Call number
FIC FRE
Collection
Genres
Publication
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Description
"Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms. Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died. That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything--in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone. As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal--a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prize winning discovery--she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member ablachly
This is a quiet and marvelous book about grief, friendship, and motherhood, as seen through the lens of a physicist. As someone who lives in Cambridge, I was also impressed at how real the sense of place felt.
LibraryThing member susan.h.schofield
This was a beautifully written book about grief and friendship. It is the story of a physicist, Helen, whose best friend from college, Charlie, dies after battling lupus for years. Her death comes as a surprise to Helen since they haven't kept in regular contact. It is a great story of a
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relationships between parents and children, friends and family. There is some science but I didn't find it overwhelming or too confusing. I liked how the author explored the Helen's feelings about Charlie's death and combined that with stories of their friendship as students. Thanks to FirstToRead for the ARC. Show Less
LibraryThing member Dianekeenoy
Helen gets a phone call from her friend, Charlie. The problem is that Charlie is dead. That is what appealed to me and why I requested this book from my library. Glad I did, it was very good and I read it straight through!
LibraryThing member rosalita
How are we supposed to feel when we learn of the death of a friend who had slowly drifted out of our day-to-day life? As Nell Freudenberger shows in her latest novel, it's complicated.
Helen Clapp and Charlotte "Charlie" Boyce were as close as it is possible for two people to be when they were
Helen and Charlie haven't spoken for some time when Helen unexpectedly gets a cryptic text message from Charlie. Before she has a chance to follow up on this unexpected communication, Charlie's husband calls to tell her that Charlie has died — before the text message was sent. What's going on here?
That question seems as though it will be the heart of a modern-day ghost story, but in the end the answer is less important than what Helen learns about herself, about friendship, and about grief. As she struggles to process her emotions and remembers the high and low points of her and Charlie's friendship, Helen expresses herself using the language she is most comfortable with: physics. I really struggled with these bits, as I have the most rudimentary of science backgrounds. I still felt able to enjoy the story but I'm sure someone who could relate to the scientific concepts would feel a much deeper connection to the story.
Once I gave myself permission to stop trying to make the scientific connections, I found myself absorbed in Helen's journey of re-discovery. The ways in which she interacts with the people around her who also knew Charlie felt completely organic, and her need to re-interpret her memories of Charlie through the lens of new information learned after her death was compelling. As Helen muses at Charlie's memorial service, "... love was particular even though it was directed at the same person, that we hadn't lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today."
Helen Clapp and Charlotte "Charlie" Boyce were as close as it is possible for two people to be when they were
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students at Harvard despite being as different as chalk and cheese. Helen is a studious science nerd from a white working-class family, while Charlie is supermodel-level gorgeous, the only child in an affluent African-American family. After college, they drifted apart: Helen stayed in academia, eventually landing at MIT as a professor of physics; Charlie moved to L.A. to work as a television producer, where she married a surfer dude and had a daughter, Simmi. Helen remained single but had a son, Jack.Helen and Charlie haven't spoken for some time when Helen unexpectedly gets a cryptic text message from Charlie. Before she has a chance to follow up on this unexpected communication, Charlie's husband calls to tell her that Charlie has died — before the text message was sent. What's going on here?
That question seems as though it will be the heart of a modern-day ghost story, but in the end the answer is less important than what Helen learns about herself, about friendship, and about grief. As she struggles to process her emotions and remembers the high and low points of her and Charlie's friendship, Helen expresses herself using the language she is most comfortable with: physics. I really struggled with these bits, as I have the most rudimentary of science backgrounds. I still felt able to enjoy the story but I'm sure someone who could relate to the scientific concepts would feel a much deeper connection to the story.
Once I gave myself permission to stop trying to make the scientific connections, I found myself absorbed in Helen's journey of re-discovery. The ways in which she interacts with the people around her who also knew Charlie felt completely organic, and her need to re-interpret her memories of Charlie through the lens of new information learned after her death was compelling. As Helen muses at Charlie's memorial service, "... love was particular even though it was directed at the same person, that we hadn't lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today."
