Lost and Wanted
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'A novel of female friendship . . . startling and moving' New York Times
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'In the first few months after Charlie died, I began hearing from her much more frequently . . .'
When Helen Clapp gets a missed call from best friend Charlie, she knows it's a mistake. Because Charlie's dead. Ghosts break so many fundamental laws of the universe that Helen, a physicist, shouldn't believe in them. Should she?
As this question draws Helen to Charlie's grieving husband and daughter, she finds herself entangled in the forgotten threads of lost friendship and her own paths not taken . . .
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'There aren't many novels that bring to mind both Middlemarch and Bridget Jones's Diary - but Lost and Wanted is one of them' The Times
'Dazzling. Freudenberger explores the nature of ambition, success and grief . . . brilliant' Financial Times
'Beautiful. I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found in all the echoing corners of the expanding universe' New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freudenberger (The Newlyweds) explores the convergence of scientific rationality and spirituality in this stunning portrayal of grief. Helen is an MIT physics professor of some renown known as much for her accessible science writing as for the theoretical model that bears her name. A single mother by choice, Helen, now in her mid-40s, is shaken to learn of the death of her best friend, Charlie Boyce, a successful screenwriter whom she met when they were undergraduates at Harvard. As Helen grapples with her own regrets about having fallen out of touch with Charlie, she and her seven-year-old son, Jack, become increasingly close with Charlie's husband and five-year-old daughter, Simmi. The children are desperate for a supernatural connection to the deceased; Helen is skeptical except for the fact that she continues receiving eerily knowing text messages from Charlie's cell phone. Like her narrator, Freudenberger resists the impulse to use science solely as metaphor; indeed, readers will learn a great deal about the LIGO project and its Nobel Prize winning work with cosmic gravitational waves. The integration of ideas from physics sparks in the reader new ways of thinking about the nature of time and existence as well as, on a less cosmic scale, about human relationships. Helen's journey through grief and understanding illustrates how one person can represent many things to different people at different times, and her story is about grief not only at the loss of her friend but also at the demise of countless possible futures. This is a beautiful and moving novel.
Customer Reviews
Lost and Wanted
Author is one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s top ‘20 Under 40,’ which probably explains why they’ve published so many of her stories. She lives—surprise, surprise—in New York’s writer ghetto: Brooklyn.
But wait, there’s more. Ms F has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library.
Her short story collection Lucky Girls (2003) won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a New York Times Book Review Notable.
Her first novel The Dissdent (2006) about a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident on a one year artist's residency in Los Angeles is a class act. I was less taken with The Newlyweds (2012).
Her latest, Lost And Wanted, is a first person narrative by Helen Clapp, an early forties tenured physics professor at MIT whose name is attached to a breakthrough discovery to do with black holes. She's also written a couple of popular science books. Not quite Oprah, but big in nerdville.
Helen is unmarried and has a 7-year-old son she conceived with the aid of donor sperm.
Her best friend at college (Harvard of course) was a tall, good-looking African-American humanities major turned writer-producer named Charlotte—Charlie for short—who moved to LA, got married, and had a daughter.
Unfortunately, Charlie also got lupus and died of it: encephalitis officially.
Career, family, and geography had kept Helen and Charlie apart for two years when her hubby calls with the bad news.
Then Helen starts getting messages from Charlie, son Charlie sees her in his mother’s office etc. etc. A ghost story involving a super smart scientist? WTF?
Ms F writes the hell out of this, exploring ideas through plot nuance rather than soliloquy in the manner of a literary great, which she is well on the way to becoming IMHO.
5 stars