Books: "Ira Foxglove" by Thomas McMahon

This is not a re-post. This is a brand new book review.

What do you get when a scientist writes fiction? You get a novel that appeals to scientists who like to read fiction.

I know I'll incur the wreath of English majors now, but I skip over the "boring parts". If I am in a mood for a great turn of phrase, I read poetry. In a novel, when I see that the next paragraph is a description, I jump over it.

No matter how wonderfully you describe Harvard Square, your lyrical description will leave me cold as well as frustrated at the slowing down of my reading pace. I've been to Harvard Square. It was a rainy September day. I know how it looks like. I can easily imagine it on a blazing summer day, or covered with snow. Even if I have never been there, I can imagine a city square in front of an old University. That is all I need to know. Now, where is the action?

So, I skipped over the descriptions of snow-covered Harvard Square in Allegra Goodman's "Intuition", but there was nothing to skip in Ira Foxglove. McMahon said it was hot and it was on Harvard Square and moved on to what is really important - the characters, their actions, their feelings, their interactions and their words.

Now, don't start thinking that McMahon cannot write, or that his book (sadly, published posthumously - I did place his other books on my wishlist) is some kind of pulp literature. Although he was a professor of both applied mechanics and biology (wow!) at Harvard (wow!) he is a master of the written word. He just uses his mastery subtly, not with in-your-face extravaganzas of florid prose.

For instance, there is a scene when the main character, Ira, goes to Paris to see his estranged wife. The scene of their meeting and their dialogue while walking up the stairs to her appartment, takes about two pages. At the end of those two pages you realize that you are horny. Wow! What happened?

I went back and re-read those two pages and detected several places where he injected, almost invisibly to the reader, little hints that Ira was noticing his wife's legs, and a little later her ass, and next floor up her tits...without actually describing how those body parts look like...and after two pages you, the reader, want to do her.

This is a short, fast-paced and definitely quirky novel. The characters travel to Europe on a zepellin and go fishing on Iceland on their way. Ira is an inventor who designed a new kind of self-cleaning cloth material (I thought of thneed). After suffering a heart attack, he is working on designing an artificial heart. His wife leaves him. His daughter is studying in Paris. He is broke. He goes to visit them. Things happen.

The atmosphere of the 1970s Europe (and Boston) is always there, present in every scene, like a separate character, perhaps the main character of the novel. What they eat, what they wear, how they travel around, how they interact with each other, even a little bit of the political atmosphere of the times are vivid despite (or perhaps because) of the utter lack of lyrical descriptive passages. Nothing to skip. By the time you realize his sentence is descriptive it is over - too late for skipping - and you got all the relevant information you can use to let your imagination take you to the time and place in which the action is taking place.

In the end I was longing for more. It's been a while since I enjoyed fiction so much. I will have to get his other novels soon.