This is the book that introduced me to Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and as there are now quite a number of her books on my shelves, a distinction not shared by many other contemporary romance novelists, a fact important to bear in mind. As I suspect is the case with many of her other readers, I enjoy her humor, as well as the perquisites for a good love story—engaging characters and decent plotting.
But for some reason, Ms. Phillips’ books tend to pin my nit meter.
This, I judge, is because a) I like her stuff and b) I like picking nits, and so c) I combine the two enjoyable activities. Whether a reader of reviews would enjoy the same is an entirely different story, however, so I had better beg your indulgence....My major nit with this book is the female protagonist: she's a brilliant physicist. Nothing wrong with that. But she's something of an anti-intellectual brilliant physicist, and that makes no sense. Americans, for some reason not entirely clear to me, are a rather anti-intellectual bunch. It's almost as if our hard-headed pragmatism is seen as something in opposition to the sort of intelligence honed by and wielded in academia, rather than being seen two aspects of the continua that comprises our most amazing–and human–adaptation.
Recreating such a character, let alone depicting hir thought processes in an esoteric discipline you don't know well (by Phillips’ own admission) would seem to make the task difficult, if not impossible. Yet, despite my general lack of penetration of stuff intended for the lay public, such as Einstein's famous elevator analogy or Feynman's essays or A Brief History of Time, Jane's comments about physics tended to come off as a series of terms extracted from learned treatises rather than a deep abiding quest to develop–or disprove–a theory. In other words, her status as a genius wasn't fully formed, for me.
I complained about this character to an acquaintence of mine, who as a certifiable a genius pointed out to me that lots of people, by the standard definition (achieving something like 130 or 140 on a IQ test) are geniuses. Without getting into the whole argument about what genius is, whether it is a single facility or suite of them, or whether IQ tests measure anything besides one's facility in taking IQ tests, the point is, there are lots of bright people on the planet. They're entitled to get into the same stupid messes the rest of us do. So what was my problem?
This woman is not just your ordinary, run of the mill-type genius, I retorted. She's really brilliant, along the lines of the scientists mentioned above. Oh, he says, you mean a towering genius. Um. Yes. Somebody like that is indeed a rara avis. Granted, Hawking and Feynman and Einstein's thought to themselves were remarkably lucid and straightforward to them–along the lines of picturing elevators, police cars, or adding up arrows. Uh, right, guys.
This is not to say the love lives of towering geniuses aren't as ordinary as dandelions, or that such relationships can't be depicted. (All three of the above, as an example, married.) But delineating those thought processes that differentiate them from the rest of the humanity strikes me as a difficult task at best. I wouldn't even attempt to create a towering genius. Nor do I think, for example, that I would have a very easy time recreating the mental approach that a really top athlete uses in the execution of a superb dive, an impossible catch, a new record, though I have belonged to various sports teams, and have intimate experience with practicing a given move over and over and over. I'm not even certain the athlete could verbalize what is, in effect, a kinesthetic experience.
Nor did I ever get the sense that Jane was working on a particular problem, and that, given my current understanding, is how all scientists work. It's certainly how I work, though to be fair I only make (I hope) medium-quality art, not earth shattering scientific discoveries. I have a suspician, though, that the theory is the same. But I'll be honest here: Physics is not my strong subject, and I've probably read just enough to guess this author read some books, jotted some pretty sounding terms, and inserted them when necessary. And, if you don't have an Einstein level physicist around to correct your book, what else are you supposed to do?
I've stated my workaround for this dilemma before, and so won't repeat it.
Bigger than the problem that the fact that I don't buy Jane's towering genius is the premise that she sees her own intelligence as a liability for success in society. As it happens, Jane isn't a towering genius; she's a moderately bright woman dressed up in a wizard's costume. I don't think–and again, this hardly an original observation, though perhaps one not commonly understood–that people become towering geniuses by brains alone, any more than gold medal Olympians become champions by physical attributes alone. Gold medalists are driven. Towering genius is driven. This is why they tend to come off as obnoxious and impractical. It's not that they can't be pleasant and charming–as indeed many are–or that they can't deal with practical things–as indeed many do–but they are focused on a single goal, and make a choice to let other issues slide by the wayside. (And why we adore the one and pay him–it's almost always a him–millions while tolerating the other as a nerdy, impractical stereotype utterly baffles me, especially when it's the latter that makes the lasting and ultimately more contributions to our society. But that's a rant for another time.)
That she wasn't actually the best woman physicist in the world (why couldn't she've been the 2nd or 3rd or simply the best physicist in the world? After all, you don't do physics with your gonads) as promised, but what really frosted me is towards the end of the book she simply throws away all her notes, books and computers simply to dig weeds and be pregnant. This inexplicable behavior devalued her intelligence even more, because one of the things striking even me about towering genius (or even ordinary genius, for that matter) is that these people find it very hard to stop thinking. Even if they take a break from their fields (as Feynman was particularly famous for doing) they're still very inquiring active minds.
Jane's brain, on the other hand, turned into mush. (Worse, sentimental mush. Yech.) Now, I grant you, people do get mushy–even muzzy–headed during pregnancy. (I surely did.) And there's nothing wrong with digging weeds. I do it all the time, as should be obvious to anyone who's checked out my garden site. But I should think a person to whom physics are so important would tend to notice–and probably be upset–about a sudden loss of interest in the topic. Even if she did want to be pregnant.
I know, I know, Phillips needs Jane to be a towering genius for the hook to work: she wants a dumb man to father her child so it will only be average intelligence, and therefore grow up happy, instead of miserable, like her own childhood. This was the worst problem: I don't know of a single person–either by inference, as with the physicists, all of whom have written about, and attempted to convey their pleasure of, physics, or by example in the case of just ordinarily bright people, even ones who felt woefully out of place in society–who felt any desire to give up hir brilliance, and what's more, who wouldn't regard their own intelligence as the single greatest gift they could pass along to their children.
I read somewhere once that intelligent people tend to cope better than stupid ones, and intelligent children tend to surive childhood difficulties more easily than dumb ones. One could of course point to the spread of humanity itself as an argument for the success for intelligence as an adaptive feature, excepting cockroaches have been successful approximately 600 times longer and have greater ecological niche exploitation, or, if we really want to be humbled, that bacteria, in terms of quantity, variety, ecological penetration, and endurance–they've been around, what 3 billion years or so, compared to our paltry 100 000 years to one million or so (depending on how you count)–only 3 or 4 orders of magnitude...
I've always defined intelligence as the flexible adaptation–(problem solving) to situations, and I simply fail, totally, completely, to understand how anyone could wish to deny this gift to one's child. I think if I were I were so far beyond the rest of humanity that I could not conceive of forming any link to it I wouldn't want to mate with any of its members, for the same reason I personally have no desire to mate with dogs. Why? Because I'm human and they're canine, and I have a powerful biological imperative to mate within my own species.
Jane is clearly not so far above the rest of humanity she doesn't feel connected; indeed it would be impossible to write a sympathetic love story of equals around such a character so much more intelligent than anyone else. Thus, her desire to dilute her intelligence in her child is in effect the American anti-intellectual fantasy that brilliant folks really want to be like the rest of us. Baloney. And that's why the premise irks me. Or to translate to the romance idiom, it would be like a sexy protagonist wanting to have all the S.A. of a plump, balding/frumpy, wimpy middle-aged nerd. You know anybody like that? –Thought not.
Originally created: Mon Jan 11 16:11:06 EST 1999
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