The 20th century changed everything. Lemaître’s hypothesis, initially met with scepticism, suggested that the Universe had a fiery origin – one that might be discoverable. Today, many of us still believe this story. The Universe, according to popular books, television documentaries and the theme song to at least one sitcom, started with a Big Bang, marking the origins of physical matter and time itself.
The question of our Universe’s birth seems settled. And yet, despite how the Big Bang is portrayed in popular culture, many physicists and philosophers of physics have long doubted whether science can truly tell us that time began. In recent decades, powerful results developed by scientifically minded philosophers appear to show that science may never show us that time began. The beginning of time, once imagined as igniting in a sudden burst of fireworks, is no longer an indisputable scientific fact.
When I was eight years old, I won a coloring contest that earned me a free birthday party at my hometown Chuck E. Cheese. We don’t have any photos from the event because, as my mother recalls, it was absolute mayhem. Kids were running from room to room playing video games and Skee-Ball. The adults couldn’t corral anyone for pizza and cake. And then there was the show: The animatronic rat Charles “Entertainment” Cheese and the Pizza Time Players entertained—or terrified—attendees with their songs and corny banter.
That may have been the last time I entered a Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria. And yet, when I heard that the company was phasing out the animatronic bands from all but five locations by the end of this year, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. Much to my surprise, I was truly sad that the moving dolls are being replaced by video screens, dance floors, and trampolines. Consider this my ode to the era of animatronics.
Regrets, you’ve had a few. Ever since you first admired the Taylor Swift lyric “No amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity,” you’ve wished there was a way to appreciate the writerly side of Swift without the interference of postproduction wizardry or a level of screaming that registers on the Richter scale, as was heard two summers ago at a concert in Seattle. So when you learned that the Thurber House, a literary center in Columbus, Ohio, was offering a class, open to writers of any genre, called Write Like Taylor Swift, you thought, Bingo. Still, the prospect of joining a roomful of young people to write bracingly personal accounts of love lost and wisdom gained was so daunting that you spent much of the flight to Columbus anxiously trying to think of words that rhyme with “tryna.”
But part of the power of this often fascinating book is its longing for a different kind of amplitude altogether. Gladman’s reading of popular romances feels so genuine, the love scene so easy a fusion of readerly and writerly delight, that another kind of novel seems possible – one where the lines erupt not just into paragraphs but chapters.