Alan Lightman (2003)
Author
of
Reunion talks with Robert Birnbaum
Scientist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman was born in Tennessee and
attended Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology.
His novels include Einstein's Dreams (which has been translated
into thirty languages), Good Benito, The Diagnosis,
and recently Reunion. He has also published Dance for
Two, a collection of essays and fables, and his essays and
short fiction and reviews have appeared in a wide array of periodicals
and magazines. Alan Lightman teaches at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and lives with his family in Concord, Massachusetts.
This is our second conversation.
Reunion tells the story of middle-aged Charles, a college
professor and once-promising poet who attends his thirtieth college
reunion and revisits the last year of his undergraduate life and
the passionate love affair he had with a beautiful dancer. Jonathan
Wilson in the New York Times Book Review writes, "A
narrative of this love affair and reflections upon it form the bulk
of the novel; the salient reunion for Charles arrives, via the vagaries
of memory and its slipperiness and distortions, with his younger
self. It comes as no surprise that for the author of Einstein's
Dreams considerations of love and life-altering choices are
inevitably bound up with meditations on time, and in this novel,
as in the earlier book, there are some formal innovations that demonstrate
and endorse theories of relativity. But alchemically turning science
into art is not at the heart of Reunion, which seeks, in
less elliptical fashion than Einstein's Dreams, to plumb
life's most complicated and enduring relationship: that between
who one was and who one is."
Robert Birnbaum: This isn't a court of law, but
you did introduce something, which I normally wouldn't talk about,
which are reviews. You pointed me to the favorable
New York Times review by Jonathan Wilson. You must
be aware of the Gail
Caldwell review in the Globe a few weeks ago, which
was less than complimentary. In your world, does that balance out?
The pain of one against the…
Alan Lightman: I think they do. I don't think
any one reviewer has supreme authority. I think you expect to get
a range of reactions in reviewers, just like readers, and that's
related to the power of fiction, I think. It has that personal,
individualized reaction. I think all the reviews together balance
out and give you a message or feed back about a book. If all the
reviewers or most of them are saying the same thing, either positive
or negative, then that means something to me as a writer. The irony
of Gail Caldwell's review is that she also didn't like The Diagnosis,
and as I was going on a book tour, traveling around the country—because
her review is syndicated and the New York Times is not,
that her review kept getting reprinted in lots of these cities and
was following me around. It was just like with The Reunion.
Her review is negative, and the Times review is positive.
It's a review that will keep being reprinted in various places and
follow me around. So that's just the luck of the draw.
RB: It's not about me, so I haven't the same sensitivity.
I didn't see the Caldwell review as terrible. I thought she expressed
reservations.
AL: No, it wasn't a terribly negative review.
RB: She began her review alluding to the baby
boom and focused on the protagonist going to a reunion. Where Wilson
starts off referencing Emily Dickinson and the vogue of "less
is more" and then makes a clever little joke about the mini
Cooper. At any rate two different foci.
AL: As a writer what I want in a review is someone
open to go into the depths of the book, and even if there are things
that they don't like, I want them to really get immersed in the
book, to probe its depths and to be perceptive. To let the book
speak to them on its terms and receive the book on its own terms.
You see many reviewers—you can tell they go into the review
with a preconception. They want to put the book in a niche or a
category and they want to receive it in a certain way. That's the
wrong way to approach a book or any work of art. You want to listen
to it talking to you. Later on you can say, "I listened to
it, and I like the way it did this, and I didn't like the way it
did that." But what’s important is to be open to it.
RB: I was thinking about a reading I went where
Robert Stone was asked his reaction to a less-than-favorable review
he received by Michiko Kakatuni. He said, "You know, I have
never learned anything from her reviews."
AL: One of the reviewers I admire the most is
Richard Eder [NYT] and what he says about the reviewing experience
for him is that he tries to go on a journey with the writer and
see where the writer is taking him. And report on his feelings along
the way. That is very close to my ideal reviewer being, open to
the book, to be being receptive and not going in and trying to steer
it in one way or another but perceiving it as it is.
