GHOST
Alan Lightman
Pantheon
Fiction
ISBN: 9780375421693

David Kurzweil is a middling man. He is middle-aged and a former middle manager who has lost his job at a large bank and soon finds himself working as an assistant at a family-owned funeral home. Although bright and intellectually curious (he reads Hume and Descartes and attended law school for one semester), he is content to live a tranquil life in a modest, all-male apartment building, sharing quiet evenings at home and walking around a lake with his librarian girlfriend. But what happens to him one afternoon in the funeral home's slumber room --- when he believes he sees "vapor [come] out of a dead body" --- changes his life irrevocably and serves as the springboard for this thoughtful and affecting novel.

At first David is reluctant to embrace the import of his experience: "He believes that something has happened to him, but he doesn't know what it is, and he wants to explore it slowly and gingerly, like an ambiguous but riveting smile in the distance." When reports of the sighting inevitably leak to the press, he is besieged by desperate people who believe he has supernatural powers and want him to communicate with their deceased relatives and friends.

Soon David is approached by an organization known as the Society for the Second World, whose leaders think they have found an appealing Everyman to popularize their beliefs. Eventually they persuade him to submit to testing by a Dr. Tettlebeim, using a Rube Goldberg-like contraption called an "R box" --- for random number generator --- to see if his mind can influence the distribution of those numbers. He is pulled in the other direction by a skeptical college classmate, Ronald Mickleweed (the professionals in the novel, including a lawyer named Pillbeam, all have odd, almost Dickensian, names), a professor of physics at their alma mater. The investigators press their claims against each other in a series of tests that ultimately allow each side to claim that its position has been vindicated.

As troubled as David is by his sudden notoriety, his life is thrown into more turmoil when his ex-wife Bethany unexpectedly reappears in town. Their encounter revives his suppressed feelings for her and threatens to undermine his relationship with his girlfriend Ellen. What happiness David experiences is further shadowed by the childhood death of his father and his mother's failing health.

Alan Lightman, a professor of theoretical physics at M.I.T., is one of those remarkable thinkers able to bridge the worlds of science and humanism while giving equal respect to each. He takes no sides in the debate between those who believe in the paranormal and its scientific challengers, leaving it to his readers to sift through the evidence and make their choice. Still, it's fair to say his sympathies lie with those who give at least some credence to the notion of a hidden world. Lightman's observations about the possibility of that nonmaterial realm are lyrical and moving.

Describing David's uncertainty about whether his experience was anything more than a visual hallucination, he writes, "At times, he has felt the world opening up around him, shifting, cracks forming in the wall of experience, and he has been poised to see through those cracks. The supernatural he cannot accept. But he does believe that there is something unseen behind common experience, some totality, which can be glimpsed only between the cracks." Lightman evokes his first novel, EINSTEIN'S DREAMS, a strikingly original meditation on the nature of time, when he quotes the eminent scientist in a similar vein: "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Lightman is an empathetic writer who sketches even his relatively minor characters with depth and subtlety. Most notable among them is Martin Shaw, the aging, fourth-generation funeral director who collects stamps and quotes William Blake and who is less concerned about the validity of David's experience than he is about the flood of business generated by the reports of the extraordinary sighting.

What Lightman does with both compassion and sensitivity in GHOST is to suggest gently to even the most skeptical among us the possibility that there's a real world beyond the one we can perceive with our senses. "The seconds and years stretch to infinity," he writes, "but a thing might be felt only at one moment. It might always be there, the world underneath and the miracle, but felt only in brief, fleeting stabs." GHOST elegantly traverses the shadowy boundary between faith and reason, belief and science, and Alan Lightman is a capable guide to that territory.

    --- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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