The Physics of Life and Death

This novel is by no means unique in writing about what happens after the death of someone who has been important in the lives of those they left behind. Recently, by chance, I was reading Anna Quindlen’s After Annie, where the 40 year old Annie who drops dead suddenly of an aneurysm, is the mother of 4, and leaves not just a grieving husband and children, but a best friend who is, if anything, even more bereft than her family.

In similar vein, Lost and Wanted also is told from the perspective of the dead woman’s best friend. Charlie (Charlotte) Boyce is a woman in her 30s who dies of lupus, supposedly a rich, gorgeous black woman who was best friends with physicist, Helen Clapp. They were freshmen together in Harvard in 1989, “Charlie and I – an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study-white science nerd from Padasena” (p16). Charlie married a surfer, the handsome Terrence, whom her parents did not approve of. They had a daughter, Simona (Simmi) a year older than Jack, Helen’s 7 year old son, whom Helen had through a sperm donor when she was 36. Helen was not without a love affair, however. She had been, for many years, in love with Neel, an Indian colleague and fellow physicist, and they even had a romantic relationship, but only for a year while they were students, and a long, continued friendship all along.

The story of course has many flashbacks, but its present day reality is the now dead Charlie and all the fall out, Neel returning to the East Coast, engaged to a beautiful Indian woman who works as a cardio specialist in Doctors Without Borders (which underlines how she is both clever and has a fulfilling, worthwhile, fascinating career), and Terrence coming to live near Helen so that they can share childcare, especially as Jack and Simmi get along so well, and it was apparently Charlie’s wish that the children should spend time together. The twist is that although Helen had drifted a little from her friendship with Charlie now they are in their 40s, just before she dies and after she is dead, Helen gets occasional messages from Charlie’s phone. Terrence had told her the phone had gone missing, and they had not found it yet, along with presumably Charlie’s goodbye letter to her parents.

Helen is unsure how to respond to those messages. She does not believe Charlie is haunting her, but she does engage with the questions the messages ask. Just once, she asks for the phone to be returned, offers a cash reward, threatens to go to the police if not. Contact is suspended for 2 months, then resumes. The mystery continues throughout the book as to who is contacting Helen, from Charlie’s phone.

Helen describes herself as a nerd, but she is not really a nerd so much as someone who seems curiously unemotional for most part. She describes her relationship with her younger sister, Amy, who is a Maths teacher, as being quite a close one. She lists points – namely that they are both smart, Amy is prettier than her, and has a husband and children (as if these are further pluses somehow), while she scores by having interesting work and being more successful than Amy. She notes their mother loves Amy and her children more than Helen and her son. She also notes their father is in awe of Helen and brags about her to his friends. “Amy and I sometimes marvel at other siblings who let their differences get in the way. What, afterall, is the point?” (p76) This list and conclusion tells us a lot about Helen’s character and values and expectations. Clearly, no relationship with her would be completely conventional. And indeed, when she and Neel first get together, he asks her to be his 2nd wife, not to marry him then, but “I’m thinking I want to marry you the second time round. […] After your adopted waif is out of the way, and we’re established as a theoretical-experimental physics power couple” (p228).  

Freudenberger writes well, engaging the reader’s interest page after page effortlessly, providing enough detail to intrigue but not to overwhelm. For example, Helen thinks to herself: “I hurried past the quiet side streets, the rows of shabbily genteel, hundred-year-old houses, most of them filled with people like myself, obsessively committed to one obscure subject or another, the importance of which we communicated in books we passed among ourselves. It was exactly that insularity that Charlie had been eager to escape when she’d left home for L.A.” (p252). There is a lot of social commentary in Freudenberger’s writing, flagging up class, race, and gender issues. This novel also flags up issues of single parenthood.

Some of the race issues flagged are quite nuanced. For example, Charlie tells Helen that another black student, Patricia, warned her off a lecherous professor who regularly makes moves on his female students; Patricia had told Charlie that she would go far. After Charlie is dead, Patricia gets in touch with Helen, and in the course of conversation, she reveals what she had actually said to Charlie was, “You’re going to go far because you are the type of black person white people like” (p237). When Helen admits she couldn’t understand about the pressure Charlie was under, Patricia “was generous but definitive. ‘You couldn’t’” (p237). Patricia talks about how few tenured women, and especially tenured women of colour there are in the departments of their prestigious universities, how she has collected a shelf of awards which create low-level resentment from colleagues, who nevertheless want to co-create courses with her because “there are a lot of popular courses these days that need a black faculty member to have any kind of credibility” (p236). Charlie however, had not wanted to fight that fight; when some younger students later wanted to report the lecherous professor, she was not happy that that Patricia had mentioned her name to those students, indicating that for some like Charlie, individual survival and success may preclude (racial) solidarity and sisterhood.

