Product Description

What if your lover left you for, well - nothing? Literally nothing? This is a strange, moving, funny love story about a man, a woman, and the space between them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #920852 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
When is the absurd not absurd? When the story is chronicled by Jonathan Lethem. In As She Climbed Across the Table, Lethem again manages to take the strangest of set-ups and make them seem commonplace--so much so that, despite the high concepts (Motherless Brooklyn was about a Tourettes-suffering gangster/private eye and Girl in Landscape was a sci-fi coming-of-age story), his books are masterpieces of human characterisation..

The (ostensible) premise of As She Climbed Across the Table concerns the discovery of a hole in the universe by Professor Alice Coombs, and the effect of the discovery on the campus on which she works. A physicist, Coombs and her department create a hole in the universe--a hole that is defined by its complete lack of tangible qualities. As she and her department explore their discovery, they anthropomorphitise it: Alice comes to ascribe a personality to "Lack"; it is this relationship and the effect it has on Coombs' partner, Philip Engstrand (a sociologist who studies the community of academics around him), that the book revolves around. Told from Engstrand's point of view, it is a fantastic tale told without wonder--think Don DeLillo, especially White Noise, another tale of the everyday absurd set on a college campus--and it's all the richer for it. --Randy Silver

Review
'This is a very clever book, with virtuoso ideas and a confident delivery. We shall, I hope, hear much more from this delightfully original writer.' The Times

In an enclosed world of an American university, anthropology professor Philip Engstrand finds that his particle physicist girlfriend, Alice, has become obsessed with the latest experiment in the sinister physics complex, the creation of a void, which comes to be called 'Lack'. Engstrand gradually realizes that Alice has fallen in love with Lack and the novel follows his increasingly desperate attempts to win her back, helped or hindered by the physicist Professor Soft, the blind duo Evan and Garth, the attractive therapist Cynthia Jalter and the enigmatic deconstructionist Georges de Tooth. Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn has written a sardonic, multi-layered fable about the pretences of the academic world. While real events happen distantly outside the campus, Lethem's characters argue about the role of the observer in their blinkered disciplines, while simultaneously either spying on or snubbing each other. Lethem also pokes fun at the 'lack' of understanding in codependant relationships and in poor verbal communication. Ultimately he also asks how we can possibly know anything about the universe apart from our own 'mappings'. Lethem's Nobel prize seeking physicists, in their attempt to probe our origins, actually create a tacky parallel world, not even worthy of Alice in Wonderland, which reflects back the worst aspects of its creators. The virtual world of the Lack is, in fact, inhuman, a non-event. A host of playful references parade through these pages, including Freud, Derrida, Lacan, Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Frankinstein and Don Quixote, ironically reflecting back the metaphysical problems which obsess the characters. Lethem's spare, economic prose tells a timely tale which reflects on the failure of science to give ultimate answers about the human condition and which pleads for closeness in a social world grown narcissistic, cold and empty as the universe. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Jonathan Lethem's books include The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, Gun With Occasional Music, As She Climbed Across the Table and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the Macallan Gold Dagger Award for Crime Fiction 2000.

Customer Reviews

A wierdly wonderful novel of love and particle physics
I read Jonathan Lethem's 'Motherless Brooklyn' last year and I was really excited to see 'As she Climbed Across the Table'. Lethem is brilliant at playing with ideas and the words used to express them, but is also an excellent storyteller so that the ideas come to life and inhabit his writing as strongly as his characters do. This novel uses a bizarre physics experiment and people's reaction to 'Lack', the anthropomorphised result, as a way into talking about unrequited love, blindness in all sorts of senses, and our perceptions of the world around us. Lethem writes with a lightness that makes the read a pleasure, while drawing out concepts that kept hitting me as I read, so that by the end I felt almost exhausted, physically and emotionally. This is a book that made me look at the world in a new way as I read, and that makes it a fantastic novel. I recommend this and 'Motherless Brooklyn' to anyone who loves writers who play with language to reveal more about the world while telling a story that keeps the reader engaged.

It was okay...
My girlfriend loved this... I thought it was okay--a fast read, a bit odd, defintely not like other stuff I read. We (my girlfriend and I) exchanged the books we had just read. She gave me this, and I gave her Watership Down. I think she got the better end of the deal... she thought I got the better end. *smile*

Quirky but not really satisfying
An interesting idea about human relationships with non-human objects, but the book doesn't really grab. It feels a bit like a short story that has gone on too long. Not a bad read though.