Book: Schrodinger’s Ball
Author: Adam Felber
Published: 2006 (Random House)
Pages: 241
If a young man accidentally shoots and kills himself while
cleaning his dad’s old gun in his grandma’s basement with the door closed and
no one else to find him, is he actually dead?
Or does he still go out on the town with his group of
friends, feeling and acting even more spacey than usual as they all seize onto
his weirdness as an excuse to fend off the unraveling of bonds they all feel
between each other?
This book’s title might clue you in on the answer, which is
both, and all of the below.
Does the young man only truly die when his grandma opens the
basement door a few days later at the exact instance the young man throws
himself in front of his friends to prevent them from getting squashed by a
giant 18-wheeler? Yes.
Theoretical physics mixes really well with the absurdity of
the human condition, especially when it’s applied lightly and with the cynical
armor of post-grad oh-god-what-are-we-doing-with-our-lives-and-each-other
sarcasm.
The story does not make a hell of a lot of sense, especially
the bits where a collective voice talks about how the real (but somehow still
dead) Dr. Schrodinger butts into and invades their real life, only to gradually
reveal that part as the hallucinations of a single, modern-day science lecturer
who’s having a really hard time getting over the loss of his wife. This, and
the parts of the philosophizing bag lady’s revisionist history of the world,
are revealingly funny, but they only trickle into the main flow and only make
it, like, a bigger stream, not a lake or something.
But then, the parts of an atom are a gajillion measuring
units apart and look how well they hold everything together. So this was a good
read, and I will be giving it back to the library’s bookshelf because guys, I
walked through the stacks instead of the staff exit a week or so ago and that
gets me every time.
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