Items related to The Diagnosis
While rushing to work one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive at a company in Boston, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. Surrounded by other commuters, busily at work with their laptops and dictaphones and columns of numbers, all Bill can remember is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time. When Bill's memory returns, a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. Over the following months, as he attempts to receive a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition, and the manic frenzy of his company, where the executives rush to a health club each day at precisely 3.30 for twenty minutes of exercise and relaxation. Playing counterpoint to Bill's story is a gripping narrative about the execution of Socrates, a fictitious Platonic Dialogue conveyed in instalments over the Internet by Metropolitan College Online. Here noise contrasts with silence, mindless speed with thought, emptiness with sensuality as the novel switches back and forth between contemporary America and ancient Greece.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
In the bravura opening chapter of Alan Lightman's novel The Diagnosis, a nameless horror befalls Boston businessman Bill Chalmers in the hubbub of his morning commute. As he jostles his way aboard the train and makes cell-phone calls to check last-minute details on his morning meeting (for Bill is punctilious), a realization surfaces in his brain, "like a trapped bubble of air rising from the bottom of a deep pond." He has forgotten where he's going. All he can remember is his anxious urgency and his company's creed, "The maximum information in the minimum time." Acutely aware that he's got a 9:15 appointment, but recalling only the first six digits of his phone number, Bill helplessly gazes out the window. "Trees flew by like flailing arms.... Railroad tracks fluttered by like matchsticks. Trees, white and gray clapboard houses with paint peeling off, junkyards with stacks of flaccid tires." Lightman's Kafka pastiche is as pitch perfect as his verbal music: note the rhyming x sounds in stacks and flaccid (which is not pronounced "flassid").
From the Publisher:
Terrifyingly soon, Bill is mad, homeless, beaten, and experimented on by comically evil doctors. He recovers and reunites with his family, but inexorably, mysterious paralysis ensues. Doctors try to diagnose him. Coworkers offer empty condolences and plot to steal his fast-track job. His wife seeks consolation with a passionate virtual lover on the Internet, a professor she's never met in the flesh. His teenage son triumphantly hacks into AOL's Plato Online, and Bill's last days are counterpointed with the trial of Socrates and his troubled, rich inquisitor Anytus. Instead of the real story, we get a second shimmering Lightman fable. Anytus's strife with his rebel son, a Socrates supporter, parallels Bill's grief as his son is distanced from him by illness.
Though I felt glimmerings of understanding from time to time, I never did fully figure out exactly what the Socrates story and Bill's decline have to say about each other, nor what Bill's paralysis says about modern times. I implore a smarter reader to explain it to me in the customer comments below. But I can tell you that every character is resonant, and every sensory particular is exquisitely precise, as in Lightman's biggest hit, the Italo Calvino pastiche Einstein's Dreams. --Tim Appelo
"The Diagnosis is packed with dark power and awful humor. Lightman's intelligence, imagination, and clarity of style mark him as one of the most brilliant contemporary American writers."
-- Annie Proulx
"I know of no novel that captures the technological horror and pervasive spiritual poverty of our wildly prosperous land in so powerful a way as The Diagnosis. It is haunting."
-- Norman Mailer
-- Annie Proulx
"I know of no novel that captures the technological horror and pervasive spiritual poverty of our wildly prosperous land in so powerful a way as The Diagnosis. It is haunting."
-- Norman Mailer
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMacmillan
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0747556644
- ISBN 13 9780747556640
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages368
- Rating
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