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On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Karl Iagnemma. On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction. Dial, 2003. 212 pp. $22.95.

Iagnemma, who works as a research scientist at MIT, is clearly aware of various scientific investigations into the nature of atomic particles; ethnological surveys of "primitive" societies; the workings of digestive systems; the nineteenth-century explorations of the brain. He recognizes that although science and pseudoscience try to chart underlying forces that govern existence, they cannot really achieve knowledge of human interaction. He is an heir of Hawthorne, another American writer fascinated by the failure of experiments (see "Rappaccini's Daughter"). Poe, Melville, James- well versed in biology, psychology, and ichthyology-are also romance writers obsessed with the curious inabilities of science to marry humanism

. And of course lagnemma joins such distinguished contemporaries as Pynchon, DeLillo, and McElroy in their extravagant romances involving entropy, fractal shapes, and information multiplicities. In every story in lagnemma's collection there are references to mathematical theorems or "kingdom, order, species" or theory. Thus in the wonderful "Children of Hunger" the physician claims that his wounded patient allows him to "observe, not simply hypothesize, the stomach's actions.""The Phrenologist's Dream" has a description of a head "crisscrossed with thin black lines that divided her skull into thirty-five organs, combativeness and wonder and acquisitiveness and wit sectioned into neat parcels." The narrator of the title story tries to complete his thesis, entitled "Nonlinear Control of Biometric Systems." Iagnemma's scientists are usually astonished by the cruel, ironic, horrifying others-lovers, friends, and partners-who rebel against abstract equations, plotted surveys, cold abstractions. And, therefore, the stories play with reversals, insanities, "common sense." And the collection becomes, in many ways, a cabinet of curiosities. It asserts that we don't know what is coming; that there "are events in nature . . . that cannot be explained or reproduced, that simply are." And finally we bow to shock and awe and incomprehensible faith. [Irving Malin] Copyright Review of Contemporary Fiction, Inc. Fall 2003

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