Alan Lightman's "The Diagnosis" is diseased. Lightman has produced too many characters, threads and parallels that are not satisfactorily developed. Instead, they have spread, damaging several important connections until they finally manage to kill the book.
That is not to say that "The Diagnosis" doesn't have its strong points. Alan Lightman is so intelligent that whatever he writes will possess moments of brilliance. It is unfortunate, however, that Lightman's intelligence is nowhere near as apparent in this book as it is in his first novel, "Einstein's Dreams," which is absolutely astounding.
A humanities professor and physics lecturer at MIT, Lightman holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton and a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. The man is smart. He certainly struts his stuff in 1993's "Einstein's Dreams." In this debut novel, each chapter, or "vision," consists of a different way of looking at time from Einstein's mind-blowing point of view. It is a startling and unforgettable masterpiece that has proven Lightman to be a promising writer as well as a physicist.
Two years later, he published his second novel, "Good Benito." "Benito" did not live up to the sheer brilliance of "Einstein's Dreams" and garnered mixed and mostly lukewarm reviews. "The Diagnosis," Lightman's latest novel, falls desperately short of "Einstein's Dreams," which is a misfortune since Lightman has proven to be an exceptional writer. Perhaps he should have quit while he was ahead.
As with all Lightman novels, there is a clear message and theme in "Diagnosis." The novel deals with the "crush of humanity" - people racing on and off trains and elevators, producing "the maximum information in the minimum time." It is a bleak world for the protagonist, Bill Chalmers. Time is money; he finds that his efficiency is his number one priority as he struggles not to waste a single second. One strange day, Bill enters a subway train and realizes that he has forgotten where he is going. He has lost all memory and knows neither where he works nor what his name is. After being taken to the hospital, where he is at the hands of two very shady doctors, Bill escapes and wanders around Boston for two days in a daze.
Then, suddenly, Bill remembers everything again. It is at this point that the numbness begins, starting from his fingers and toes and eventually sneaking all over his body. Bill has become paralyzed with no explanation. His wife, who is convinced that his paralysis is all in his mind, is conducting a cyber affair; his preteen son is getting more attached to the Internet and less involved with his dying father. Bill is an angry, sad and helpless man waiting for an explanation - the diagnosis.
Although four specialists are monitoring Bill and running test after test, no diagnosis is ever made. They can find no explanation for his condition. It is obvious to the reader that the paralysis must be some sort of metaphysical effect caused by Bill's incredible, undying efficiency. Bill is suffering from information overload, and his circuits no longer agree to work.
The hellish nightmare of human technological overload seen in "The Diagnosis" compares with the dehumanizing motifs in Don DeLillo's 20th-century manifesto "White Noise" and Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film "Koyaanisqatsi" (a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance"). "Diagnosis" is also reminiscent of the suburban paralysis in the 1999 Oscar-winning film "American Beauty." Lightman's latest has been dubbed "Kafkaesque" by many critics, and its malady parallels the metaphysical illness throughout Nobel prizewinner Jose Saramago's "Blindness." In short, it has all been done before, and, in most cases, with a much better effect.
Lightman's writing is highly unsatisfactory throughout this novel. Even the first sentence refuses to make sense: "People must have been in a great hurry, for no one noticed anything wrong with Bill Chalmers as he dashed from his automobile..." Why would they notice anything wrong with Bill Chalmers? He's perfectly unnoticeable; he fits right in among the time-ridden throes of humanity, as Lightman takes pains to make clear. There are multitudes of blatantly un-thought-out statements like this within the pages of "The Diagnosis."
The entire novel consists of dry, unexciting prose, which, while perhaps adding to the bleakness of Bill's world, does nothing to interest the reader. There are several well-written scenes, especially the scene in which a very bewildered Bill is forced to be an elderly lady's lucky charm during Bingo. It is unfortunate that the interesting, well-written scenes seem out of place when placed with the rest of the story.
I assume that it is to add to the reality of the story that Lightman has included around 50 full-text e-mail messages in the novel, complete with typos. No, you don't understand. All of these e-mails have typos. Even the ones written by neurological specialists at Harvard have typos. This technique does nothing for the story; rather, it detracts from it by distracting and annoying the reader.
A lot is going on in this novel: Clock images abound, efficiency is a central theme, paralysis and its causes are obviously huge issues. Maybe Lightman expects his readers to figure everything out for themselves. Or maybe he's just copping out. There are too many questions left unanswered in this book, and too many connections left unmade. I can understand leaving Bill without a diagnosis; in fact, I can even understand that the title may refer to Lightman's own diagnosis of an efficiency-focused mankind. But I can't reconcile what is going on when Bill suddenly loses his memory, suddenly gets it back five or six pages later, and then spends 300 or so pages deteriorating. How does that happen? And why? The book contains too many moments like these.
One major fault of the book is its parallels to Socrates' executions that work as a story within a story. Alex, Bill's son, is taking an online course in Socrates and reads the text aloud to his father. There are several explanations for this other story and how it reflects the main plotline. Maybe Bill is a modern-day Socrates. He is the one hope for a corrupt society and will be killed by the very society he wishes to remedy. Perhaps the story-within-the-story shows that life has always been artificial and will always remain so. Perhaps there is an entirely different, brilliant parallel that I am entirely missing. Whatever the case, Lightman decides to let the reader do all of the work. Nothing is either clear or connected. The reader is given no hints.
Despite these rather gaping holes in the writing and development of the novel, Lightman's point comes across. There is no way you can read this book and not see humanity in a terribly tragic light. It is a harrowing, dehumanizing feeling, and Lightman achieves this feeling with great success. You can close the book and put it away, but you will not forget it. It will be with you every time you race desperately to catch the early bus, every time you answer an urgent call on your cell phone and every time you check your watch to make sure you're not late. You'll be thinking of this book whenever the fear enters your mind that you are wasting time and that there is no time to be wasted.
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