RB: I read a couple of reviews by Daniel Mendelsohn,
one of The Lovely
Bones that was really thoughtful and well presented and
did the book justice and put it into an interesting cultural and
historical context.
AL: Good reviewers can do that.
RB: Lovely Bones wasn't a book that was
interesting to me, but its success was.
AL: So you might want to read the review and many
of the reviews in the New York Review of Books are like
that. Where they use the book as a stepping-off point to meditate
on issues raised by the book.
RB: So here we are. I know you to be a man who
retires to the isolation of coastal Maine in the summer, and we
are in the middle of the summer, and you are doing some outreach
for your new novel. How did that happen?
As
a writer what I want in a review is someone open to go into
the depths of the book, and even if there are things that
they don't like, I want them to really get immersed in the
book, to probe its depths and to be perceptive. To let the
book speak to them on its terms and receive the book on its
own terms. |
AL: I have never published a book in the summer
before. And this particular season there was a glut of novels in
the Spring, and my book could have come out in the Spring, and my
publisher advised that it come out in the summer, and I agreed.
So I interrupted my retreat in Maine. A week now and then I go back
to Maine and then in the beginning of September I do a couple of
weeks. A lot of cities. I found in the past that leaving Maine for
a day or two really disorients me. I get in a real meditative state
there over the summer. It's like taking a vacation. When you go
on a vacation for longer than two weeks, you get in a qualitatively
different mental state, and you can really hear yourself thinking.
It's a wonderful condition to be in, and I wish everybody had the
luxury and privilege to be able to do that. Most people can't take
more than two weeks.
RB: Wishing that sounds socialistic and utopian.
People aren't supposed to think and enjoy themselves. They are supposed
to be consumer units and march along toward the radiant future that
all their consumption creates.
AL: If you have the meditative period, then you
know why you are consuming.
RB: [both laugh] Or you might consider fomenting
revolution. Last time we spoke I recall that one of the features
of your summers in Maine is an osprey family and you were considering
writing a book about them. Are you still thinking of that?
AL: I am still going to do that. I have another
book that I am working on now that I want to finish, but it's something
that is in my mental pipeline. This summer there are three osprey
children. Usually there are just two. But we watch them all summer
long. We feel very attached to those birds.
RB: This is the same family?
AL: The same parents.
RB: They return year after year from South America?
AL: Yes, the children don't return. They go somewhere
and make their own nest. But the parents comeback to the same nest
every year. We have learned their calls and the different sounds
they make and what they mean. We have a big picture window that
looks out on the nest, and so that is our television screen. Instead
of watching television that's what we do.
RB: Have you named them?
AL: We call them different names at different
times. I had an idea a couple of summers ago about putting a video
camera up on the tree, pointing down at the nest and just having
twenty-four-hour monitoring of the nest. You could probably put
that out on the Internet and you could call Osprey TV.
RB: [both laugh] You never know.
AL: The bird version of reality TV.
RB: The Diagnosis was a more external
book. The story of a man besieged by the pressures of…
AL: The world around him.
RB: In Reunion, we have Charles the protagonist
who lives in a "leafy" suburb and teaches at a "leafy"
minor college and is a professor in mid career. This is very much
an interior story. The scheme of the story is not unusual. An older
man reviews his life. Thinks about his first love and you know this
going in, so…
AL: Why did I write the book?
RB: [chuckles] No, I'll ask the questions. What
do you want to do to insure that this is an interesting story, given
its commonality?
AL: It's a very common situation. Well, what interests
me about it and the reason why I wanted to explore and invest the
two years to write a novel—two years if you are lucky, longer
usually—is that I am interested in consciousness and self
identity and how we form self identity from memory. From memories
of our past, how we reconstruct that memory to be the kind of person
we want to be. How do we reconnect with our past selves? To me that's
a terribly interesting subject—the relationship between us
and our younger selves and the way that memory mediates that relation.
