Intuition by Allegra goodman

[lightreads]

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those where I can rattle off a whole long list of good things about this book and Goodman's talent, but my face would still be going '…eh' the entire time. Watch:

The story of a cancer research lab and what happens when one researcher calls shenanigans on the extraordinary results of her colleague. An intensely interpersonal web, where it's not about the conflict and who is right and what the truth is, but instead about these personalities in this high-pressure mixing bowl. It's a book about science by way of being 95% about people -- about their screwups and jealousies and intuitions and desires and money and patience and breaking points. About how that makes science go as much as truth does. The writing has that lucid, pane-of-freshly-scrubbed-glass quality, if you know what I mean. It's not that this book is sympathetic to each conflicting point-of-view. It bypasses that to something more straightfaced and real and tangled. Sort of lifting the knot of people and squinting at it from every direction, watching it go, recording the data. One of the better executions of omniscient writing on a technical level I've seen in a long time.

It's all quite admirable and well-crafted and interesting.

And I just didn't care. Really at all. Shrug. I don't know, it just seems patently obvious to me that the practice of science is fundamentally no different than any other vocation or discipline: it ticks complexly and emotionally and interpersonally. Okay. Next.

I'd probably have cared if this was about a presidential campaign, though. So take that as you will.



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Comments

[cahn]

Hee. Okay. Will add it to the data points when reccing books to you :) I think my love for this book has to do with the idea that science ought to be pure, and at its best really is pure (either Cliff saw something or he didn't; either the data is corrupted or it isn't), but because it's done by humans, is rarely pure. And that tension is something I don't feel in non-science disciplines, where I'm more likely to say what you said ("yes, it's complex and emotional and interpersonal; okay fine").

...That may be just to say that science is the one thing in my life that I've managed to retain some measure of idealism (naivete?) about (as opposed, say, to politics), so there's that.

So who did you think was the (closest thing to a) villain of the book? (I say Cliff, Abigail Nussbaum says Jacob -- which I think has a lot to do with how one feels about science; you will be unsurprised to hear that I never got past the OMG FABRICATING DATA THIS IS TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY WRONG knee-jerk reaction. I mean, I can see why Nussbaum thinks Jacob is the villain, but I can't feel it.)

[lightreads]

I'm with you on that one, but for entirely different reasons. On a purely emotional-reactive level, I flat out did not like Cliff, but quietly enjoyed and really grocked Jacob, even when I flinched and went 'ooh, don't do that.' And I think you can trace that back to their degrees of self-deception and honesty. Cliff has a really impressive ability to convince himself of what he wants to be true. Not just his results, but the icky way he pursued Robin (his coworker! ick!) until she gave in, no matter how often she told him she wasn't interested. And to me, it's not just that it makes him a bad scientist. It makes him the sort of person I frankly wouldn't want to ever be around, because I value self-questioning way too highly.

It's one of the most successful aspects of the book to me, imho, just how thoroughly a job it did at making sure there wasn't an answer -- he got results, he didn't. Robin was reacting to clues everyone else missed, Robin was reacting out of resentment. Such that when various people started swinging around to this or that conclusion at the last, it was really an afterthought. That was very smart to me, for reasons I can't quite put into words at the moment.

[ecaterin]

The writing has that lucid, pane-of-freshly-scrubbed-glass quality, if you know what I mean. It's not that this book is sympathetic to each conflicting point-of-view. It bypasses that to something more straightfaced and real and tangled. Sort of lifting the knot of people and squinting at it from every direction, watching it go, recording the data. One of the better executions of omniscient writing on a technical level I've seen in a long time.

