Book detail: As She Climbed Across the Table is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The novel follows Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist who studies academic communities, as he navigates his relationship with Alice Coombs, a particle physicist. Alice has helped create a laboratory anomaly nicknamed Lack, a seemingly sentient void that consumes certain objects while rejecting others. As Alice becomes increasingly obsessed with understanding and communicating with Lack, Philip observes the competitive dynamics among the scientists and grapples with his own feelings of jealousy toward what appears to be a rival for Alice's affections. The narrative satirizes academic culture and intellectual rivalry while examining how people project meaning and desire onto incomprehensible phenomena. Lethem uses the science fiction premise to investigate human emotional patterns, the nature of attention, and the ways that relationships can be destabilized by fixation on abstract or unattainable objects.
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