I was aware at every moment that the narrative was a love story,
an older man looking back. That those were very dangerous things
to write about because they are trite and the book could easily
be written off as sentimental and self-indulgent, and some reviewers
have dismissed it for that reason. But what I was interested in
and what some reviewers have seen and understood is the other issues
of the formation of self-identity and the way we reshape the past
and memory for our own purposes. I think the nature of reality is
a very slippery thing. You can have two people witness the same
event and give different accounts of it. And so it’s not surprising
that one person can give different accounts of an event—over
time as they age and they become different people. Each of us is
many different people. Every ten years or some period of time like
that you become a different person. How do you connect with those
previous versions of yourself? I was attempting to explore some
of that in the book.
RB: On a number of occasions in the novel, you
offer alternative versions of the same episode.
 AL:
Those suggestions that are part of that same aspiration.
RB: This may be a silly question but why not?
Could you have written this book ten years ago?
AL: No, I don't think so. I don't think I'd lived
long enough. I always laugh and joke about the fact that scientists
do their best work when they are younger and artists do it later,
when they are older. I think the reason is that writers and some
other artists need life experiences. Whereas the scientist needs
that mental agility that youth offers. Getting older doesn't particularly
help a scientist in the way he or she thinks about their work. It
doesn't help you become a better scientist to have more life experience.
It does help a writer. I think this is why when you look at the
work of the great scientists that scientists often so their best
work when they are very young and you can see great books from writers
coming out in their fifties and sixties.
RB: Are you still a "practicing" scientist?
AL: No. I don't do research in science anymore.
I stopped that in the early 1990's. I felt I was past my peak as
a scientist, and yet I felt I was still getting better as a writer,
and I had a long way to get better and feel like there is still
a lot of room for improvement as a writer. I wanted to keep being
creative, to go wherever I had the most creative potential.
RB: I recently talked to Karl
Iagnemma who is over at the robotics lab at MIT. Part of our
conversation had been about using science in fiction. We both observed
that there aren't that many writers who do it and we were about
conjecturing why not.
AL: Well, it's dangerous to do it because you
need to do it in a way where it is almost invisible, that the reader
doesn't feel like they are getting a lecture in quantum physics.
It has to be just part of the landscape. It can't be didactic. John
Updike has had scientists in his novels and other writers do occasionally
have scientists as characters and that's the way to do it. Karl
is finding that balance, right now, of how to put the science in,
how much to put in. I like his stories.
RB: There is Andrea
Barrett. Thomas Mallon occasionally. Who else?
AL: Margaret Atwood has sometimes technical themes,
but I agree there are very few people…CP Snow, of course,
was the original person that people often talk about—original
in recent times. A lot of his characters were scientists because
that's the world that he knew. He was a scientist himself. I don't
think his novels are great novels, but he was one of the early people
to put scientists in fiction. But there aren't many…
RB: I found it odd because this is a time when
science stories—discoveries and inventions are part of the
daily news. So what is the leap from that to making them part of
stories?
AL: Well you can include them as science stories,
a person is reading the newspaper and reads the Universe is expanding
twice as fast as we thought it was, but the danger is when you trying
to explain the science. The novel is a very poor form for doing
that. Sometimes I wonder whether there are traits about scientists—human
traits that make them different from other people. That would be
an interesting thing to explore.
RB: In Reunion, you include a series
of anecdotes about an astronomer, but there is no science that is
explicated.
AL: No, there is no real science. He was just
seducing young women.
RB: That part of the book was something that Jonathan
Wilson didn't appreciate. But he did note a passage that had stood
out for me months ago when I first read it:
''Reunion'' is a novel that has all kinds of interesting things
to say about how we reconstruct the elusive past, particularly where
love and passion are concerned, but is also a book that comes with
the high ambition of restoring authenticity to experiences that
have been sullied and distorted by decades of interference from,
well, the media, especially television and its digital cousins.
