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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375700125
ISBN number: 0375700129
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: February 24, 1998
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: February 24, 1998
Sale Popularity Level: 439025
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Philip is in love with Alice. As the novel opens, he is beginning to lose her. Not to another man, as he fears, but to, literally, nothing. Alice is a physicist, and a team at the University where both she and Philip work has created a hole, a vacuum, a doorway of nothingness inside the laboratory. They call it 'Lack.' Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, as Philip is obsessed by Alice.
The novel is at the same time an astute and wise portrait of unrequited love (albeit of a very unusual kind) a hilarious academic parody, a novel of ideas and a social satire. It is utterly original, but in the school of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Katherine Dunn, and David Foster Wallace.
Passion, humor, yearning and knowledge, blended together in a suspenseful love story that could be characterized as 'American Magical Realism.'
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
Particle physics, false vacuum bubbles, an alternate universe--this is the stuff of Jonathan Lethem's novel As She Climbed Across the Table. The tale echoes Alice in Wonderland in its mad tumble through a rearranged reality. Narrator Phillip Engstrand is a university professor who has made a career out of studying academic environments. Engstrand is in love with Alice Coombs, a particle physicist engaged in a bold endeavor to replicate the origins of the universe. The result of the experiment is Lack, a very selective grey hole that sucks some things into its void--a cat, a pair of socks, a strawberry--and rejects others, namely, a love-struck Alice. As Alice's unrequited obsession with Lack grows, Phillip becomes so desperate to save his beloved from this empty rival that he risks a journey down the metaphysical rabbit hole.
Here the language of physics becomes the language of love: describing physics' 'observer problem,' Alice says, 'Some people think the observer's consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron.' Later, as he stumbles to explain Alice's importance to him, Phillip tells her, 'I'm not sure I really exist except under your observation.' In this memorable little book, Lethem explores the cosmic possibilities of love.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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I read As She Climbed Across the Table four or five years ago and thought it was cute but I didn't really connect with it. It felt stuffy in a way, and I couldn't understand some of the character motivations. At very first I thought it was a flaw on the author's part, but since then I've come back round to reading Lethem books again, and so I re-read this one. This time I couldn't believe how sad and funny this book is, how accurate a picture of academics it sketches. I think the book was always this good, but I hadn't had the right experiences in life yet to understand it. I'd read it before I was ready. Now, after college and a few heartbreaks of my own, I completely get it. Identity is a fiction, but we try desperately to fill our own lack with things, preferences and dislikes, people, friends, families, lovers. A sad truth to confront, but I see the emptiness there, and why love is so important to fill it. I'm glad I gave this book another go round.
Rated by buyers -
I am an avid reader of Jonathan Lethem and have been happy with many of his novels (ie Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, Girl in Landscape) though less impressed with some of his others. This particular story is really fantastic. The narrator is fabulously flawed, sharp witted, slightly egocentric but very much in love. Discovering he is the other man to a scientific experiment throws him into a great depression and gives him the drive to win back his lover.
Unlike many of Lethems other novels which take themselves very seriously this novel is fun, it's a quick read and it's very clever.
Rated by buyers -
I'm not sure what to think of Jonathan Lethem these days - each work I read by him is, for a time, effortless, close to perfect, and then finds itself veering into a land of bad bad choices. Reading his The Fortress of Solitude, I was left to wonder what the book would have been like if it were simply kept as its electrifying very first half, instead of allowed to wander, halfheartedly, into its characters' imagined futures. A similar sensation takes hold in As She Climbed Across The Table - it's not that what becomes of its characters is bad, per se, as much as it is simply ignorant of the novel's wondeful strengths. The book doesn't conclude, per se, doesn't quite complete its central love story - a bizarre love triangle in which Alice, the main character's girlfriend, is drawn away by a hyperactive physics blackhole called Lack - nor does it quite fulfill it, as a very first glance at its ambiguous, artsy ending might assume. That's an interesting choice, to be certain, but it also ignores what the book does right. That's because As She Climbed... is effortless not as a love story, but as a breezy satire on academic life. It trots in a revolving door of bizarre academic types, each using Lack - which is, clearly and repeatedly stated, a giant nothing - as a springboard to represent their own attempts at fulfillment, their own need to "get" a situation. Its characters - named in bizarro Pynchon-esque monikers like Georges DeTooth, Dr. Soft, Carmo Braxia, Gavin Flapcloth (!) - are then a wild evocation of pretention in action, a goofy take on collegiate pretentions. There's not much of a sense about Philip Engstrand, a pleasant enough lovestruck protagonist, but its love story itself is a bit of a pleasantry meant to present the lack in its characters' own self-images that make its lunacy possible. All of that leaves this novel breezy, easy to read, fun, and not much of anything. Still, its goofiness is a treasure, especially climaxing in the actions and reactions around DeTooth, the wigged, deluded deconstructionist who explains to a physicist that his response to Lack is to, "compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will consist of only the word 'lack.'" The physicist's response is to start vomiting.
Rated by buyers 
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I'll keep this brief. This book seems like it's trying to be weird for the sake of weirdness. Skip this one and try Lethem's other books, like "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude."
Rated by buyers 
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Two of Lethem's prior works, "Gun with Occasional Music" and "Amnesia Moon", offer so much more to the reader than "As She Climbed Across the Table". The earlier novels had characters that were likable or despicable--at least they were interesting. The worlds of those other books were the product of an active imagination.
"As She Climbed Across the Table" manages to annoy where his earlier works captivated. The characters aren't interesting or likable and the setting is a modern-day American University. There's nothing to grab the user and make them love anything about the book.
Lethem throws in some random science talk in the last chapter to allow the book to be called science fiction. Otherwise, it's a soap opera--and a boring one at that.
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