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LibraryThing member Beth.Clarke
3.5 Lost and Wanted has a lot of great themes - love, grief, women in science, friendship, single parenthood, and afterlife. Many times, it works, but other times the science was too much. The strongest part of the novel was the friendship between the two female characters. Their friendship, like
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many we all have, go through phases and the author details it well. Other parts of the book I just wanted to skim through to get back to the interesting parts. It's just okay. Show Less
LibraryThing member lindaspangler
decent read. Woman physicist gets a phone call from her dead best friend.
Interesting parts about physics and friendship, but didn't relate that much to the main character
Interesting parts about physics and friendship, but didn't relate that much to the main character
LibraryThing member Gwendydd
When the audiobook app I was using to listen to this broke, I was 90% done with the book, and at that point really didn't care enough to make the app work to finish it. By that point of the book, I couldn't really tell you what the storyline was. or what the book was about. The interesting part of
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the story is that the main character is a physicist, and her best friend (who she hadn't spoken to in a long time) dies, and she keeps getting messages from her dead friend's phone. The blurb leads the reader to believe that this is a ghost story, and that the physicist is going to have some sort of conflict between her belief in science and the evidence of ghosts right in front of her. But that "storyline" is just a very teeny percentage of the book - the vast majority of the book is flashbacks to the physicist's relationship with her best friend and her past boyfriend, and tedious minutiae of daily life as the best friend's husband and daughter move into her basement apartment. I found the book really frustrating because I could never tell where any of it was going. The characters are all interesting and well-written, which is the only reason I stuck with it so long. I just couldn't tell why the book spent so long dwelling on all of the main character's past relationships instead of focusing on the mystery of where the text messages were coming from. Show Less
LibraryThing member d.r.halliwell
This author seems to be popular among readers who enjoy the journey. I am a destination person instead, and I found this book unsatisfying.
LibraryThing member tbrown3131949
The full review is available at The Gray Planet.
Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger is an interesting read and something different for Freudenberger. Lost and Wanted is written in the first person from the point of view of Helen Clapp, a well-known and respected physicist and a distinguished
Subsequently, Helen receives and responds to occasional text messages from Charlie's phone, which Terrence informed her is missing. This establishes a supernatural element to the plot, one that is juxtaposed to Helen's strong belief in the science and reality of physics. But, as we learn through Helen's many digressions into her work as a physicist, physics and reality also have their strange, contradictory, and mysterious aspects--like quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and black holes. In this manner, Freudenberger presents three very different aspects of Helen. The most important of these is her life as a scientist and physicist, a characteristic that grounds her in logic, mathematics and the scientific method. The world is a logical place and can be understood if only one looks at it closely enough, Helen believes. The second aspect of Helen is her personal life--a somewhat messy, uncertain and fuzzy experience that she struggles with defining. Helen's third aspect is as a mother--Helen has an eight-year-old son, whom she raises alone, and who was conceived via an anonymous sperm donor.
The story proceeds in three areas as well. The first is the present time, in which Helen attempts to come to terms with the death of her friend Charlie. Helen and Charlie (who is black, Helen is white), met in college at Harvard, and were very close for many years. However, after the births of their children (Simmi, Charlie's daughter is one year older than Helen's son, Jack), they had less and less contact. Helen is strongly affected by Charlie's death and it leads her to take actions that make her uncomfortable, but which are important. She speaks at Charlie's memorial service, and she pushes for Terrence and Simmi to move into the apartment she has in her home.
Charlie's death also creates echoes from the past. In flashbacks, Helen reminisces extensively about her relationship with Charlie over the years. She remembers events and her reactions to them that cause regret, and realizes that there were many times when both she and Charlie missed opportunities to enhance and deepen their relationship--opportunities now gone forever. These thoughts cause Helen to muse about where she is in life now and what she wants in the future.
Helen also remembers in detail her long standing and one time romantic relationship with Neel Jonnal, who was also at Harvard. After their romantic relationship ended, Neel became Helen's collaborator on her signature contribution to physics--the Clapp-Jonnal model. Neel reappears in her life at nearly the same time that Charlie dies, providing Helen with a complicated triangle consisting of her attraction to Terrence, Neel's return, and her own uncertainty that raising Jack alone was a good choice.
The third story arc involves the melding of the past and the present in Helen's mind and emotions. Charlie is gone, but her family and her presence continue in Helen's life as she sees Charlie reflected in her daughter Simmi, as well as in the sorrow, anger, and persistence of Charlie's husband Terrence's attempts to help his daughter through the loss of her mother while at the same time navigating his own way through his grief.