The book is also full of references to Helen’s work, and Freudenberger does sometimes fall into the usual problem of someone who has read up on some expert subject and inserted too much of this detail into the novel, even when not necessary or warranted by the narrative. There are long chunks of ‘physics’ embedded into the novel here and there, which have not been worked well enough into the story, and is too much a monologue/spiel. That said, it is all very interesting stuff and written in a digestible form, but some of these physics details run for a page or more at a time. A lot of it is to do with the work Neel is involved with, in the LIGO discovery of gravitational waves. He explains about the collision of 2 black holes, which release energy as sound, not light.” It releases wave after wave of energy as it goes around – each one slightly less powerful than the last. The sound becomes quieter and quieter, like a bell […] That’s the ringdown. […] Finally we have machines sensitive enough to do it [measure a gravitational wave]. You can translate that incredibly quiet vibration to an audible register, and the computer spits out an actual billion-year-old sound: a rising note – we call it a ‘chirp’” (p154). None of what Freudenberger writes is dull, or even difficult to follow, but it feels like she is indulging her own interest rather than necessarily building the story. That said, it indulges my interest too, and maybe other readers like me, the science parts are pretty cool material actually, so this is not a complaint! But it is a flaw in the novel design. Also, the novel is about a woman physicist in a very male world, but there is not much reflection of Helen’s gendered experience in the workplace. Likewise, not much reflection on how Neele’s Indian heritage/culture may have influenced his life choices and relationships; this omission is almost as if it is too carefully skirted around to avoid being reductionist about Indians/Asians, but of course, no reference at all is equally unsatisfactory and not quite realistic.

Still, all this low level carping aside, I enjoyed this read very much, and am glad to have read all 5 of Freudenberger’s novels, and am eagerly anticipating her 6th.

This novel is by no means unique in writing about what happens after the death of someone who has been important in the lives of those they left behind. Recently, by chance, I was reading Anna Quindlen’s After Annie, where the 40 year old Annie who drops dead suddenly of an aneurysm, is the mother of 4, and leaves not just a grieving husband and children, but a best friend who is, if anything, even more bereft than her family.

In similar vein, Lost and Wanted also is told from the perspective of the dead woman’s best friend. Charlie (Charlotte) Boyce is a woman in her 30s who dies of lupus, supposedly a rich, gorgeous black woman who was best friends with physicist Helen Clapp. They were freshmen together in Harvard in 1989,

Charlie and I – an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study-white science nerd from Padasena (p16)

Charlie married a surfer, the handsome Terrence, whom her parents did not approve of. They had a daughter, Simona (Simmi) a year older than Jack, Helen’s 7 year old son, whom Helen had through a sperm donor when she was 36. Helen was not without a love affair, however. She had been, for many years, in love with Neel, an Indian colleague and fellow physicist, and they even had a romantic relationship, but only for a year while they were students, and a long, continued friendship all along.

The story has many flashbacks, but its present day reality is the now dead Charlie and all the fall out, Neel returning to the East Coast, engaged to a beautiful Indian woman who works as a cardio specialist in Doctors Without Borders (which underlines how she is both clever and has a fulfilling, worthwhile, fascinating career), and Terrence coming to live near Helen so that they can share childcare, especially as Jack and Simmi get along so well, and it was apparently Charlie’s wish that the children should spend time together. The twist is that although Helen had drifted a little from her friendship with Charlie now they are in their 40s, just before she dies and after she is dead, Helen gets occasional messages from Charlie’s phone. Terrence had told her the phone had gone missing, and they had not found it yet, along with presumably Charlie’s goodbye letter to her parents.

Helen is unsure how to respond to those messages. She does not believe Charlie is haunting her, but she does engage with the questions the messages ask. Just once, she asks for the phone to be returned, offers a cash reward, threatens to go to the police if not. Contact is suspended for 2 months, then resumes. The mystery continues throughout the book as to who is contacting Helen, from Charlie’s phone.

