Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer  2001 issue

 

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We meet Bill Chalmers in the Boston T subway on a summer’s day at 8:22 in the morning. The exact time of day is carefully noted and Alan Lightman maintains this temporal documentation throughout his latest novel, The Diagnosis. With its obsession with time, this novel suggests a final, extended tale from Lightman’s best-known work, Einstein’s Dreams (1993). In this brief earlier book, a bestseller, Lightman described thirty remarkably distinct worlds in which time operates in strange and provocative ways, sometimes circular, sometimes passing more quickly or slowly depending on one’s location. In The Diagnosis, Lightman presents a grim vision of how a modern corporate obsession with time and productivity leaves professional men and women isolated and powerless.

Technology as an alienating force is a prevalent theme in twentieth century literature, but Lightman’s work stands out in its observation that the tools intended to foster communication are the very ones that cause isolation. Employing a keen critical eye, Lightman finds that cell phones and e-mail only serve to tie executives to their work twenty-four hours a day, increasing the pressure to be productive at all times. He also identifies the escapist aspects of the Internet as a threat to human relationships. In many instances, Lightman’s thematic points are put across through careful observation of modern society; in the main, however, he relies on his audacious imaginings, which recall the wonderful eccentricity of Einstein’s Dreams.

But while, in his earlier novel, Lightman’s imaginative powers vivified the fantastical dreams of a Swiss patent clerk in 1905, in The Diagnosis, they confuse and frustrate the more immediate and recognizable context of contemporary corporate life. Of course, there are problems from the start. Soon after meeting Mr. Chalmers, we witness his spontaneous breakdown, an unprovoked episode of amnesia, which transforms him from a confident professional to a discombobulated exhibitionist. Chalmers recovers from this rather unpleasant predicament shortly thereafter (though not so soon that we can dismiss how overwhelmingly weird it is), but finds himself afflicted with a numbness in his fingertips. The spread of this numbness, and the failure of doctors to diagnose its cause, takes us through the remainder of the novel. By the final chapter, the difficulty of sustaining a fanciful proposition over three hundred and fifty pages becomes painfully apparent.

When the novel begins, before Bill Chalmers’ crisis, Lightman manages to create a authentic and brilliantly satiric picture of the morning commute. There is nothing fantastical here - just plain, powerful observation of the way things are - and this description introduces Lightman’s theme effectively. We see Bill’s terribly productive businessman-neighbor glibly announcing that he’s reading, while he listens to the book-on-tape version The Bridges of Madison County. We listen to one of the three voicemail messages Bill’s received on his cell-phone in the past twenty minutes. We stop to read one company’s tempting slogan, “Work wherever, whenever. We are, in short, assaulted from all sides with evidence of corporate America’s obsession with productivity. The effect is not obvious, but rather cumulative, and subtly achieved.

There are various other points in the novel where Lightman engages in telling observation. These moments can be funny, as when the doctors who are treating Chalmers stand in reverential awe before a new piece of medical machinery, a symbol of America’s greatness. More often, however, they are tragic, as when Bill’s wife, Melissa, engages in a passionate and typo-ridden love affair with a man over the internet. “I imagine talking to you and I see the keyboard in my mind,” she says, “I can feel my fingers moving on the keys, typing the things I want to say to you. I can feel my fingers moving, honetsly [sic].” It is a world in which contact with others is mediated by technology, and the physicality of touching a loved one is replaced with the sensation of groping with a keyboard. It is through such sly and understated references that Lightman’s social criticism sings. Herein lies the point of the novel: this is our world, and it’s crazy.

Unfortunately, instead of developing these clever criticisms, the bulk of the novel undertakes the ambitious enterprise of detailing Bill’s illness. We get the impression that Lightman could have told a rather straight and down-to-earth tale, one that would speak convincingly about the current American cultural phenomenon. This would perhaps rely heavily on his powers of observation, which he does put to good use in the novel, and not so much on his imaginative conceptions. Instead, the balance is shifted in the other direction, and so we have Bill’s illness. Clearly the failure of doctors to diagnose Bill properly points to our own failure to see how technology and materialism are crippling our lives. All the same, it does little for the reader’s understanding to see the problems of society rather ridiculously manifested in one man’s illness. In trying to create a rounded character with authentic responses to an imaginary disease, Lightman overtaxes his own visionary powers.

Bill is an unconvincing protagonist, whose rationality and motivations seem forced, borne out of thematic necessity rather than an understanding of humanity. Much more moving than Bill’s physical suffering is the emotional emptiness experienced by his wife, Melissa, and by his son, Alex. It is in fact very difficult to feel any sympathy for Bill by the end of the novel, as his growing recognition of social problems causes him to isolate himself further from his family, blaming them for embodying those problems. Chalmers is nobody’s hero, not even in the tragic sense. He falls, certainly, but then, who cares? His fall is contrived and artless, and it occurs too early in the novel to carry us through the remainder.

As if the main plot of the novel were not fanciful enough, Lightman employs as a subplot an imaginary dialogue from The Last Days of Socrates, which he places in his narrative. This inventive reinterpretation of history is the mode in which Einstein’s Dreams was written; it seems that Lightman is showing off his old tricks. Indeed, the historic tale as Lightman tells it is rather beautiful, focusing on the estrangement between Anytus, the man responsible for bringing Socrates to trial, and his son, who is a follower of the philosopher. All the same, we have to ask how this subplot relates to Mr. Chalmers, and the relationship is certainly problematic. Clearly there is resonance in Bill’s gradual loss of contact with his son, and so perhaps we identify him with Anytus. The cause of the deterioration paternal bonds is different in either case, however, and the ideological differences between Anytus and his son shed no light on why Bill values his work above Alex. The matter is made even more confusing when Lightman describes Socrates’ death, where a hemlock-induced numbness creeps up over his body from his toes. Up to this point, and hereafter, Socrates only alluded to, but the explicit similarities to Bill’s illness suggest that we see the Anytus episode with the focus shifted to the philosopher. The relationship is complicated, but moreover, it is frustrating.

The Diagnosis, in the end, is a dire warning as to where society is headed. Lightman’s direct engagement with America’s prosperity, by which he observes the dehumanizing effects of the technology that this nation is so very proud of, is brave and unrelenting. Less impressive is the bravura by which he indulges his imagination, sacrificing the authenticity of his characters for the awkward restatement of his theme. He leaves readers to sort out the tenuous connections between allegory and narrative, the wisps of meaning which root his protagonists failure in a larger, realer context. In this novel, Lightman demonstrates a highly perceptive and critical world-view that could yield even more remarkable insights.