafka, brilliantly reflecting for a 21st-century readership the provocative ideas expressed at another century's turn. Lightman's evocation of the growth of Chalmers's interior life, as set against the disappearance of his normal outward life, is both luminous and dark. The author also introduces a fictional narrative of the death of Socrates, told with compact tension. Working out how the stories relate to each other poses a worthwhile puzzle for the reader. Recommended for literary collections.DDavid Dodd, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams (1993), perfectly captures the frenzy of our electronic era in this breakneck tale of one man's short-circuiting under the relentless pace and pressure of life in the age of information overload. Always on the phone, compulsively checking his watch, and frantically responding to e-mails, Bill Chalmers runs himself ragged until, suddenly, he snaps. Crammed into a train stuffed with commuters communing with laptops, cell phones, and portable CD players, Bill cannot remember his name or his destination, and in no time he's descended into a circle of hell. As Lightman tracks the progression of Bill's clearly metaphysical malady, and his mythic and darkly comic quest for a diagnosis, he interleaves installments in the story of Socrates and his persecutor, Anytus, which Bill's computer-addicted teenage son downloads from the Internet, thus creating a curious juxtaposition between his disconnected and stoic hero and the dignified but doomed philosopher. A work of vivid sensuousness, sparkling intelligence, and poignant beauty, Lightman's gripping tale contrasts the needs of the body and spirit with the acquisitiveness of the mind and ponders the potential lethality of ideologies, be they cultural or technological. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
In Praise of The Diagnosis
"The Diagnosis is packed with dark power and awful humor. Lightman's intelligence, imagination, and clarity of style mark him as one of the most brilliant contemporary American writers."
--Annie Proulx
"I know of no novel that captures the technological horror and pervasive spiritual poverty of our wildly prosperous land in so powerful a way as The Diagnosis. It is haunting."
--Norman Mailer
From the Publisher
"The Diagnosis is packed with dark power and awful humor. Lightman's intelligence, imagination, and clarity of style mark him as one of the most brilliant contemporary American writers."
-- Annie Proulx
"I know of no novel that captures the technological horror and pervasive spiritual poverty of our wildly prosperous land in so powerful a way as The Diagnosis. It is haunting."
-- Norman Mailer
From the Inside Flap
Alan Lightman's first novel, Einstein's Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it "at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel creates "a magical, metaphysical realm . . . as in Calvino's work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose." With The Diagnosis, Lightman gives us his most ambitious and penetrating novel yet.While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time.
When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition.
By turns satiric, comic, and tragic, The Diagnosis is a brilliant and disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our spirits.
From the Back Cover
In Praise of The Diagnosis
"The Diagnosis is packed with dark power and awful humor. Lightman's intelligence, imagination, and clarity of style mark him as one of the most brilliant contemporary American writers."
--Annie Proulx
"I know of no novel that captures the technological horror and pervasive spiritual poverty of our wildly prosperous land in so powerful a way as The Diagnosis. It is haunting."
