The Diagnosis
by Alan Lightman
Pantheon, 368 pp., $25
This is a novel that angles, from its first few pages, to be a contemporary horror tale — the Kafka brand of Metamorphosis, starting on a commuter train between the protagonist’s suburban Boston home and downtown Boston office. Rather than transforming into a twitching insect, everyman (or, at least, everybusinessman) Bill Chalmers transforms into a twitching commuter who loses his memory, his bearings, and his self-control in the space of 15 pages. Rather than making it to his job, he ends up in a hospital, escapes, stumbles upon a surreal, Felliniesque bingo parlor, and then — with a fortuitous trigger — his memory returns, he returns home, and he is left to parcel out the details of what has just happened. Except his trials are only beginning. Unfortunately, same goes for the novel’s readers.
From its arresting beginning, The Diagnosis (which was a finalist for the National Book Award) twins into equally bleak stories: the Chalmers family home life and Bill Chalmers’ work life. At home, wife Melissa and precocious son Alexander attempt to help Bill discover what caused the amnesia episode and what is making his body progressively more and more numb throughout the course of the novel. At work, a cast of co-workers, all who engage in secretive business over the trade and sale of information, wonder what’s happening to Chalmers with varying levels of concern for his health and opportunistic bloodlust for finishing business deals Chalmers can’t finish himself. As this is a contemporary story, Lightman chooses to convey much of the story’s movement through e-mails. Even Alexander holes up in his bedroom and communicates with his parents, in the same house, via e-mail. Coiled around the contemporary story is an ancient, albeit fictionalized, one: the final days of Socrates, from the point of view of a key prosecutor in his case.
The premise and structure of The Diagnosis is intriguing, maybe even innovative, but the execution leads me to immediate, reflexive criticisms. The e-mails, for one, are consistently rife with spelling and grammar errors, to suggest a hurried nature and status as pieces of imperfect information. For the novel, they function on the most obvious level of symbolism. Yet this is an upscale, East Coast world. A world with spell check. A world where communiqués should not resemble a TAAS test worksheet — but do here, in order to illustrate Lightman’s underlying theses. The bulk of the novel’s players are cold, remote, and austere — including those characters that are supposed to evoke sympathy in the reader. The story becomes, in its second half, a progressively emphatic repetition of the same question, and whether or not the question is ultimately answered is up for debate among those readers who can hang in long enough to finish the novel. The characters, with the exception of the inquisitive Alexander, are placed in the novel not to grow or reveal themselves, but to keep the gears of the story moving.
Lightman is both a physicist and writer, and given that, it might be tempting for critics to refer to this novel as a formula that fails. But this isn’t quite the correct diagnosis. The equation Lightman creates, in structuring the novel, is a workable, if not solid, skeleton. The novel he creates around it, however, does not appropriately mask the scaffolding of the bones. In mathematical terms, Lightman shows his work where he should be efficiently hiding it instead. The Diagnosis is a novel where x equals x, despite depicting a world where x could potentially refuse to equal x. Lightman, free to draw in the air, confines his novel to the chalkboard and carries all his numbers. Which makes for more satisfying math than it does reading. The DiagnosisAlan Lightman
This article appears in December 1 • 2000.