karenika - books - the center of things

The Center of Things

Marie had always prided herself on her Emperor's New Clothes realism. She believed, no matter how painful it might be, in calling a spade a spade. She saw Marco, on the other hand, as one of the weavers - a knave, a rogue, spinning his own reality, seeing what he wanted to see, with no regard whatsoever for the concept of truth. But there was something oddly reassuring about him. His total lack of interest in reality made her feel more sure about her own firm handle on it. Being with Marco, as frustrating and annoying as he could be, he often felt herself undergo a kind of renormalization process. It was as if he were some sort of virtual photon with an infinite number of contributions. By adjusting herself ever so slightly to one of his contributions, she could chancel out all the other realities that were invading her own and making her feel out of control. "Marcospeak," she said to herself, shaking her head, as she hurried through the front entrance of the library. To put it much more simply, she thought, Marco was so nuts that, by contrast, he made her feel less nuts.

As she passed through the lobby on her way downstairs to the reading room, she imagined she was strolling through B. Altman's ground floor, admiring counters cluttered with lipsticks, liners, and creams, ogling display cases overflowing with jewels and silks. Saleswomen offered to make her over and spray her with perfume that would allegedly cause any man to fall before her and beg to be stepped on. In reality, the library lobby was soaring and spare and she was alone in it apart from the man behind the information desk.

Downstairs, the reading room was nearly empty. A woman in a business suit sat in front of a tack of annual reports at one of the cubicles. Two androgynous teenagers with blond shoulder-length hair whispered to each other over by the reference stacks. A handsome young Asian man in the front lounge area drew in a sketchbook. Marie circled the floor but Marco was nowhere to be found. She looked in the computer room, the microform center, the cubicles behind the chemical-abstract shelves. She wasn't sure what she would say to him if she did find him: "I'm in need of a relative reality cure. My reality sucks but compared to yours it's nirvana."

If I were to be entirely honest, I'd say that Jenny McPhee's the Center of Things left me empty. Each time I got into a story, she'd jump around to some scene in the past, a long scientific diatribe. I am quite interested in science and found her scientific dialogues interesting except for they kept interrupting the plot and they were dryly presented so much so that I wanted her to stop. If I wanted science, I could read a book on physics. Indeed, most of her dialogue felt like excerpts from science books. I also didn't feel so attached to her character. I found myself ambivalent to the character's future. My favorite character in the book, her brother, had no more than a few lines. So overall, while it was an okay distraction, I can't say I've really enjoyed this novel. However, it did have some great one-liners. Maybe had she separated this into two novels, I might have liked it more.