Reality - in its diverse avatars, both shimmeringly atomic and sloppily concrete - is the subject "matter" of Particles and Luck. Less broadly, this is a novel about physics, marriage, and real estate; or, in a word, uncertainty. That reality and uncertainty are inextricably linked is the trendy purview of modern physics; it's also something that the hero- buffoons of this contemporary fable must learn to take in stride.
Particles and Luck unfolds in the course of a single day (Halloween, 1992). The story corrals two unlikely but highly sympathetic misfits: Mark Perdue, a prematurely lionized UC Berkeley physicist who wanders through life as absently as a neutrino; and Mark's neighbor Roger Hoberman, whose failing pizza franchise and failed marriage evidence the wisdom of his credo: "Plan for the worst, hope for the best."
The force that links the two men during their brief alliance is anxiety - felt in very different proportions - about a claim of "adverse possession" filed against their property in the Cobblestone Hearth Village Estates. Riding this scant storyline, author Louis Jones has written one of the brightest novels in years; a book in which every scene splatters into elegant hilarity like an accelerated particle, and "the frustrating 'moment' of 'time' keeps moving along like a pinched seed that squirts ahead out of one's grasp." - Jeff Greenwald
Particles and Luck, by Louis B. Jones, US$22. Pantheon Books: +1 (212) 751 2600.
STREET CRED
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Particles and Luck
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