In addition, Neel, her collaborator on the most important work of her career in physics, and her first love while in college, returns to Helen's life, moving to MIT from Cal Tech to pursue his research. This brings up the emotions of their failed relationship, complicated by the fact that Neel surprises her, first with the announcement that he will marry, then with the fact of his new wife's pregnancy. This is especially significant since one of the complications of their early relationship was that Neel did not want children and Helen did.
Throughout all of these narratives Helen's thoughts veer off topic frequently, into long explanations of the concepts of quantum and relativistic physics. These appear random, but they are not. They show us two things. First, these expositions of science are the essence of who Helen is--a rational and practical woman who finds solace in the predictability of science, but who, at the same time understands that science itself produces unpredictability, randomness, and mystery at its deepest levels--for example, when we enter the realm of quantum entanglement, or approach the event horizon of a black hole, or when relativistic effects create things like gravity waves.
These scientific asides provide the reader, and Helen, with a way of trying to understand how our lives and experiences are a mirror of the complexity of the physical world--how the active, ghostlike presence of Charlie is reflected by quantum entanglement (which Einstein claimed was "spooky action at a distance"), or how Neel's return to her life so many years later is like a gravity wave touching a detector on Earth billions of years after it was created by the faraway collision of two black holes--objects we can't even see directly.
But Freudenberger leads her readers down the garden path in her novel by presenting the text messages from Charlie in a such a mysterious manner. Because this is a trope from many a lesser novel, we at first think Freudenberger's novel may be like them. We think we may be reading about supernatural events and this is misleading. It is not what the story is about and it minimizes the effectiveness of what Freudenberger is really about. Helen doesn't really believe the ghost of Charlie is sending them, but we are left with this idea for much too long in the story.
There are also times in the novel when Freudenberger presents the reader with what are clearly scenes filled with portent. But for me, these are too hazy and I am left only with uncertainty and confusion. Her metaphors and imagery don't resonate in my mind or provide me with any sense of deeper understanding--they are only complex and unintelligible.
So I am left with mixed feelings about Lost and Wanted. I enjoyed the book, and I particularly enjoyed Freudenberger's forays into physics and all its mysteries. The story is well told and her characters interesting and complex. But I find myself wanting to forget the almost supernatural ending with Helen's daydream that conflates Neel and Charlie warming Helen's freezing body and Simmi's apparent ghostwriting of a message in the data log at the LIGO lab. When I read these, I expected an ending that would make sense to me and pull together all the people, the times, and the events of the story into one metaphysical denouement that would expand my spirit and leave me with a sense that this was a completed experience. I really expected this of Freudenberger since she had such control of her story and her characters. Instead, I was left confused and empty.
This is probably my lack, but still.
Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger is an interesting read and something different for Freudenberger. Lost and Wanted is written in the first person from the point of view of Helen Clapp, a well-known and respected physicist and a distinguished
Show More
professor at MIT. Helen receives an unexpected and aborted phone call from her friend, Charlie, from whom she hasn't heard in a while. Two days later Helen receives a call from Charlie's husband, Terrence, telling her Charlie died--the day before Helen received the aborted call.Subsequently, Helen receives and responds to occasional text messages from Charlie's phone, which Terrence informed her is missing. This establishes a supernatural element to the plot, one that is juxtaposed to Helen's strong belief in the science and reality of physics. But, as we learn through Helen's many digressions into her work as a physicist, physics and reality also have their strange, contradictory, and mysterious aspects--like quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and black holes. In this manner, Freudenberger presents three very different aspects of Helen. The most important of these is her life as a scientist and physicist, a characteristic that grounds her in logic, mathematics and the scientific method. The world is a logical place and can be understood if only one looks at it closely enough, Helen believes. The second aspect of Helen is her personal life--a somewhat messy, uncertain and fuzzy experience that she struggles with defining. Helen's third aspect is as a mother--Helen has an eight-year-old son, whom she raises alone, and who was conceived via an anonymous sperm donor.