Wow! A shame this happened to be about characters one couldn't really get invested in, it sounds like :P

I do love that kind of utter clarity in writing though. Ursula LeGuin hits that a big proportion of the time - amazingly even when writing from a specific POV....which is one of the many things that makes me worship her adore her writing so :) For a writer to somehow put across a wholeness of vision, no matter what it is they might happen to be envisioning....that's a rare gift. And one that thrills me no end when I find it :)

[cahn]

(grr, let's try this again without deleting a paragraph, don't know how that happened, sorry)

Well, as one who recommended it (it made my list of top books I read in the last ten years), I'd like to say that I got invested in the characters! :P :) (However, I should append here that I am a scientist, and have spent way too long in the academic world, and I was always going to be partial to a book about the process of science; lightreads talks about perhaps being more invested were the book about a political campaign -- in which case I would probably be far less interested/invested in the characters.)

I don't think I would compare Goodman's writing to LeGuin's. To extend the metaphor, I think of LeGuin's writing more as a... prism, or a faceted gem, where the interaction between the writing and the content contributes to what you call the wholeness of vision (which I really like; that's a good way to describe LeGuin's writing).

Goodman's writing in this book, by contrast, is lucidly clear, without this interaction; it exists simply as a clear medium through which the content (the characters) are observed, without getting in the way for good or ill.

It impressed me a huge amount, don't get me wrong. I think it's a gift to be able to write in a way that is that transparent. But it impresses me in a totally different way than the way I'm impressed by LeGuin's books :)

[livingbyfiction]

*Raises hand from the back of the room*

For those of us who don't really know you in real life, could you please take a moment to explain how you come by visual analogies such as freshly scrubbed panes of glass? Based on your sartorial refinement, I started out thinking that your eye troubles were a teenaged sort of development. Then you posted about Bunnicula, so I added a data point. Now we're talking windowpanes, which leads me to conclude that you are actually 3 different people (which explains a lot about your productivity).

Also: Science is affected by office politics? Whoa nelly, next you'll tell me science is affected by university politics, and maybe even (gasp!) politics politics.

[lightreads]

Okay, tldr, but you did ask!

I was born with very low vision, then it was stable from birth to 16, when I lost some difficult to measure amount, and then stable again until the year I started law school when my left eye imploded entirely. So functionally speaking, these days I'm working out of the far right corner of my right eye (no central vision at all). This is why when you're sitting and talking to me, I'm generally tilting my face left. Acuity is too low to put a number on it. My retinologist uses a scale where I can see large hand gestures at about 18 inches, but not much farther, and not enough acuity to count fingers, generally. Which is basically where I've always been, in broad strokes -- it's one of those things where the losses were a much bigger deal to me functionally than could be accurately measured, just because I was starting from such little vision anyway. And I'm a bit of an outlier in terms of what I get out of what I have -- I'm far more mobile and spatially aware than a lot of people in my place on the scale. Shrug.

So writingwise -- and this is interesting you asked about this, because I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. For writing, I think a lot of it was/is simple mimicry. People write visually, I learned what images they associate with what. And I wasn't always good at it -- I'd have betas tell me 'that doesn't make visual sense,' that sort of thing. And I always suspected I lacked visual metaphor creativity. Various people told me over time that my writing isn't very visual at all, but tends to engage much more seriously with the other senses. I can't tell, but it seems reasonable. I used to worry about it, like my writing was missing something, but I got over that invisibly at some point, and in the process became a lot more willing to throw something creative out there.

So tldr, but these days, when I pop out with a visual image, it may be reflexive mimicry, my brain spitting back out something I heard somewhere. But it also might be something I've experienced -- looking at something through something, for example, is familiar to me. Particularly looking at something through a clouded lens versus a clear one (I actually had a cataract a few years back, if you want to be really literal about it). But also, visual images are often not just visual. The words we use for them often have texture or mood or shading. Like the pane of glass, I said "scrubbed," which correlates to clean, not just to transparency. And I think a lot of what I'm doing with visual metaphors is engaging with them on other levels like that. That's where the creativity is coming from: choosing the words/image out of the stack I've absorbed that fits in a broader sense than the visual.

As for clothes, I just really, really enjoy them. And have good friends with opinions when I want them.

[livingbyfiction]

Fascinating. I enormously like the freshly scrubbed pane of glass imagery -- it conveys the idea of looking through, and also that Goodman achieves her lucidity by applying that special sort of effort that becomes invisible when done correctly.