Alan Lightman, Reunion

MIT physics professor Lightman is best known for Einstein’s Dreams, a brilliantly elliptical series of spare, magical-realist vignettes which explored what it would be like if the laws of physics worked differently—what-if tales not so much science fiction as brief essays on the limits of human nature. He switched gears for The Diagnosis, a National Book Award finalist, a paranoid J.G. Ballardesque tale about an executive whose body rebels against him with amnesia and paralysis. His latest novel, Reunion, is a downbeat bit of midlife-crisis angst about a 50ish professor who starts seeing hallucinatory reenactments of a disastrous, life-changing love affair from his college days. Lightman’s distanced, even formal prose style, which we enjoyed in his previous books, fits well with the book’s theme of sadness at the road not taken. But even at only 231 pages, Reunion reads like an overextended vignette from Dreams. Lightman reads at Ruminator Books August 1.