"The communicating television screen that brings Charles
and his partner, Sheila, a horrific story of the suffering of Honduran
refugees actually does more harm than good and prevents, rather
than assists, the passing on of meaningful information."
Did you have the "high ambition of restoring authenticity
to experiences that have been sullied and distorted?"
AL: I would say rather than an ambition that it's
something that is on my mind. The Diagnosis was all about
that. The issues that are on a writer's mind will come out in their
writing whether they intend it or not. In this sense all fiction
is autobiographical. Even though a writer may not be writing explicitly
about himself or herself the words, the story, the characters are
coming out of a mind. That mind lives in a landscape, and that landscape
is colored not only by everything that writer is doing as an artist,
but also the whole life of the writer, all the issues that a writer
is dealing within his or her personal life. They are all in that
compartment together. Why does this writer choose to write about
this topic? And that writer about that topic? Well, it's not accidental.
So I think that my ongoing concern in my personal life with the
digital world that we live in, the fast-paced, noisy, digitized,
disembodied world that we live in, it colors a lot of what I write.
But I would put it that way rather than saying it was a big ambition.
RB: Actually, my emphasis was on the wrong part
of the passage. I was more interested in the concern with the "restoration
of authenticity."
AL: Of course, every writer would love to do that,
if possible. And even if I did it a little bit I would be delighted.
RB: What does that mean? Once you have had an
original experience how do you restore it?
I
am interested in consciousness and self-identity and how we
form self-identity from memory. From memories of our past,
how we reconstruct that memory to be the kind of person we
want to be. How do we reconnect with our past selves? |
AL: I don't think it needs restoring. I believe
that what he [Wilson] might be referring to, and what I would be
very pleased with if I achieved, is to have more original experiences
and not just mediated experiences. When we are looking at television,
you could say in a sense that we are experiencing the whole world
because television takes us everywhere, but it's highly mediated.
Whereas you take a canoeing trip in Canada by yourself when you
can't se anybody for miles and you are having an original experience
there.
RB: Allow me to differ with you. My five-year-old
son watches television, and I mention the characters to him and
he says they are not real—a shrewd observation. What I think
he might be saying is that when we are watching television that
we are watching a box with pictures of various marionettes. I don't
see its content as original experience of the world.
AL: I don't think most people do.
RB: So I agree that there is a qualitative difference
between the canoe trip and the TV watching, but I don't think it's
about either/or. Some people in the 21st century will make the best
of both kinds of experience and not be turned into unfeeling automatons
or cancer-ridden neurotics. On the face of it I think you are correct,
it suggests an ugly picture, that our experience of the world would
come from being told about it…
AL: Take the Internet, there are people who spend
many hours a day on the Internet and there are whole communities
that converse with each other only on the Internet, the chat rooms
and all those other things. And that seems to me to be, well, that
may be what Mr. Wilson was contrasting to the authentic experience.
RB: Right. These days Internet communities seem
to be claiming credit for all sorts of miraculous achievements.
AL: There is no doubt that the Internet is having
a vast impact on our culture. And you can't deny that whatever your
attitude about it is. And so we have to deal with it. It's there.
RB: I am very fond of Chou
En Lai's observation about the French Revolution which is my
current mantra, "It's too soon to tell."
AL: I sense that it's having a big impact, but
I don't know what their impact is.
RB: It has meaning but …
AL: …But I don't know what it is. I'm not
smart enough to figure it out.
RB: I really admire this passage:
''I've decided that the great achievement of our age: to so
thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact
has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent
determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial
Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the
bad sense of the word.''
If I were editing Bartlett's I would include that in the next edition.
That's a fine encapsulation of the reasons to resist the brave new
world. Anyway, that's from Charles early in the story, and then
he attends his reunion and something happens, and at the end of
the novel I was wondering if he had changed—if he was a changed
man?
