What do you get when you cross a nuclear physicist with a keen eye for both the comedy and pathos of graduate studies?
I know that last sentence shouldn't be over yet, that no self-respecting writer would cross a keen eyeball with a nuclear physicist, but it's Saturday afternoon, and since I'm writing about a funny novel named Here, Eyeball This!, I've decided to go ahead and leave it like it is.
The novel, written by pro-design nuclear physicist David Heddle, traces the progress of several graduate students at Carnegie Mellon. I was already sold on Heddle as an essayist/blogger, but writing fiction (and particularly novels) is a very different thing. The novel might have been just awful--pedantic, talky, wooden characters sitting around arguing about whether Carl Sagan's yo-yo universe is viable, only to discover that, no, it isn't; ergo, creation ex nihilo. Fortunately, the novel offers the reader a very different experience.
The novel does have a point of view (no surprise there). The protagonist even hears persuasive design arguments from a brilliant physics professor and later converts to Christianity. But I never got the feeling the story was just an excuse for Heddle to smuggle in apologetics. The main character is well realized and several supporting characters are well etched. There are moments in the novel of deep pathos, but many more of lively comedy, some of them laugh-out-loud funny (The Hiroshi character alone should get his own sitcom).
Since the author is himself a physicist who graduated from Carnegie Mellon, one can't help but wonder what is and isn't autobiographical in the novel. Although this can be a diverting game to play, the novel stands on its own apart from such questions.
"You have to remember," the department chair reminds the main character, "no graduate department smaller than ours is rated higher." The chair offers up this talking point in all seriousness, but the first person narrator passes it along to us as an ironic morsel, as a commentary, perhaps, on man, small and very small in his bluster and strivings.
The latter portion of the novel explores the main character's conversion to Christianity, a Reformed position and, specifically in this case, one involving a soft determinism not unlike the determinism one finds in physics (bracketing off for the moment the whole debate over necessity and quantum indeterminacy).
One needn't spend much time at Heddle's blog to know that the author shares this view with his main character, and here it would have been perhaps most tempting to subjugate the larger aesthetic demands of the novel to an effort to make his formulation of the Reformed position as appealing as possible. But instead Heddle surprises us, allowing the protagonist to grope his way into a place of light but also of pain and loneliness in the wake of some wrenching events. The reader is left to ponder why the main character still feels like there should be something more to life.
Has the soft determinism of his particular formulation of Reformed theology left no room for the wildness of human and divine freedom? Or is it that having lived long on the surface of things, the protagonist has now been plunged into a dark night of the soul where there is nothing to distract him from his most pressing purpose, to draw near to and obey in all things his Maker? Or is it simply that the author wanted to avoid the gimmick of passing quickly over human suffering on his way to a too-hasty happily ever after, instead leaving the reader to dwell in loss with the protagonist?
I don't know, but I do know that anyone interested in the human dimension (including the politics) of graduate studies generally and physics specifically, will find much of value in this novel.