--Norman Mailer
About the Author
Alan Lightman's previous books include Einstein's Dreams, Good Benito, and Dance for Two. A professor of humanities and a lecturer in physics at MIT, he lives in Boston.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE DIAGNOSIS
ON THE SUBWAY
People must have been in a great hurry, for no one noticed anything wrong with Bill Chalmers as he dashed from his automobile one fine summer morning. Earnest and dressed in a blue cotton suit, he was immediately swept up by the mass of commuters also galloping from their cars toward the elevators and down to the trains of the Alewife Station, a cavernous structure of concrete and crisscrossed steel struts, one end of the Red Line through Boston. At the ground floor, Chalmers presented his pass and rushed through the turnstile. He was halfway down the stairs to the platform when he heard the taut string of electronic beeps and the doors began sliding on train Number One. A woman groaned. Another commuter, a tall nervous man with squeaky shoes, lunged ahead and ran alongside the train, shouting and slapping his magazine against the red paneled doors. But the train was already in motion, its steel wheels scraping and squealing so fiercely that several people had to turn up their head sets. The tall man swiveled and shot Chalmers an accusing stare, as if his lack of sufficient speed through the turnstile had caused a half-dozen people to miss their trains. What a jerk, Chalmers thought to himself and looked down at his watch. It was 8:22. Twenty-three minutes to his stop, a nine-minute walk to his building, two minutes on the elevator, and he'd be sitting at his desk by 9:00. Assuming the train on Track Two arrived and departed within four minutes, as it should. With some satisfaction he reminded himself that, unlike the ridiculously agitated man with the magazine, he had calculated his morning commute so that he could miss the first train and still arrive at the office on time. Abruptly, he began worrying that the train on Track Two might be late. Never had that happened when he'd missed train Number One, but it was certainly a possibility. Stroking his mustache, he continued down the stairs and looked again at his watch. He mustn't waste the four minutes. However, he slowed his descent to drop fifty cents into the cup of a homeless woman sprawled on the edge of the stairs. She looked disturbingly like his old piano teacher. "Thank you, kind sir," she said. "Please don't thank me," he answered, embarrassed. "I thank everyone who is more fortunate than me," she called to him as he hurried down to the platform. Waves of people flowed around him, jostling and crushing from all sides, shoving each other to gain an advantage for the next arriving train. Gulped down in seconds were muffins and rolls, hard-boiled eggs, bananas, coffee, and crackers. Some commuters tried to unfold newspapers in the cramped space but gave up and contented themselves with staring at the digital sign on the kiosk, where bits of news and the correct time scrolled by in bright glowing dots. The dozens of upturned faces were waxy and yellow beneath the underground fluorescent bulbs.
Even in that pale yellow light, if any of those waiting had looked carefully into Chalmers's eyes, they might have observed a faint petrifaction, a solidification, some sign that all was not well. But they did not, occupied with their own busy schedules and the marching dots on the sign. Chalmers himself felt perfectly fit, aside from the normal stresses and aches of a man just past forty, arguably overweight but by no means fat. He glanced at his watch, 8:23, and forged a path to the kiosk. Above his head, the digital sign flickered and hummed and something clattered repeatedly against the high concrete ceiling and the air sagged with the burnt smell of hot brake fluid. Several radios blared, jumbling their throbbing bass notes in competing rhythms. Huddled against the kiosk as if battling a strong wind, a woman in a smart linen suit was delivering instructions into a cellular telephone. Chalmers couldn't help noticing that her phone was a new model, considerably smaller and sleeker than his. He took out his own phone from his briefcase. As he began dialing, he found that he was still shaken by the poor woman on the stairs. Her misery had cast a gloom over him, which he tried to forget by pushing the tiny buttons as fast as he could. First, he called Jenkins, to make sure that the proper documents would be ready for his 9:15 meeting. All was in order. He hung up and stood on his toes, peering down the dark tunnel of Track Two. Over the track, hundreds of glowing red neon tubes dangled down from the ceiling, one of them broken and blinking like a Christmas tree light. His telephone rang. Two men reached inside their briefcases, thinking it theirs. "Mr. Chalmers, this is Robert again. You didn't tell me if you wanted the Lehman file for the meeting." "No. Thank you, Robert." "Just checking to make sure everything is in order, Mr. Chalmers. We're set for TEM at ten-thirty." That Jenkins was an excellent young man, Chalmers said to himself. He would remember to compliment him when he arrived at the office. People didn't compliment each other nearly enough. Everyone was too quick to criticize. Chalmers looked at his watch and dialed his voicemail. As the connection was being relayed through space or wherever--who knew exactly where cellular transmissions were at any one instant?