Alan Lightman cast a spell with "Einstein's Dreams," his small and soaring novel about emotion and time. His moving second novel, "Good Benito," has a narrower focus but recalls the themes of the first, as a man learns to balance his lonely life against the cosmic visions of his passion: the physics of the universe.
"Einstein's Dreams" is an exquisite book, but an unconventional novel. As Einstein, the young patent clerk, sleeps, his fertile mind spins tales of time as aspects of human existence. In one chapter, when time stops, so do people's lives; in another chapter, people rush through life, believing their haste gives them more time. Mr. Lightman's whimsical and poignant scenarios depict people who too often fail to enjoy the present in their preoccupation with the past and the future, or whose most meaningful moments are lost as the machinery of time winds on.
This great clock is also at work in "Good Benito," but its gears hum quietly in the background. "Good Benito" is Bennett, nicknamed by his dearest boyhood friend, John. His goodness is something that John seems to take for granted. In the simplicity and certainty of his friendship with John, as with no one else, Bennett takes it for granted, too.
John understands Bennett's deep curiosity, his need to quantify the big questions through the "sleek" equations of science. When feelings refuse to correspond to Newton's laws, Bennett finds a haven from the chaos of emotions in the order of his work.
Mr. Lightman, whose other books include "Great Ideas in Physics" and "Time for the Stars," teaches writing and physics at the Michigan Institute of Technology. One suspects his personal passions enable him to capture Bennett's exhilaration when he looks at the night sky, or solves a physics problem:
"A mixture of particles was more fragile than a pure population; a mixture made the gravothermal catastrophe more likely to happen. The answer appeared in his mind as a beautiful curve and he tingled and shivered. It had to be right." Mr. Lightman's writing about science breathes like poetry. And his dialogue, devoid of quotation marks, sounds genuine, too.
As Bennett grows up with his uncommunicative parents and his beloved housekeeper in Memphis, falls into first love, moves on to pursue his analytical dreams in school, makes his way in the world, loses old friends and again falls into love, he discovers dimensions beyond his graph paper.
It isn't the chronology of his experience that's important to the story; Mr. Lightman's chapters jump all over the place and all over time -- flashbacks, flash-forwards, from Fells Point in Baltimore to Memphis -- but the connections are there, as if the author were mapping a constellation. Mr. Lightman creates a life as we experience it, without obvious cause and effect but, ultimately, with meaning.
Like the nameless pawns of time in "Einstein's Dreams," Bennett is limited by his own experience. But he is also informed by his experience, like Einstein; he learns to recognize the gap between the metallic certainty of science and the silken colors of emotion. There is life somewhere in between. Mr. Lightman's light-as-air prose renders this life, Bennett's life, real. We identify with Good Benito, whose failures and loves and seconds of joy allow us, and him, to forget for a moment the unrelenting cosmic clock, even while we know it's ticking.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Good Benito"
Author: Alan Lightman
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Length, price: 216 pages, $21