As She Climbed Across the Table

If the listener can grasp the goofy physics of this story (and author Lethem does a good job of helping out), it's a lot of fun to be immersed in the cosmos of Phillip, his girlfriend, Alice, and the alternative universe known as Lack. Narrator David Aaron Baker vividly captures a myriad of strange characters, from international scientists to blind men obsessed with spatial relativity. Although Baker's female voices are a touch too whispery, he sets them apart in a way that doesn't detract from the narrative. The production is spare, but this works for listeners, as Baker's voice allows them to be immersed in the space of the story and the odd world that revolves around Lack. B.H. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from February 2, 1997
A poser of warped, philosophical conundrums whose witty, genre-bending novels are set in dysfunctional worlds of the present and near-future, Lethem (Gun, with Occasional Music) situates his fourth novel on the fictional campus of a Northern California university where a physicist, known as Professor Soft, has accidentally opened a hole in space, a portal to an alternate universe. Lethem's narrator is Philip Engstrand, a professor of anthropology studying "academic environments," who is the jealous boyfriend of Alice Coombs, a professor in Soft's lab at work on the physics of "tiny nothingness." Soft's vacuum, nicknamed Lack, is a gaping void that swallows some items into its universe-from an argyle sock to a grizzled lab cat-but ignores others. It soon becomes a campus sensation and Alice its most ardent enthusiast, but as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed with Lack, she retreats from Philip, who struggles mightily to reclaim her. Lethem's characters aren't emotionally complex: they aren't so much people as mobile talking units tumbling down a rabbit hole of sense and meaning while trying to sort out their personal lives. Yet it's hard not to get caught up in Philip's efforts to rescue Alice from Lack, or be unsettled by what happens in the novel's closing chapter, when he ventures too close to the brink. Lethem's reflections on being and nothingness are tempered throughout with a genuine silliness that helps make this one of the most engaging academic spoofs to emerge in the wake of Don DeLillo and David Lodge.