Read[H]er: "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey and "Lost and Wanted" by Nell Freudenberger

Quantum Entanglements, anyone?

These are days when you might feel like you need a little… distance. Calamitous events, natural and very man-made, crowd our headlines and consciousness. Let me recommend as a temporary antidote two novels that deal in the wonders of the universe and the draw of the unknown, novels that zoom out and view the world from a clarifying distance.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey traces the cosmic route of four astronauts and two cosmonauts on the International Space Station as they orbit the earth, looping through sunrises and sunsets that follow rapidly on one another. The characters’ distance from earth makes them meditative, and Harvey’s prose is both hypnotic and precise as it captures the philosophical musings that spring from such a distance. Don’t let the novel’s slim appearance fool you: it is a novel of depth and wonderment, and one that demands your full attention as you read it. Its pages may be few but its rewards are great, perhaps the greatest of these being the sense of perspective—on life, on our place in the world—it grants.

Lost and Wanted also deals in the cosmic and the astronomical, and the fine thread that connects the known and unknown—and in some cases, unknowable. Protagonist Helen Clapp has fought hard to get where she is in life. A professor of physics at MIT and a single mother by choice, Helen finds cause to reflect on her life and everything it took to get there when her dearest friend from college dies. Charlie Boyce was a phenomenon: phenomenally bright, phenomenally beautiful. But her path through Harvard as a student and Hollywood as a screenwriter was not easy: as an African American woman, she encountered the sexism and racism of both rarified realms in equal parts. After Charlie’s devastating death, Helen continues to receive messages from her that challenge Helen’s sense of the order of the universe but also call to mind science’s efforts to understand the mysterious and unfathomable. Freudenberger pulls off the impossible here: she writes a compulsively readable, very accessible novel about love, family, friendship, and ambition that also delves into dense concepts like quantum entanglement. She also teases out science’s acknowledgment of uncertainty, and its occasional flirtations with the fantastic. (The metaphase typewriter at Berkeley and Princeton’s experiments with ESP feature here.) If great scientific institutions dabbled in what we would now consider the occult, what drove them to do it? Could it be that these messages from beyond, as outlandish as they sound, express a reality? Freudenberger entertains all of these ideas and more in a novel that is a real pleasure to read.