GRL
ascendancy become more impossible to ignore, not until Lotta, not until he’d started watching a girl take shape from earliest infancy, the fineness of discernment, as well as a soreness, which amounted to a discriminating kind of electromagnetic force, all superpowers compared with boys’---and how hard that all was for them, the amazing unremitting meanness of their competition, their fundamental sad practicality, then the encroaching ineluctable weird song and dance of their inferior competence. Later in the novel, the writer’s far-reaching and often strung together thoughts become not only easier to unpack, but add texture and provide an unusual back beat for the story, as well as demonstrate his obvious understanding of the various complexities (and simplicities) of the human condition: That’s what Bodie’s kind of philosophy proposed; but the truth is, a physicist and a lawyer are worth more than a paralyzed, retarded, blind baby, that’s an objective social fact you have to take responsibility for, because if you don’t, then you do live in a world where the evening sound of dishes is as great as the Milky Way, or just the sensation of cotton fabric is as profound as the Seven Wonders of the World. Such ideas serve the novel once the reader adapts to the use of such layered language, and once the story itself becomes strong enough to support them. “Radiance” is an intelligent novel with unusual but beautifully imagined characters and situations. Once you’re anchored in the story, you’ll want to fly through the chapters to learn what becomes of these quirky but tender people, and the conflicts in which they find themselves, conflicts that anything engage readers in the simple but large questions (the loss of a child, the value of one life over another, real life versus fantasy). As for the stickier philosophical questions the novel wants to illuminate, “Radiance” will please those patient and eager enough to tackle them, as well as to challenge and engage those who simply want to travel the pages of a novel with a handful of well-wrought characters and a story that matters.
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