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

[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 :)