The story proceeds in three areas as well. The first is the present time, in which Helen attempts to come to terms with the death of her friend Charlie. Helen and Charlie (who is black, Helen is white), met in college at Harvard, and were very close for many years. However, after the births of their children (Simmi, Charlie's daughter is one year older than Helen's son, Jack), they had less and less contact. Helen is strongly affected by Charlie's death and it leads her to take actions that make her uncomfortable, but which are important. She speaks at Charlie's memorial service, and she pushes for Terrence and Simmi to move into the apartment she has in her home.
Charlie's death also creates echoes from the past. In flashbacks, Helen reminisces extensively about her relationship with Charlie over the years. She remembers events and her reactions to them that cause regret, and realizes that there were many times when both she and Charlie missed opportunities to enhance and deepen their relationship--opportunities now gone forever. These thoughts cause Helen to muse about where she is in life now and what she wants in the future.
Helen also remembers in detail her long standing and one time romantic relationship with Neel Jonnal, who was also at Harvard. After their romantic relationship ended, Neel became Helen's collaborator on her signature contribution to physics--the Clapp-Jonnal model. Neel reappears in her life at nearly the same time that Charlie dies, providing Helen with a complicated triangle consisting of her attraction to Terrence, Neel's return, and her own uncertainty that raising Jack alone was a good choice.
The third story arc involves the melding of the past and the present in Helen's mind and emotions. Charlie is gone, but her family and her presence continue in Helen's life as she sees Charlie reflected in her daughter Simmi, as well as in the sorrow, anger, and persistence of Charlie's husband Terrence's attempts to help his daughter through the loss of her mother while at the same time navigating his own way through his grief.
In addition, Neel, her collaborator on the most important work of her career in physics, and her first love while in college, returns to Helen's life, moving to MIT from Cal Tech to pursue his research. This brings up the emotions of their failed relationship, complicated by the fact that Neel surprises her, first with the announcement that he will marry, then with the fact of his new wife's pregnancy. This is especially significant since one of the complications of their early relationship was that Neel did not want children and Helen did.
Throughout all of these narratives Helen's thoughts veer off topic frequently, into long explanations of the concepts of quantum and relativistic physics. These appear random, but they are not. They show us two things. First, these expositions of science are the essence of who Helen is--a rational and practical woman who finds solace in the predictability of science, but who, at the same time understands that science itself produces unpredictability, randomness, and mystery at its deepest levels--for example, when we enter the realm of quantum entanglement, or approach the event horizon of a black hole, or when relativistic effects create things like gravity waves.
These scientific asides provide the reader, and Helen, with a way of trying to understand how our lives and experiences are a mirror of the complexity of the physical world--how the active, ghostlike presence of Charlie is reflected by quantum entanglement (which Einstein claimed was "spooky action at a distance"), or how Neel's return to her life so many years later is like a gravity wave touching a detector on Earth billions of years after it was created by the faraway collision of two black holes--objects we can't even see directly.
But Freudenberger leads her readers down the garden path in her novel by presenting the text messages from Charlie in a such a mysterious manner. Because this is a trope from many a lesser novel, we at first think Freudenberger's novel may be like them. We think we may be reading about supernatural events and this is misleading. It is not what the story is about and it minimizes the effectiveness of what Freudenberger is really about. Helen doesn't really believe the ghost of Charlie is sending them, but we are left with this idea for much too long in the story.
There are also times in the novel when Freudenberger presents the reader with what are clearly scenes filled with portent. But for me, these are too hazy and I am left only with uncertainty and confusion. Her metaphors and imagery don't resonate in my mind or provide me with any sense of deeper understanding--they are only complex and unintelligible.
So I am left with mixed feelings about Lost and Wanted. I enjoyed the book, and I particularly enjoyed Freudenberger's forays into physics and all its mysteries. The story is well told and her characters interesting and complex. But I find myself wanting to forget the almost supernatural ending with Helen's daydream that conflates Neel and Charlie warming Helen's freezing body and Simmi's apparent ghostwriting of a message in the data log at the LIGO lab. When I read these, I expected an ending that would make sense to me and pull together all the people, the times, and the events of the story into one metaphysical denouement that would expand my spirit and leave me with a sense that this was a completed experience. I really expected this of Freudenberger since she had such control of her story and her characters. Instead, I was left confused and empty.
This is probably my lack, but still.
Show Less
Awards
Writers' Prize (Longlist — 2020)
Boston Globe Best Book (Fiction — 2019)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best: Adults (Selection — 2019)
ISBN
9780385352680