Maybe a cross between Franz Kafka and Peter Kingsley. Bill is a wheeler-dealer high finance guy. We watch him collapse physically to a profound degree. Nobody can figure out what the cause is. LIghtman doesn't really explain it... there are a couple breadcrumbs but they don't really form a trail. But we see what a hollow shell of a life our hero actually has. He's a kind of upper middle class everyman. Our whole society is a hollow shell. Then we have a parallel story inside the story, the death of Socrates. Yeah, killing of Socrates could well be down at the root of the hollowness of our society. Bill starts to find beauty in the interstices. There's hope at the heart of the hollowness. ( )

Bill Chalmers is on the subway. It's a normal day, he's just going to work...that is, until he suddenly forgets which stop he's supposed to get off at. It's a little alarming, but maybe he's just getting forgetful. Where does he work again? He can't remember that either. The more Bill tries to remember who he is, the more he realizes that he doesn't know anything, and the longer he tries to remember, the looser his grip on reality becomes. Hours later he is found naked, curled up in the fetal position, mumbling to himself at the train station.

Bill does regain his memory, but at the cost of his physical health. As he consults doctors about what may have happened to him, he body goes numb, and over the course of several months his physical health declines just like his mental health did that day on the train. Needless to say, things aren't going well for Mr. Chalmers.

I'm surprised this book has such a bad average rating. Well, that's not entirely true, it totally makes sense that this book has a terrible rating, because it's not the type of book the modern reader is looking for. Light on plot and excitement, the book meanders for a few hundred pages and then leaves the reader with more questions than answers. The reader isn't spoon-fed, and a hundred people could probably read it and interpret the events differently. This, in my opinion, is a masterful work of literary fiction, one that I could reflect upon for ages, as the size of this review probably indicates. Alas, the book will never get the attention it deserves, I suspect, unless it's many decades from now...presuming the book isn't lost to time. It's too bad, because it's really fantastic, it's just not SATISFYING. It's deep and complex, but the openness of the story is too off-putting for most people, I think, and that is why the book has been received so poorly.

Regardless of public opinion, I highly enjoyed the book, but I don't think I would recommend it to everyone. I have a thing for stupid boring books that don't appeal to most people, and I suspect this is one of them. ( )

I read this after having loved "Einstein's Dreams" for years. This did not live up to my hopes at all. The story was intriguing at first and as always Lightman's descriptive skills are pretty impressive but the story got rather mind numbing as it went along. My biggest issue with it however was his use of emails as part of the storyline. The email text and misspellings (though I understand they were part of the point he was making) were infuriating to try and read and I eventually gave up. ( )

Boring, disappointing, plodding. ( )

This books starts well, but drags as it goes along. I love the descriptions and satires of corporate life in metro-Boston. The email dialogue complete with misspellings is annoying. The scene with the debilitated father and anxious son is very close to the heart for me. ( )