Lost and Wanted

Honestly, this story was good. I did not personally like the ending, or maybe the ending just wasn't enough of an ending for me. Most of the story was really good, but good only gets three stars.

Melancholic meditation on loss and death. The science explored here is fascinating. However, some plot points were just too loosely explored to really work for me.

Likable at times but, overall, boring. I did appreciate that the realities of academia were portrayed pretty well and the science was interesting (I have no idea how much is real though).

I'm not sure what I expected from this book when I put it on my list to read. Maybe it was the physics part of the book. At any rate, I was a little unsure starting, but it kept my attention through to the end.

I like the author's voice. Freudenberger's writing flows well and the character dialogue sounds natural. I thought the 7 year-old characterization hit the nail on the head. It took a bit, but I eventually made a connection of the mysterious forces of the universe being like the mysterious influences we have on each other. I don't know if that was the author's intent, but it came across to me. The tension in the relationships felt authentic to me, as well.

At the end, I felt discouraged. Maybe I missed a point, but I came away feeling a lack of hope and left with an idea that many of us are looking for something we will never find.

This is an interesting one to review. Lost and Wanted is not going to be for everyone - it is quite science-heavy, it's kind of about grief, it's mostly a remembrance of a friendship after Helen's college roommate and BFF Charlie dies (by complications from lupus or assisted suicide, depending on which state you live in). I'll try to break this down with those three things in mind.

1. You don't actually have to know anything about science, or really even follow some of the stuff Helen's talking about, in order to read this book. Which is maybe both one of its strengths AND weaknesses: it's really cool to see a woman in a STEM career (physicist and professor at MIT) that clearly loves what she does, is good at it, and has worked hard to get to where she is; because Helen has a young child, she does a reasonably good job explaining concepts in a way that makes sense to non-STEM brains. The downside is that, as a person who struggled in science and really only understood the algebraic stuff in the one college physics class I took, a lot of the conversations between Helen and Neel (her former boyfriend and current coworker, whom she spends a lot of time collaborating with [and that's not a euphemism]) are so high-tier as to almost be more philosophical. I still really don't understand the significance of gravitational wave measurement or kilonovas or the difference between a brain and a mind as Einstein would have argued or whatever, or why I am supposed to care about those things.

2. There are elements of grief here; Charlie has just died, and her parents, her husband and her daughter Simmi all play relatively big roles in the novel. You see how each of them deals with the loss in bits, anger and denial and depression, but because it's from Helen's perspective — and Helen and Charlie had kind of drifted over the years as Charlie got sicker and they lived on opposite coasts — you really only see fragments of grief, but there is an undercurrent throughout, of death and grappling with it.

3. Overall, this story is really more of Helen looking back on her and Charlie's friendship, through flashbacks in their shared past: Visiting each other across the country during conferences or family visits, taking road trips in college, helping each other when a grad school professor becomes creepy and menacing. I wouldn't say it's a fantastic portrait of a friendship — I do wonder why these two would have wound up as close as they were — but there is a lot about their past and it feels a lot like Helen processing Charlie's death and life.

There is plot, but it felt more like it worked well as a character study, if that's your thing, though I don't know if it's more a character study of Charlie or Helen.

I enjoyed it for the most part, once I got used to the flow of the science stuff, but I don't think I'll pick it up again.

Helen knows everything about physics; Helen knows nothing about human relationships. Not that she hasn't had a few in her life...there's Neel Jonnal, a fellow physicist and a college boyfriend...her young son, Jack, who she conceived after giving up on finding a life partner...and, maybe the strongest and longest relationship of her life, Charlie Boyce, her college roommate. It is only when Charlie dies and Helen begins receiving text messages from her old friend that Helen begins to contemplate the limits of human consciousness.

The story has elements of science fiction and fantasy and mystery and romance, but the real story is about Helen and the bonds she tries to forge with others.

Whew! This book is deeply (DEEPLY) science-y, but, if you are like me and tried to skip science in school, don't let that hold you back from reading this delight of a book.

The full review is available at The Gray Planet.

Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger is an interesting read and something different for Freudenberger. Lost and Wanted is written in the first person from the point of view of Helen Clapp, a well-known and respected physicist and a distinguished professor at MIT. Helen receives an unexpected and aborted phone call from her friend, Charlie, from whom she hasn't heard in a while. Two days later Helen receives a call from Charlie's husband, Terrence, telling her Charlie died–the day before Helen received the aborted call.

