The Physics of Sunset: A novel - Hardcover

Vandenburgh, Jane

3.57

30 ratings by Goodreads

9780679424833: The Physics of Sunset: A novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679424830 ISBN 13: 9780679424833

Publisher: Pantheon, 1999

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From the author hailed by Newsweek as "a writer of great daring and skill to match" comes a brilliant, wholly original novel about the freedoms and imprisonments of desire.

When "an active grief suddenly yawns open for no good reason in the middle of her life," Anna Bell-Shay finds herself inexorably drawn to Alec Baxter, a celebrated architect. Both are transplanted Easterners in a form of exile in Berkeley, an enclave they find something less than paradise.

Alec--intense, intellectual, Jewish, an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn--advocates the beauty of orderly buildings as ardently as he upholds the structure of his marriage. Anna is a poet, self-effacing and calm, devoted to the elegance of language. Against a backdrop of California's signature disasters--earthquakes, floods, urban wildfire--Alec and Anna explore an unexpected, extramarital physical passion with a recklessness that threatens the balance of their carefully constructed lives.

The Physics of Sunset is a spellbinding and fearlessly accurate portrait of the complex erotics of modern married life.

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Review:

A novel that concerns adultery between a married Jewish architect and an almost-divorced poet--in Berkeley, no less--had better have a sense of humor about its subject. Fortunately, The Physics of Sunset does. Yes, Jane Vandenburgh populates her tale with characters named Alec and Gina and Carlo and Veronique; yes, they all have glamorous occupations such as poet and painter and experimental musician; and, yes, they dine at Chez Pannisse. But into the mix, the author stirs a bracing dollop of irony and not a little satire. Take, for example, this commentary on Berkeley life:

What one did in order to demonstrate that you were a successful Berkeley couple, Anna noticed, was manage to stay together long enough to get the family's portrait done by Elizabeth Smythe and therefore have irrefutable evidence.

And then there are the chapter titles--spiky little headings, such as "Technically Daylight" or "Suicide Haiku" or "Schmutz," that add a frisson of anticipation of what is to follow. What does follow is the history of two marriages, and the point where they intersect. Architect Alec Baxter and his wife, Gina, have entered a lull in their relationship; Gina, an artist, has become so involved in her latest venture, Video Family, that "her love for this project--she called it 'Bungalow'--was so intense, her love for her own family paled by comparison." Though Alec is proud of his wife and of her dedication, he is also beginning to think "vaguely of other women." Enter poet Anna Shay, a neighbor whose own marriage to her musician husband, Charlie, is on the rocks. Over a period of years, Alec and Anna--both East Coast transplants to Berkeley--are drawn to each other and finally into an affair that threatens to shatter the careful balance each has achieved in life. Though The Physics of Sunset is not a particularly long book, Vandenburgh doesn't rush Anna and Alec--or the reader--into this affair. Instead she carefully lays the groundwork, introducing us to her protagonists' pasts, to their friends and passions and preoccupations, before finally allowing them to indulge in some very kinky sexual adventuring. Indeed, one could describe this book as an erotic novel for intellectuals, for in between the graphic love scenes are meditations on subjects as diverse as physics, architecture, and ethnography. In her second novel, Jane Vandenburgh has taken an old subject and given it a uniquely imagined new twist. --Alix Wilber

From the Publisher:

"Jane Vandenburgh is a seer: it is the multiple dimensions of life that draw her keen, original eye. The Physics of Sunset is a gorgeous poem to human and physical observation. Reading it is like being given the gift of second sight."
-- John Burnham Schwartz

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