As She Climbed Across the Table (SIGNED COPY) by: Lethem, Jonathan
Hardcover. New York, Doubleday, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 212 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Spotless and tight copy in a bright dust jacket. Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it "Lack." Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a novel of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.