The Speed of Light
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
As a young man, Dr. Nathan Kline enjoys excellent health, good looks, and a prestigious Park Avenue ophthalmology practice. He is also blessed with a gorgeous young wife, abundant friends, and two infant daughters who adore him. But whoever appreciates what comes so easily? “We take notice of our lives only when something is amiss, when the engine falters and something is found wanting.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When 31-year-old New York ophthalmologist Nathan Kline gets on an elevator in the wrong building, his mistake affects the rest of his life. Also on the elevator is Carla Weisenthal, a beautiful, cultivated art history major at Smith. After a spirited, though stiff, courtship (addressed as much to Carla's parents as to her), he weds the reluctant bride, and their loveless marriage dooms Nathan to a miserable life riddled with career disappointments and numerous affairs. Oblique and arch at times, the writing is often pretentious: "The plump mound of ass he had once, briefly, adored had lost its shine and its scent. She was a density bereft of line, an irksome contemptibility." This earnest, meticulously observed character study fails to impart energy to the protagonist or his post-midlife regrets. Nathan's a hopeless snob, but the waste of his life, and Pashman's views on marriage as "a struggle to accept mortality," may inspire some introspection in the reader. And as a novel of Upper East Side Jewish manners from the 1950s to the present, Pashman's debut has telling scenes that ring absolutely true.