Writing: 4/5 Plot: 5/5 Characters: 4/5
This was a wild ride — adventurous (plenty of plot), insightful, and deep dives into broad domains of art, physics, and relationships. Noah, a quantum physicist, is enticed into a top secret, billionaire funded project that explores the nature of time, memory, and consciousness in an intriguing, and quite personal, way. His wife Maya, a Tokyo-born, biracial artist, joins him hoping to explore the vibrant, though isolated, art scene in Marfa, Texas (look it up — the art scene is real!). Noah has never fully recovered from the death of his three-year old child and the ensuing collapse of his previous marriage, and he hopes that this project will somehow allow him to reconnect with a past that he can’t quite escape.
I was particularly drawn to how a single book could so thoroughly explore topics (time, memory, and consciousness) from two so dissimilar perspectives and manage to create a synergy between them. The physics explanations were far more plausible than I expected and the artistic dives were far more interesting (to me — a non artist) than I expected. I liked the characters, found the philosophical scrutiny well-paced and satisfyingly twisted, and the commentary on the motivations, approaches to problems, and subjective experiences of the three main characters (the physicist, his wife, and his ex-wife) fascinating.
The author also wrote The Ensemble — a novel about a young string quartet navigating the complex and somewhat cutthroat world of classical music performance. I loved that book as well. I’m impressed by the way this author is able to bring these very different worlds (classical music performance, modern art, quantum physics) to life in a way that allows the reader to inhabit a world in which they have no real expertise through the eyes of a character who actually does.
Books to look forward to ... 