Habitus by James Flint (First U.S. Edition)

A woman born in an asylum, a son of Hasidic Jews, and a mathematical genius find their lives converging in a brief but earth-shattering encounter that will leave the woman pregnant with a very unusual child.

British writer Flint's first book is an allegorical meditation on the nexus of flesh and machine, an eclectic essay on math, physics and Kabbalah--and only secondarily a novel. It abounds with gorgeous panoramic prose, yet totters irritatingly through self-conscious metaphors in service to the author's grand theme. As the forgotten space dog Laika orbits the earth, peeking in and out of the text, aware of humanity via electronic transmissions, a grotesque drama unfolds in England. Thirteen-year-old Jennifer, conceived when her brain-dead mother was raped in a mental hospital, and now living with her mother's husband in Stratford-upon-Avon, discovers she has a precocious interest in sex. Separately impregnated by Joel, a savant mathematician and Kabbalist Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, and 10-year-old Judd, child of an English actress and an African-American computer salesman, Jennifer carries Emma, a child with two fathers, for two years. When the baby is born with a double heart and various other abnormalities, she is taken away from Jennifer. Though isolated in a hospital ward, Emma, like Laika, is psychically connected to the outer world, and she manipulates her three parents from afar, years later engineering her rescue by Jennifer. Meanwhile, Joel searches the world for the mystic underpinnings of apparent chaos, believing that if he collects enough data he can explain the Holocaust, and Judd nurtures a talent for gambling. Though masses of data on cybernetics, chaos theory and cellular biology flesh out Flint's intriguing if arcane theories, they often disrupt the narrative. There are too many grand epiphanies for the story to bear with credibility; the narrative hemorrhages at last into an apocalyptic finale, which is too easy, too broad a cap for such an elaborate edifice. Nonetheless, this highly unusual novel has a certain undeniable sweep and a muffled aura of significance.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A darkly witty English import about the lost souls of the information age. Jennifer, a ferociously unconventional hoyden; Joel, an American Jewish mathematics wunderkind; and Judd, the woebegone product of a black, upwardly mobile father and a beautiful, brainless white movie-star mother, combine as the authors thoroughly unholy trinity. But that grandiose formulation overstates the case. These three young people, each in thrall to an inflexible destiny, are merely lost. They are information-age aliens, isolated and adrift in a way deterministic enough to recall, of all things, a novel such as An American Tragedy, in which Dreisers overwhelmed protagonist has his own existential cards stacked against him. Joel is the luckiest. For him, at least, mathematics generates occasions of compensating warmth. Judd falls in love with gambling. Jennifer dabbles in sex and drugs. Joel and Judd never actually meet, though in one poignant scene they unknowingly cross paths. Each, however, has a role to play involving the third Js womba commingling that Flint brilliantly and amusingly describes at length. Joel marks his growing up by breaking free of the Hasidic family so ill-equipped to understand him. Ten-year-old Judd wanders for a time into Jennifers orbit, where shethree years olderenables him to part with his virginity. Later, Joel turns up in England, at Cambridge, and in the tangential manner common to all three, has a brush with Jennifer, becoming afterward her teacher and, even more briefly, her lover. The lives of these characters are unrewarding, fitfully relieved by bursts of energy but never by anything resembling joy. Their ends are bleak. Digressive and overstuffed, yes; still, there is some remarkable prose here from a talented newcomer who is as difficult to classify as he is to read. And, even so, his people do linger. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.