As they saw it, the way to ensure the integrity of science was to enrich and deepen its connection to the public, not to sever it. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for his contributions to the mind-bending new theory of the atom, was embarking on a second career as a popular science writer. A scientist didn’t truly understand a concept, Schrödinger argued, until he could explain it to a non-expert. Schrödinger stressed not the autonomy of science but the way it depended on something beyond empiricism – a faith in the essential universality of human perception. And he insisted that scientific discoveries gained in meaning by being shared as widely as possible, thereby multiplying the subjective experience of ‘discovery’.
A common joke is that the chore of pandemic cooking has reduced us to eating piles of slop. But for a weird, specific, tertiary reason, I actually was. In May, I burned my esophagus. My doctor prescribed a soft food diet, for which there is no clear definition. Finding a truly soft food is difficult. Polenta can be rough. Beans have scratchy skins. Greens are fibrous. Rice is unyielding, bread is dry, yogurt stings, vinegar burns. Ground meat feels gristly, herbs have pointy stems, and entirely too many types of ice cream come with bits.
There’s a woman who has very loud orgasms in my apartment block in Berlin. Olympian, operatic, verging on the absurd. It’s hard to tell where the orgasms are coming from because the apartments are stacked around a courtyard, but they keep coming. For the past two months, in the hottest summer on record, (since 1970-something, someone somewhere said) the woman has exhaled euphoria at least three times a day. I wake up to her morning release, have a cup of tea around the same time as her afternoon delight, and smoke to an orgasmic soundtrack every evening.
Now, some 15 years after all that cosmic embarrassment, Hawke has published a novel called “A Bright Ray of Darkness.” It’s about a young movie star who got caught cheating on his stunningly gorgeous wife. This recycled gossip is tiresome, but what’s most irritating about “A Bright Ray of Darkness” is that it’s really good. If you can ignore the author’s motive for creating such a sensitive and endearing cad, you’ll find here a novel that explores the demands of acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and insight.
Rare is the first book that reveals the writer fully formed, the muscles and sinews of her sentences firm and taut, the voice distinctly her own — think Imbolo Mbue’s “Behold the Dreamers” or Casey Cep’s “Furious Hours.” But Cherie Jones’s lavish, cinematic debut, “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House,” rises to that high bar, its beguiling title a steppingstone into a Barbados that’s both Caribbean paradise and a crime-riddled underworld. Which is to say: The novel’s a stunner.