Subsequently, Helen receives and responds to occasional text messages from Charlie's phone, which Terrence informed her is missing. This establishes a supernatural element to the plot, one that is juxtaposed to Helen's strong belief in the science and reality of physics. But, as we learn through Helen's many digressions into her work as a physicist, physics and reality also have their strange, contradictory, and mysterious aspects–like quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and black holes. In this manner, Freudenberger presents three very different aspects of Helen. The most important of these is her life as a scientist and physicist, a characteristic that grounds her in logic, mathematics and the scientific method. The world is a logical place and can be understood if only one looks at it closely enough, Helen believes. The second aspect of Helen is her personal life–a somewhat messy, uncertain and fuzzy experience that she struggles with defining. Helen's third aspect is as a mother–Helen has an eight-year-old son, whom she raises alone, and who was conceived via an anonymous sperm donor.

The story proceeds in three areas as well. The first is the present time, in which Helen attempts to come to terms with the death of her friend Charlie. Helen and Charlie (who is black, Helen is white), met in college at Harvard, and were very close for many years. However, after the births of their children (Simmi, Charlie's daughter is one year older than Helen's son, Jack), they had less and less contact. Helen is strongly affected by Charlie's death and it leads her to take actions that make her uncomfortable, but which are important. She speaks at Charlie's memorial service, and she pushes for Terrence and Simmi to move into the apartment she has in her home.

Charlie's death also creates echoes from the past. In flashbacks, Helen reminisces extensively about her relationship with Charlie over the years. She remembers events and her reactions to them that cause regret, and realizes that there were many times when both she and Charlie missed opportunities to enhance and deepen their relationship–opportunities now gone forever. These thoughts cause Helen to muse about where she is in life now and what she wants in the future.

Helen also remembers in detail her long standing and one time romantic relationship with Neel Jonnal, who was also at Harvard. After their romantic relationship ended, Neel became Helen's collaborator on her signature contribution to physics–the Clapp-Jonnal model. Neel reappears in her life at nearly the same time that Charlie dies, providing Helen with a complicated triangle consisting of her attraction to Terrence, Neel's return, and her own uncertainty that raising Jack alone was a good choice.

The third story arc involves the melding of the past and the present in Helen's mind and emotions. Charlie is gone, but her family and her presence continue in Helen's life as she sees Charlie reflected in her daughter Simmi, as well as in the sorrow, anger, and persistence of Charlie's husband Terrence's attempts to help his daughter through the loss of her mother while at the same time navigating his own way through his grief.

In addition, Neel, her collaborator on the most important work of her career in physics, and her first love while in college, returns to Helen's life, moving to MIT from Cal Tech to pursue his research. This brings up the emotions of their failed relationship, complicated by the fact that Neel surprises her, first with the announcement that he will marry, then with the fact of his new wife's pregnancy. This is especially significant since one of the complications of their early relationship was that Neel did not want children and Helen did.

Throughout all of these narratives Helen's thoughts veer off topic frequently, into long explanations of the concepts of quantum and relativistic physics. These appear random, but they are not. They show us two things. First, these expositions of science are the essence of who Helen is–a rational and practical woman who finds solace in the predictability of science, but who, at the same time understands that science itself produces unpredictability, randomness, and mystery at its deepest levels–for example, when we enter the realm of quantum entanglement, or approach the event horizon of a black hole, or when relativistic effects create things like gravity waves.

These scientific asides provide the reader, and Helen, with a way of trying to understand how our lives and experiences are a mirror of the complexity of the physical world–how the active, ghostlike presence of Charlie is reflected by quantum entanglement (which Einstein claimed was “spooky action at a distance”), or how Neel's return to her life so many years later is like a gravity wave touching a detector on Earth billions of years after it was created by the faraway collision of two black holes–objects we can't even see directly.

But Freudenberger leads her readers down the garden path in her novel by presenting the text messages from Charlie in a such a mysterious manner. Because this is a trope from many a lesser novel, we at first think Freudenberger's novel may be like them. We think we may be reading about supernatural events and this is misleading. It is not what the story is about and it minimizes the effectiveness of what Freudenberger is really about. Helen doesn't really believe the ghost of Charlie is sending them, but we are left with this idea for much too long in the story.

There are also times in the novel when Freudenberger presents the reader with what are clearly scenes filled with portent. But for me, these are too hazy and I am left only with uncertainty and confusion. Her metaphors and imagery don't resonate in my mind or provide me with any sense of deeper understanding–they are only complex and unintelligible.

So I am left with mixed feelings about Lost and Wanted. I enjoyed the book, and I particularly enjoyed Freudenberger's forays into physics and all its mysteries. The story is well told and her characters interesting and complex. But I find myself wanting to forget the almost supernatural ending with Helen's daydream that conflates Neel and Charlie warming Helen's freezing body and Simmi's apparent ghostwriting of a message in the data log at the LIGO lab. When I read these, I expected an ending that would make sense to me and pull together all the people, the times, and the events of the story into one metaphysical denouement that would expand my spirit and leave me with a sense that this was a completed experience. I really expected this of Freudenberger since she had such control of her story and her characters. Instead, I was left confused and empty.

This is probably my lack, but still.