--he twisted his neck and gazed up at the digital sign: "8:24 . . . Introducing a new feature of Providential Services: Providential Online . . . Get stock quotations on your pager, minute by minute . . . Think of Providential Online as 'Work wherever, whenever'™ . . . PO@Provins.com . . . 8:24." Chalmers fumbled with a pencil and hurriedly copied down the e-mail address before it fled from the screen while a feminine voice crooned from his telephone receiver, "The Plymouth voicemail system will be disabled for twelve hours, beginning at midnight on June 26, while Telecom performs an upgrade of the system. At Telecom, progress is our business. You have three messages." Which must have arrived in the previous twenty minutes, since Chalmers last checked his voicemail. A dog barked. What were dogs doing down here? he wondered. People should be more considerate. Last week he had come within inches of stepping in dog poop. He retrieved his first message. "Jasper Olswanger calling. I need to talk--hold it a moment, please. . . . Sorry, that was call waiting. I need to talk to you as soon as possible. You've got my number." Someone was shouting Chalmers's name over the roiling of voices and music and dogs. He removed his ear from the receiver and went up on his toes. Twenty feet away he spotted the shouter, now waving and grinning. "Yes," Chalmers answered, trying to make out the man's head in the ocean of pale, fluorescent faces. Gradually he recognized the sunken eyes of Tim Cotter, his neighbor across the street. He didn't know Cotter very well. Cotter worked in a small bank somewhere downtown and came home late every night to the loud reprisals of his wife. Chalmers waved back good-naturedly and started to retrieve his second message. Someone elbowed him, shoving the phone into the side of his head. The neighbor continued waving and shouting "Bill, Bill," with a definite note of urgency, as if there was something he needed to tell him that moment. "What?" Chalmers shouted back, still standing on his toes. His neighbor didn't seem to hear him, then removed one of his earphones and yelled, "What did you say?" "I thought you wanted to tell me something," Chalmers shouted back, realizing at once that he had used far too many words under the circumstances. "Lower your voice," yelled a cheeky college boy standing next to him. "You're destroying my eardrums." The student made a face and slapped his hands over his ears. Chalmers glanced at his watch. He had only two minutes or less to retrieve his messages. With a sigh, he began working his way through the concrete thick crowd toward his neighbor. Cotter shouted something else, which Chalmers didn't hear, and refastened his headphones. Now Chalmers could see that his neighbor was sitting on some kind of fancy foldable chair, like a beach chair or a country lawn chair. He made a mental note that he should get one for himself. "Guess what I'm doing," said Cotter, keeping one of the earphones pressed against his ear so that he could listen and talk at the same time. His fingers tapped on his briefcase. "I don't know. What are you doing?" "I'm reading," said Cotter, grinning broadly. He paused, to let the announcement sink in. "Books on Tape. The Bridges of Madison County." Chalmers made a thumbs-up sign. For the first time, he realized how much he disliked Cotter. In a hundred little ways, Cotter always tried to make him feel like a slacker. Cotter was just envious of anyone seriously engaged in their profession. It was Cotter who was the slacker. The dog was barking again and Chalmers began coughing, having inhaled an invisible cloud of the burnt brake-fluid air. In addition, the morning's usual indigestion had just slammed into his stomach. "Nice to talk to you," said Cotter. "I haven't seen you since Phil's thing." He put his second earphone back on. At that instant, with a high shriek of metal on metal, the train on Track Two arrived. Chalmers looked at his watch, 8:26, and surged forward with the torrent. By the time he had squeezed through the doors and been shoved to a spot in the middle of the car, the seats were long gone. The upright commuters, pressed hard against each other, clutched their coffee cups and muffins close to their bodies and searched in vain for handrails to grasp. Chalmers began brooding over his unretrieved messages. Maybe one of his appointments had been rescheduled. He could have an important call from New York. Those people got to their desks early. As he was considering the various possibilities and their dark implications, with the knowledge that he would be incommunicado for the next several minutes, an extremely loud alarm bell rang, then the series of electronic bee...