AL: I think that he has changed some. I don't
think he has changed a lot. To have him changed a lot would be totally
unbelievable and false. I think he has changed some. He has been
shaken by and certainly been emotionally moved. And [long pause]
in the last scene that he had when he encounters his younger self,
which for me as the writer was the emotional peak of the book, I
remember as I was writing that scene I was weeping. It wrote it
self. I feel that he was enormously guilty of having let down his
younger self. In not having lived up to his potential and therefore
he had cheated the hopes of his younger self.
RB: That can be crushing.
AL: I was crushed by it. I think that the way
that he acted with Sheila in the last scene made me think that he
had a little hope, that even though he had let down, he had reneged
on the future of his younger self, that he was not dead yet. There
was still some life ahead of him. And that maybe he could find something
with Sheila. And that's what I felt in the way that he acted toward
her in the every last scene. So you could say he has changed in
a way [pause] I think he has had some insight into himself. Self-examination
is always a painful process. Whenever you look deeply into yourself,
you see things that you don’t like. There might be some things
you do like.
RB: Our narcissism makes us blind to those things.
AL: Yeah, yeah.
RB: Is Charles' story one that you would want
to reexamine? That you might come back to?
AL: Yes, possibly. As I get older I might start
hearing him to talk to me again.
RB: I have talked to a string of young writers,
which didn't really come home to me until I talked with Joseph Epstein,
who is not a young writer, and whose story collection has characters
that deal with the concerns and problems of mature people, much
like himself. Do you look at the body of your work as you mature
and consider what you have written in terms of its developmental
bench marking when you move on to your next project?
AL: I do look at the body of my work. After a
person has written a half-dozen books or so, I can't imagine that
they wouldn't think about it somewhat. I am constantly asking myself
whether I have contributed anything.
RB: That would be a high ambition.
AL: Yeah it is. Whether I have changed anybody's
thinking or made the world a better place, and I am thinking about
that all the time. So at every point where I am between projects,
where I am actively working on a project and I am trying to think
of what I should do next. I ask these questions of "What could
I do that has meaning?"
RB: Is it part of your nature to write something
purely for your own amusement and consider that a higher value?
 AL:
I am not capable of doing that myself. I think that is a fine thing
to do. I have a friend who is the head writer for Sesame Street,
Judy Freuberg, I talk to her about this occasionally and she says,
"I write to entertain." And she doesn't try do anything
other than that. But when she says entertain, she means entertain
herself as well as the kids. I think that's what's been so good
about Sesame Street. I think that is a very worthy enterprise to
do writing or other art just to entertain. I am not capable of doing
that. I'm bogged down in ... obsessed with finding meaning in the
world and…
RB: How un-American. [laughs]
AL: Well it might be. It's un-American for some
group of Americans. I am obsessed with finding meaning and finding
things that are worthwhile to do. And entertainment is not enough
for me.
RB: Are you looking around at the contemporary
literary culture and pleased with what you see?
AL: I am pleased with literature in the US. It
is very much alive. There are a lot of wonderful new voices and
there's a huge range of voices, and it's very exciting to be a writer
and in the literary world today in the US. I don't know enough about
the literature in other countries, contemporary literature, there
are individual writers that I like. I haven't lived in other countries
long enough to feel the overall Gestalt of what is happening. But
here I do feel it. And I am excited by it.
RB: Steven
Kinzer recently addressed again the notion that Americans are
not really interested in reading literature in translation. Imre
Kertesz wins a Nobel Prize and his publisher had a printing of 3000
and eventually sold maybe 40000 copies, which is not very much…
AL: …not very much for a Nobel Prize winner.
Yeah, I have talked to writers in other countries who have told
me that— that it's very hard to break into this market.
RB: Some editorial director was quoted as saying,
"Well, Americans just aren't concerned with what happens in
Laos." I'm thinking isn't that missing the point?
AL: We might learn something about Laos on the
way, but that's not the point.
RB: What is some evidence for your good feeling
and belief in the vitality of the American literary culture?
