Mar 31, 2006    Members Login  New Users Register  E-mail alerts  Home Delivery  Contact Newsday
Newsday.com - Book Reviews
Today Saturday Sunday
Clear 51°
Clear
Chance of a Thunderstorm 59°/42°
Chance of a Thunderstorm
Clear 59°/35°
Clear
Site Search Entertainment Homepage News Sports Business ShopLocal Jobs Cars Homes Place an ad am New York
Newsday.com - Long Island/Nassau County and Suffolk County
Subscribe
Start now and get a $100 gift card and premium web access!
>PARTNERS
New York News from amNY.com
Books

In pursuit of results


Buy Tickets

BY HELLER McALPIN
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

March 5, 2006

INTUITION, by Allegra Goodman. The Dial Press, 344 pp., $25.





Talk about intuition! Allegra Goodman was already revising her third novel, "Intuition," which features two female cancer researchers at a fictional institute in Harvard's backyard, when the university's now-outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, made his explosive remark last year about women's aptitude for science. By the time South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk's work on stem-cell research was exposed as fraudulent, "Intuition," Goodman's novel about the politics and ethics of science, was in galleys.

Topical as "Intuition" is, Goodman is not in the business of writing op-ed commentaries. Her metier is fiction, with its ample room for nuance, complexity and extended character development. Yet, at a time when writers have been challenged on the veracity of their nonfiction, Goodman's depiction of two years in the life of a cancer research laboratory offers not just the intelligence and depth we've come to expect from this writer, but exacting verisimilitude.

Goodman's earlier books, including her warm and witty story collection, "The Family Markowitz," (1996) and her previous novels, "Kaaterskill Falls" (1998) and "Paradise Park" (2001), focus on what one of her characters refers to as "the identity crisis" of American Jews and "the fallout of two generations of assimilation." "Intuition" is about a different sort of creed entirely - a secular faith in science's ability to uncover biological truths through painstaking research and compilation of empirical data, "hallowing intellectual honesty, and technology, and the pursuit of progress."

But "Intuition" is about more than science. Like the tightly knit Orthodox Jewish community in the Catskills that "Kaaterskill Falls" examines, the lab at the fictional Philpott Institute is another closed community that Goodman scrutinizes under her microscope. She focuses on the interactions of its members, interested in how enthusiasm, faith, insights - and doubt - affect them.

Goodman lovingly sets up a study in contrasts between her two lab directors, repeatedly highlighting their differences. Marion Mendelssohn is a meticulous, cautious, conservative, socially awkward scientist with "an almost ruthless sense of self and mission." Her colleague, Sandy Glass, nee Sam Glazeroff, is an assimilated impresario and beloved oncologist who runs on an "alchemy of authority, charm and chutzpah."

The plot of "Intuition" hinges on the dedication and competitiveness of the post-doctoral lab workers, who live on slave wages but are "too highly trained to stop" and "overeducated for other work." When Cliff's experiments with a variant of the Respiratory Syncytial Virus, R7, start to produce promising results, shrinking malignant tumors in mice, his sudden success causes friction with his girlfriend, Robin, whose own experiments are stagnant.

Sandy is eager to publish Cliff's findings and win much-needed further funding. Marion balks, loath to "stake the reputation of this lab on half-baked results." The other post-docs are asked to drop their own projects to assist Cliff, a move that especially rankles Robin, eight years Cliff's senior. In the bitterness that follows their split, she starts to question his work, wondering if, as Marion's husband slyly suggests, his data are too good to be true.

Goodman meticulously charts the insidiousness of doubt, showing how it metastasizes. When Robin takes her worries to the Office for Research Integrity in Science, her attempt to rule out possible error blows up into a full-scale tribunal against fraud.

Goodman's characters and story are luxuriously imagined, occasionally to a fault. As a result, "Intuition" builds slowly, a methodical, textured accrual of details that finally picks up momentum in its second half. Reflections on the nature of research - "dreary," "addictive," "tragic," and almost always risky - enrich a deeper exploration of moral ambiguity and the interaction between intuition, emotion and truth.

Scientific research shares several traits with novel-writing, including quests for elusive truths and uncertainty of outcome. Sandy's description of the risk inherent in research is equally applicable to literary enterprise: "open-ended work ... it means exploration, not delivery of specified results." When Goodman explores a subject, however, the risk of negligible results seems decidedly slim.






Most emailed

Best Bets
S M T W T F
Search by event type

Search by name (optional)

Local Search
Restaurants | Caterers | Travel
Legal | Wedding Service | Home & Garden | Health & Wellness
Enter a Category View List
Featured Advertisers
Columnists
Junior Damato
News on the go
Get the latest headlines on your cell phone at http://www.newsday.com.

Find It Fast


Get the latest headlines on your wireless device at http://www.newsday.com.
By visiting this site, you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
Partners: Shopping: ShopLocal.com I Careerbuilder for jobs I Cars.com for Autos I Apartments.com for rentals I Homescape.com for Homes