Helen describes herself as a nerd, but she is not really a nerd so much as someone who seems curiously unemotional for most part. She describes her relationship with her younger sister, Amy, who is a Maths teacher, as being quite a close one. She lists points – namely that they are both smart, Amy is prettier than her, and has a husband and children (as if these are further pluses somehow), while she scores by having interesting work and being more successful than Amy. She notes their mother loves Amy and her children more than Helen and her son. She also notes their father is in awe of Helen and brags about her to his friends.

Amy and I sometimes marvel at other siblings who let their differences get in the way. What, afterall, is the point?” (p76)

This list and conclusion tells us a lot about Helen’s character and values and expectations. Clearly, no relationship with her would be completely conventional. And indeed, when she and Neel first get together, he asks her to be his 2nd wife, not to marry him then, but

I’m thinking I want to marry you the second time round. […] After your adopted waif is out of the way, and we’re established as a theoretical-experimental physics power couple (p228).  

Freudenberger writes well, engaging the reader’s interest page after page effortlessly, providing enough detail to intrigue but not to overwhelm. For example, Helen thinks to herself:

I hurried past the quiet side streets, the rows of shabbily genteel, hundred-year-old houses, most of them filled with people like myself, obsessively committed to one obscure subject or another, the importance of which we communicated in books we passed among ourselves. It was exactly that insularity that Charlie had been eager to escape when she’d left home for L.A.” (p252).

There is a lot of social commentary in Freudenberger’s writing, flagging up class, race, and gender issues. This novel also flags up issues of single parenthood.

Some of the race issues flagged are quite nuanced. For example, Charlie tells Helen that another black student, Patricia, warned her off a lecherous professor who regularly makes moves on his female students; Patricia had told Charlie that she would go far. After Charlie is dead, Patricia gets in touch with Helen, and in the course of conversation, she reveals what she had actually said to Charlie was,

You’re going to go far because you are the type of black person white people like (p237).

When Helen admits she couldn’t understand about the pressure Charlie was under, Patricia “was generous but definitive. ‘You couldn’t’” (p237). Patricia talks about how few tenured women, and especially tenured women of colour there are in the departments of their prestigious universities, how she has collected a shelf of awards which create low-level resentment from colleagues, who nevertheless want to co-create courses with her because “-

there are a lot of popular courses these days that need a black faculty member to have any kind of credibility (p236)

Charlie however, had not wanted to fight that fight; when some younger students later wanted to report the lecherous professor, she was not happy that that Patricia had mentioned her name to those students, indicating that for some like Charlie, individual survival and success may preclude (racial) solidarity and sisterhood.

The book is also full of references to Helen’s work, and Freudenberger does sometimes fall into the usual problem of someone who has read up on some expert subject and inserted too much of this detail into the novel, even when not necessary or warranted by the narrative. There are long chunks of ‘physics’ embedded into the novel here and there, which have not been worked well enough into the story, and is too much a monologue/spiel. That said, it is all very interesting stuff and written in a digestible form, but some of these physics details run for a page or more at a time. A lot of it is to do with the work Neel is involved with, in the LIGO discovery of gravitational waves. He explains about the collision of 2 black holes, which release energy as sound, not light.

It releases wave after wave of energy as it goes around – each one slightly less powerful than the last. The sound becomes quieter and quieter, like a bell […] That’s the ringdown. […] Finally we have machines sensitive enough to do it [measure a gravitational wave]. You can translate that incredibly quiet vibration to an audible register, and the computer spits out an actual billion-year-old sound: a rising note – we call it a ‘chirp’(p154)

None of what Freudenberger writes is dull, or even difficult to follow, but it feels like she is indulging her own interest rather than necessarily building the story. That said, it indulges my interest too, and maybe other readers like me, the science parts are pretty cool material actually, so this is not a complaint! But it is a flaw in the novel design. Also, the novel is about a woman physicist in a very male world, but there is not much reflection of Helen’s gendered experience in the workplace. Likewise, not much reflection on how Neele’s Indian heritage/culture may have influenced his life choices and relationships; this omission is almost as if it is too carefully skirted around to avoid being reductionist about Indians/Asians, but of course, no reference at all is equally unsatisfactory and not quite realistic.

Still, all this low level carping aside, I enjoyed this read very much, and am glad to have read all 5 of Freudenberger’s novels, and am eagerly anticipating her 6th.

---