AL: I see the younger writers, people like Jhumpa
Lahiri, Dave Eggers, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Dandicat, Jonathan Foer,
I see that people are experimenting. They are taking chances. Not
just writing the novels that they have read. And [pause] even an
old hand like Don Delillo, who is willing to try something like
The Body Artist, which is totally and 180 degrees from
what he has written before. But he is willing to explore and take
chances. I think it's dynamic and there are new literary magazines,
Eggers has just started a
new one.
RB: That's the upside. But we are starting to
see writers mentioned in big-city newspaper gossip columns…
AL: That's okay as long as it doesn't affect the
writer.
RB: A big if. So now we have thousands of people
in writing programs around the country, and we have, for reasons
that mystify me, booksellers and publishers talk about the contraction
of the market, why would people want to become writers when the
idea of making a living has questionable merit?
AL: All these writers I mentioned are serious
writers, even Dave Eggers. He is unusual in that he made a lot of
money from writing. But even if these people were not making a lot
of money and of course there are a lot of excellent writers who
don't, I will repeat something that Rilke said, "You write
because you have to write." I think the commercial aspects
are invisible to the kind of writer we have been talking about.
They are going to write because they have to write, and even if
the market shrunk by another factor of ten these people would still
be writing. We are not talking about the writers who do sequels
and genres.
RB: I found it noteworthy to discover, rooting
around in the press materials about you, that Einstein's Dreams
had been made into a stage production.
AL: It's been made into a number of stage productions.
RB: No movie?
AL: There have been a number of attempts, but
so far no one has succeeded with that. But people have made musicals,
and they have made musical compositions. Songs, and serious theatrical
dramatic performances, a lot of those. No one has been able to crack
the nut of making a film. It doesn't matter to me if there is a
film made of it or not. I am very delighted when other artists can
do their own art inspired by that book.
RB: Sounds like whatever the other iterations
are, you don't look at it as your work?
…scientists
do their best work when they are younger and artists do it
later, when they are older. I think the reason is that writers
and some other artists need life experiences. Whereas the
scientist needs that mental agility that youth offers. |
AL: It's somebody else's work, and I think that's
important when people, that when different artists work in their
own medium, in their inspiration and reconception, whenever you
see a film that is made from a book when the book was good and the
film is also good, which his a rare occurrence, it’s usually
because the film maker totally reconceived the project. And had
their own vision about the project and that's what you need.
RB: Is there an audiotape of Reunion?
AL: There is going to be. And there was one for
Einstein's Dreams read by Michael York.
RB: Like the movie I see these tapes as another
iteration.
AL: Yeah, it's another art form.
RB: It seems like they were viewed as the lazy
alternative to reading a book.
AL: It's different experience and a rich experience
especially if the person performing reconceived it.
RB: We were talking about the darker parts of
growing older. You’ve written x number of books and I'm sure
working on something, but is there a longer view at this point in
your life or an overview?
AL: I have longer view, yes.
RB: [laughs] Too personal to talk about?
AL: It's a personal question, but I will l answer.
The biggest view that I have as we were talking earlier is I want
to make the world a better place. Which is a very trite thing. But
I feel it. I want to change the world in some way. Even if it’s
a small way. And I think that at some point in time—it may
not be that many years from now—that I want to get involved
in a direct way with helping people who are less advantaged than
I am. Writing may or may not play a part in that. So that's what
I see looking at my life as a whole. I have been very fortunate
to have had a life in science and also a life as a writer, and I
think my life as a writer will continue because I am still learning
new things as a writer, but I would also like to change the world
in direct ways, particularly with people who haven't had the opportunities
I have. I have a couple of things in mind that I can't talk about
now because they are too unformed.
RB: You are not expecting the misery of the unfortunate
people in the world to abate any time soon?
AL: I am certainly not.
RB: Our government is not going to do anything
about the world's unfortunate?
AL: No. It's working in the opposite direction.
It's creating more disadvantaged people.
RB: Well, thanks. That was Part Two of our ongoing
conversation. I'm looking forward to more.
AL: Yes.
____
|
Posted:
October 7, 2003
