Writing is to Wording as Lusting is to Sexing

Jane Vandenburgh's novel The Physics of Sunset is as difficult to read as physics itself. It is a horribly pretentious book, set in Berkeley, populated with architects, poets, artists and European exiles, and casually referring to the California normalcy of earthquakes, floods and fires. She peppers it with references to "everyone" reading Hawkins' Brief History of Time as cocktail party conversation. All these pieces fracture the whole of the story. If it is to be a woman's view of sex, as seems to be a major plot line for Vandenburgh, the reader has to plow through 190 pages of this drivel to get there. And the sex is awful. Anna and Alec are both bored with not just their marriages but their existence and lack of professional success. Alec has his Queens/Jewish angst; Anna, her horsey Yankee stock, her inability to manage a household or child, and her poetic aloofness. After reading Sonya Friedman's theories, both Anna and Alec seem to be replicating the mating rituals, or lack thereof, of their parents.

Vandenburgh's writing style is impermeable. To hoist her on her own petard, here's a quote that refers to Alec's wife but just as accurately describes the author's lack of clarity or careful plot: "... didn't talk so much as she did what he thought of as wording, an accelerated intellectualized babble about artistic theory (or science or society or love -- my edit) and its practice that caught the listener up in a lurching and chaotic logic." And again, Alec towards the end of their "affair" opines: "Words were junk, as infinite as stars, and they were being uttered and said and written that very moment, tapped in, put out, sent, going out into the ether that was either nowhere or was the porno chat room where the lid was completely off but no actual intimacy of the mouth-to-mouth or skin-on-skin would ever transpire." Well here you have an idea about how Vandeburgh writes about Californication as well.

Although written in 1999, the book felt me feeling like I had just finished a marathon of Internet searching, occasionally finding an interesting tidbit about famous person, a facet of the universe, or a recipe from Chez Panisse. But it was equally random as a trip down a rabbit hole. Also, hardly passionately, lovingly lustful.