The Observer Principle

As She Climbed Across the Table
by Jonathan Lethem
1997, Doubleday


I don't recall anymore when I first read Jonathan Lethem, but in the last year he has been a reliably fascinating writer. In this blog's infancy I spoke a little bit about his collection of stories Men and Cartoons and then again a few months later about his new novel Chronic City. Last winter, I was delighted to read a twisted little story of his in the new issue of Zoetrope about hairdressing.

Lethem is so consistently entertaining, that it's often that I search for his books when wandering around in a library, as was the case a few weeks ago when a friend and I were exploring the Newburyport Public Library, which was unfamiliar to both of us. To my surprise, it was well-stocked Lethem-wise and I excitedly checked out a copy of As She Climbed Across the Table and it was a truly breezy read.

As She Climbed Across the Table is an amazingly beautiful love story. It takes place on the campus of a small college where great discoveries occur in basements unbeknownst to its denizens, distracted as they are by the campus's quaint beauty. I picture here the kind of New England institution with large grassy commons strewn with autumnal leaves and hoodie-clad coeds that has become synonymous with serious academia.

The college in question is indeed host to one such amazing scientific breakthrough and as the campus clamors to investigate its unique foibles and tiny miracles, it tears asunder two lovers: our increasingly despondent narrator Philip Engstrand, dean of interdisciplinary studies, and Alice Coombs, professor of particle physics.

At the beginning of the book, Professor Coombs and her colleagues conduct an experiment designed to create a universe and fail in this goal in a peculiar way. They do indeed generate something, but it fails to exhibit the intended effect and the "event", as the professors initially refer to it (other descriptors include "breach", "portal" and "aneurysm", all of which smack of euphemism), begins to take on a life of its own.

Professor Coombs discovers that the portal displays a tendency to consume certain particles and not others. Coombs and her colleagues begin to diverge in their assessment of what's happening in their physics lab. The breach eventually picks up the moniker Lack and Professor Coombs becomes increasingly obsessed with its preference for particles. She and Professor Engstrand begin to drift apart as her research occupies most of her time.

Engstrand is confused by her distance and becomes jealous of Coombs's attention towards Lack. Coombs's theory forms the crux of the book's narrative: that Lack is in fact sentient, as demonstrated by its preference for certain particles. Engstrand begins to feel as though his former love is enamored of an insentient being and when Coombs holds a press conference to announce the discovery of her sentient portal, Engstrand bitterly goads her on.

"I have to question the assumption that Lack's preference is for particles, in and of themselves... Why do we assume out visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H's to M's. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose?
Bebop or swing? I think we're leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we're - pardon me - failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror."

This sets of a chain events that sends the campus - and Coombs's and Engstrand's lives - into a furor. Professor Coombs begins sending all variety of objects through the portal, recording what it accepts and what it does not. The daily paper begins publishing a "Lack Watch" wherein it lists Lack's preference for items, what it swallows and what it doesn't.

Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter's helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck's egg, fertilized, refused a duck's egg, scrambled.

A variety of proposed research projects are granted by the university: a group of students who concoct a measuring device solely out of materials it has been proven Lack will accept, a pompous Derrida-esque deconstructionist named Georges de Tooth who argues Lack has authored himself and will respond to it, inevitably, with "more text". Coombs's obsession spirals out of control. She stops talking, spends long nights in the laboratory, eager to fight the other academics for time with Lack.

Engstrand becomes despondent as it becomes ever clearer that Alice is in love with Lack, in love with something that can give nothing back to her, but can accept anything and everything she throws at it without becoming overwhelmed, without the distraction of personality to interfere with her rabid adoration.

I realize a good portion of this blog entry has been given over to plot summary, but part of what makes this book so delightful is its dizzying science fictional bent, its cutting satire of academia.

Truly, at this book's heart is an incredibly moving love story. Its title is derived from Alice's attempt to be devoured by the object of her affection, her attempt to induce Lack to consume her as she is consumed by him. Her failure in this task wreaks emotional havoc on her jilted lover and herself both.

As She Climbed Across the Table is a story of obsession and a tragic telling of why we don't want what wants us most, our cruelty to our loved ones. The more Engstrand loves Alice, the less she loves him. The more Alice loves Lack, the harder Lack's rejection of her becomes. Lethem creates the Lack to be just that: an absence of something, in this case reciprocal affection. Lack creates self-doubt and frustration and his very presence indicates the fundamental deeply human inability to appreciate what's directly in front of our faces.

Lethem's digressions are an integral factor in what makes this book so fascinating. One such digression is what leads to the book's emotional denouement. a rival Italian physicist, Braxia, postulates that the Lack is prone to influence from its discoverer. He speculates,

"Everything is only potential until consciousness wakes up and says, let me have a look. Take for example the big band. We explore the history of the creation of our universe, so the big bang becomes real. But only because we investigate... There are subatomic particles as far as we are willing to look. We create them. Consciousness writes reality in any direction it looks - past, future, big, small. wherever we look, we find reality forming in response."

Braxia theorizes that Lack can only exist because he has been discovered, but that he is gratified by his observers and is drawn to the "gigantic reservoir of nearby consciousness". Lack is desperate to please his discoverers, for without them, he cannot exist. Without observation, existence is null - the old "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound" conundrum. In its effort to preserve its own existence, it must intrigue, confound and please its observers.

Yet, as science demonstrates in the observer effect, it is impossible to observe something without changing it in some way. Narratively speaking, this creates a situation wherein Alice Coombs and Lack and the predilections and distastes of both are all inextricably woven.

While Lethem uses a great deal of metaphysical trickery to keep his plot moving, the reliance on science fiction is an endearing characteristic. His prose is clean and relatively unadorned, but he manages to find rhythm in his descriptions of Lack's preferences and is often very funny, even. His characters, main and secondary alike, are memorable and lovable.

The plot, which is gripping in its cleverness, leads us in a roundabout fashion to the conclusion that this book is, after all, a remarkably moving love story about why we deny ourselves the things that we want, why we want the things we can't have, and of the extent to which we go when we're falling in love.

Is it possible that, as Braxia speculates, love too is something that only flourishes with an observer? That love does not exist anywhere in the universe until you, as observer, discover it? I think that however solipsistic it may sound, that there is some truth in that.