Mr. g

Alan Lightman, author of the cel­e­brated Einstein’s Dreams, has taken his latest fiction, Mr. g, even further, inviting the reader into the imagined realm of cre­ation; from the world of Void, into time, to space and, well, “…if you tried to picture wind or stars or water, you could not give form or texture.” Not until, of course, Creation!

Alan Lightman is a genius at cre­ation himself. The god of cre­ation in Lightman’s novel is young and rather inex­pe­ri­enced, but with the encour­agement and loving support from an Aunt and Uncle who, without expla­nation, also reside in the Void, he is undaunted and sets out with youthful enthu­siasm to see what he might accom­plish. Lightman imagines not only what Mr. g creates, but all the endless problems that appear to coexist within all that has been created. He does this with such a down-​​to-​​earth approach to the step by step process, that the reader has more than a few, “ah, yes” moments as if under­standing things that, up to now, had been beyond her ken: “There were ellip­soids and spheroids and topo­logical hyper­boloids,” and always the ticks of the atomic clocks.

If you are new to Lightman, first and foremost, is the fact that he is per­sonally an admitted atheist and pro­fes­sionally a the­o­retical physicist; think math­e­matics rather than testing and obser­vation as the path to truth. If your atheism is so doc­tri­naire you cannot abide even the idea of Creator – give it up, this probably isn’t your book. I’m not going near the range of Chris­tians who might like to tar and feather Lightman for his take on a Cre­ation only loosely related to Scripture. For everyone else – all you thinking atheists, agnostics, Chris­tians, Muslims and Jews, come on in, the water’s fine!

Mr g has been reviewed by many as a modern fable and if you believe as Mary McCarthy did, that when animals speak, the story is indeed a fable, then they may be correct. Cer­tainly there is a speaking animal in the char­acter of the Devil’s ugly and grotesque pri­mordial canine, Baphomet. But that brings us to the other side of a fable which is its moral. If there is a moral in Lightman’s endeavor, it is not easily dis­cerned. The best I could come up with is that to question the exis­tence of a Creator by a careful, if not rudi­mentary primer on the physics of all that is com­bustible, can be a cre­ative effort all its own, resulting in a litany of pon­dering. Even Lightman’s Mr g is almost beside himself with self-​​doubt, ques­tioning free will, the pos­sible value of evil, and the eventual and, by its nature, natural end of every­thing created, a ces­sation of life without any rea­sonable expec­tation of a creator-​​associated second life. Such a second life is not a sug­gestion of redemption, which by def­i­n­ition would rely on some­thing lacking in the created, but rather a desire by human life to exist eter­nally with their Creator. Some­thing that ain’t going to happen according to Mr. g.

Mr. g is a gentle but sweeping effort to help the reader under­stand, without the minutiae of reli­gious dogma, the inevitable, and pos­sibly regret­table, inherent physical lim­i­ta­tions of all life, human and oth­erwise. Even Mr. g regrets this. Lightman seems to suggest that a lack of eternity might be offset by an appre­ci­ation for the com­plexity and grandeur of life itself, and that Mr. g has never aban­doned his love and his heartfelt concern for the eventual demise of all that he’s created. Each step of creation’s evo­lu­tionary process, upon its com­pletion, has been rec­og­nized by Mr. g (and most likely a large number of readers) as good.

Fable? Probably, and all the more wise and sat­is­fying for the ques­tions it raises and for the gen­erosity of Mr. g’s will­ingness to share his own take on what he hath wrought.                       — s.s.

Buy MR G: A Novel about the Cre­ation. by Alan Lightman locally or look online at Amazon​.com, Powell’s Books, or through an IndieBound book­store.