Word: lightman
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...Alan Lightman...
Meanwhile the narration is uninspired, surprisingly so given the grace of Lightman's writing in Einstein's Dreams. There, his use of sparse, simple language served him well allowing him to suggest possible worlds through short, carefully chosen phrases, quick touches of color, and imaginative details. In Good Benito, however, his language falls flat and his colors seem drab...
...Alan Lightman's second published work of fiction, Good Benito, feels a lot like a first novel. Arguably it is, since this book reads much more like a novel than did Lightman's 1993 book Einstein's Dreams, a series of fictional meditations on time. It seems probable that Good Benito is, like many first novels, fairly autobiographical, since the book tells the story of a physicist, Bennett Lang, who grows up in Memphis, Tennessee and then comes to the East Coast, while Lightman grew up in Memphis and teaches physics at M.I.T. But the real reason the book feels...
...Lightman rushes from one scene to the next, so that most of his characters are caricatured, or at least underdeveloped. In this short novel, he progresses through thirty or so years; the resulting portrait comes across as a succession of incidents rather than a coherent narrative...
...that Lightman didn't stick with Scalopino and Sophie, for the first chapter seems to portend a successful (if not entirely original) intellectual mystery novel, with Scalopino as the fat, slightly revolting genius, whose nut is Lang's to crack, and Sophie as the romantic interest, a nut of a different flavor. In another novel, Lightman might have found better use for his more intriguing characters--Uncle Maury the gambler who tries to expiate himself by fixing the plumbing, Davis the aging, macho thesis adviser who bets bottles of vodka on his own conjectures...