Product Description

Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.

The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a novel of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.

Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as "American Magical Realism."


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #312367 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-24
• Released on: 1998-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
Particle physics, false vacuum bubbles, an alternate universe--this is the stuff of Jonathan Lethem's novel As She Climbed Across the Table. The tale echoes Alice in Wonderland in its mad tumble through a rearranged reality. Narrator Phillip Engstrand is a university professor who has made a career out of studying academic environments. Engstrand is in love with Alice Coombs, a particle physicist engaged in a bold attempt to replicate the origins of the universe. The result of the experiment is Lack, a very selective black hole that sucks some things into its void--a cat, a pair of socks, a strawberry--and rejects others, namely, a love-struck Alice. As Alice's unrequited obsession with Lack grows, Phillip becomes so desperate to save his beloved from this empty rival that he risks a journey down the metaphysical rabbit hole.

Here the language of physics becomes the language of love: describing physics' "observer problem," Alice says, "Some people think the observer's consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron." Later, as he stumbles to explain Alice's importance to him, Phillip tells her, "I'm not sure I really exist except under your observation." In this memorable little book, Lethem explores the cosmic possibilities of love.

From Library Journal
In this witty but telling new work from the author of The Wall of Sky, the Wall of Eye (LJ 8/96), our hapless narrator has completed his dissertation on "Theory as Neurosis in the Professional Scientist" and landed a job at the University of North California at Beauchamp (pronouced beach 'em), where he studies academic envirorments, producing "strong but irrelevant work" and falling for physics professor Alice. But Alice is too caught up in Professor Soft's notorious experiment with a vacuum intelligence called Lack to pay her lover much heed, and soon Lack is the real love of her life. This is not your typically insular campus comedy; Lethem has something bigger in mind, and he succeeds admirably in skewering our pretensions, technological or not, in language that gently mocks the way we hide behind jargon. An ironical book that is, ironically, quite poignant; for public and academic libraries.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Lethem, a witty spinner of bizarre tales (The Wall of the Sky, 1996, etc.), moves into somewhat more accessible territory with this story of a would-be Alice in Wonderland and the man who would prefer to keep her on this side of the looking glass. Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist who studies academia, is happily involved with particle-physicist Alice Coombs. When an experiment by Alice's Nobel-winning colleague, Professor Soft, goes awry, a void that may be a portal to an alternate world is created. Before this, Alice has befriended two blind men who maintain an intense, codependent relationship with each other--their names are Ethan and Garth--becoming their friend in part because she believes that Garth's special perceptual abilities may aid in her work. Meantime, Professor Soft's void refuses to disappear and acquires a name, Lack, as well as intelligence and a personality with distinct preferences: It accepts some items offered it (pistachio ice cream, a peach-colored lab cat), while rejecting others. Alice grows emotionally remote and begins spending all of her time in Lack's chamber, and Philip begins to suspect that Alice has fallen out of love with him and in love with Lack. As Philip attempts to comprehend Lack and reconnect with Alice, he becomes entangled with many other characters: The blind men, at Alice's suggestion, move into the apartment she and Philip once shared; Cynthia Jalter, Evan and Garth's therapist, develops a serious crush on Philip; and two professors, a preening Italian physicist and a fussy deconstructionist, offer various absurd explanations (scientific, philosophical, semiotic) for Lack's existence. Eventually, Philip, desperate to win back Alice's love, is forced to confront Lack on his own. The intriguing, if gimmicky, premise sometimes feels a bit thin, like a Donald Barthelme story stretched to novel length. But Lethem's clear-eyed prose and believably strange people ultimately make for a moving tale of narcissism and need. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Change of Heart
I read As She Climbed Across the Table four or five years ago and thought it was cute but I didn't really connect with it. It felt stuffy in a way, and I couldn't understand some of the character motivations. At first I thought it was a flaw on the author's part, but since then I've come back round to reading Lethem books again, and so I re-read this one. This time I couldn't believe how sad and funny this book is, how accurate a picture of academics it sketches. I think the book was always this good, but I hadn't had the right experiences in life yet to understand it. I'd read it before I was ready. Now, after college and a few heartbreaks of my own, I completely get it. Identity is a fiction, but we try desperately to fill our own lack with things, preferences and dislikes, people, friends, families, lovers. A sad truth to confront, but I see the emptiness there, and why love is so important to fill it. I'm glad I gave this book another go round.

Hilarious and Fun
I am an avid reader of Jonathan Lethem and have been happy with many of his novels (ie Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, Girl in Landscape) though less impressed with some of his others. This particular story is really fantastic. The narrator is fabulously flawed, sharp witted, slightly egocentric but very much in love. Discovering he is the other man to a scientific experiment throws him into a great depression and gives him the drive to win back his lover.

Unlike many of Lethems other novels which take themselves very seriously this novel is fun, it's a quick read and it's very clever.

Scholarly wisdom
I'm not sure what to think of Jonathan Lethem these days - each work I read by him is, for a time, effortless, close to perfect, and then finds itself veering into a land of bad bad choices. Reading his The Fortress of Solitude, I was left to wonder what the book would have been like if it were simply kept as its electrifying first half, instead of allowed to wander, halfheartedly, into its characters' imagined futures. A similar sensation takes hold in As She Climbed Across The Table - it's not that what becomes of its characters is bad, per se, as much as it is simply ignorant of the novel's wondeful strengths. The book doesn't conclude, per se, doesn't quite complete its central love story - a bizarre love triangle in which Alice, the main character's girlfriend, is drawn away by a hyperactive physics blackhole called Lack - nor does it quite fulfill it, as a first glance at its ambiguous, artsy ending might assume. That's an interesting choice, to be certain, but it also ignores what the book does right. That's because As She Climbed... is effortless not as a love story, but as a breezy satire on academic life. It trots in a revolving door of bizarre academic types, each using Lack - which is, clearly and repeatedly stated, a giant nothing - as a springboard to represent their own attempts at fulfillment, their own need to "get" a situation. Its characters - named in bizarro Pynchon-esque monikers like Georges DeTooth, Dr. Soft, Carmo Braxia, Gavin Flapcloth (!) - are then a wild evocation of pretention in action, a goofy take on collegiate pretentions. There's not much of a sense about Philip Engstrand, a pleasant enough lovestruck protagonist, but its love story itself is a bit of a pleasantry meant to present the lack in its characters' own self-images that make its lunacy possible. All of that leaves this novel breezy, easy to read, fun, and not much of anything. Still, its goofiness is a treasure, especially climaxing in the actions and reactions around DeTooth, the wigged, deluded deconstructionist who explains to a physicist that his response to Lack is to, "compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will consist of only the word 'lack.'" The physicist's response is to start vomiting.