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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of Shine Shine Shine, a tale of two astronomers who meet and fall in love only to find out they were raised from birth to be each other's perfect match. Far above the hilltops of Toledo stands the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the nation's premier center of astronomical discovery and a beacon of scientific learning for astronomers far and wide. One of these is George Dermont, a dreamer and a man of deep faith, who's trying to prove the scientific existence of a Gateway to God, and speaks to ancient gods and believes they speak back. Its newest star is Irene Sparks, a pragmatist and mathematician invited to lead the Institute's work on a massive superconductor being constructed below Toledo. This would be a scientist's dream come true, but it's particularly poignant for Irene who has been in self-imposed exile from Toledo and her estranged alcoholic mother, Bernice. When Bernice dies unexpectedly, Irene resolves to return to Toledo, and sets in motion a series of events which place George and Irene on a collision course with love, destiny and fate. George and Irene were born to be together. Literally. Their mothers, friends since childhood, hatched a plan to get pregnant together, raise the children together and then separate them as to become each other's soulmates as adults. Can true love exist if engineered from birth? How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky is a mind-bending, heart-shattering love story for dreamers and pragmatists alike, exploring the conflicts of fate and determinism, and asking how much of life is under our control and what is pre-ordained in the stars.
Author Notes
LYDIA NETZER was born in Detroit and educated in the Midwest. She lives in Virginia with her two home-schooled children and math-making husband. When she isn't teaching, reading, or writing her next novel, she plays the guitar in a rock band. Her first novel, Shine Shine Shine, was a New York Times Notable , and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Here is a diverting romp through two generations of well-intentioned friends and lovers as Netzer tells the story of ubernerds Irene Sparks and George Dermont and explores the concept of soul mates. Do soul mates actually exist in the real world? Can they, or a tolerable facsimile, be artificially constructed? If such a thing does exist, must both soul mates succumb to their fate? And so at the precise moment that cosmologist Irene hits the absolute pinnacle of her career, her estranged alcoholic mother plummets down a flight of stairs to her death. Is it coincidence that draws Irene back to her hometown, Toledo, Ohio, to bury her mother and accept a dream job at the prestigious Toledo Institute of Astronomy? Is it fate that George, a darling of the TIA, must vacate his office and his assistant in order to accommodate Irene and her new position? Can love happen between this controlling ice queen and this lonely seeker who converses with ancient gods? Netzer, author of the much-heralded Shine Shine Shine (2012), posits these and other questions in her much-anticipated, fabulous second novel, which begins when two 1970s flower children connive to predestine the future marriage of their spawn a pair of misbegotten twenty-first-century geeks.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LYDIA NETZER'S SECOND NOVEL, the antically inventive, often outrageously funny "How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky," is set in a world that's pretty different from ours. In it, narwhals frolic in Lake Erie; a girl "raised mute" communicates with her father by birdlike warble; and Toledo is home to an internationally renowned astronomy institute, replete with a supercollider, a simulacrum of "ancient temple ruins" and a gaggle of graduate students called the Daughters of Babylon. But the story doesn't simply take place in an alternate universe - it's full of them. Characters use astral projection to interact in dreams; their avatars meet in video games; and one of the central figures, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy (T.I.A.) postdoc George Dermont, is regularly visited by otherworldly beings. They tell him about "The Gateway of God," a theory that "there exists somewhere in the universe a plane of symmetry," i.e., "a gate on which the universe can bend, one side to another, an axis on which it is replicated, transformed." George, however, believes that the plane of symmetry is actually "a plane of asymmetry, and the relationship between the stars on one side and the stars on the other could be defined not by a simple equality but by an equation of some complexity." The idea of asymmetry is key, because this story, like Netzer's acclaimed first novel, "Shine Shine Shine," is a love story, and its notions of true love rely on asymmetrical compatibility, the fitting together of binary oppositions: science/ art, astronomy/astrology, reason/faith, empiricism/reverie. The dreamy believer George is half of the novel's star-charted couple. His "twin soul" is Irene Sparks, an astrophysicist whose work with black holes has landed her a prestigious T.I.A. fellowship. Although she's not without quirks - she practices lucid dreaming, has long pledged to stay "a virgin from the neck down" and has a habit of hanging out on "suicide bridges" - she's the rational, repressed skeptic in the pair. George and Irene meet at a luxe back-to-school banquet. Except they've met before, which they both sense. In fact, their mothers, Sally and Bernice, childhood best friends who both became astrologers, contrived a scheme years before their babies were born to make them grow up to fall in love: a quasi-cosmic "arranged marriage." To do it, they raised George and Irene together for three years, and then, after separating them, continued carefully grooming them for soulmatehood, nurturing their yin and yang qualities, but also teaching them the same poetry and obscure songs, so that when they met as adults their similarities would feel like kismet. All goes well until Sally and Bernice have a pyrotechnic falling out that derails their fastidious plans. Eventually, though, George and Irene do, indeed, manage to collide (inside a supercollider, no less). Netzer excels at comedy, and some of the most savory humor arrives with side characters, like the magnificent Belion, "Archmage of the Underdark" (his given name is Arturo), Irene's pre-George boyfriend. But charming as the peripheral players are, their scenes sometimes seem digressive, and many are so wacky that encountering them can feel a little like flipping through a tarot deck: They're bright and alluring, with defined roles, but they're occasionally a bit flat. One challenge for Netzer, as dealer of these cards, is that the reader knows so much more than the characters do about their destinies. Just as in "Shine Shine Shine," Netzer begins with a poetic sort of thesis statement, explaining in brief what will follow: "As for the twin souls of George and Irene, this is their story." In her first novel, the love story unfurls with organic complexity over years, and she achieves similar nuance here with Sally and Bernice's tricky, twisting friendship (until their dramatic split). But George and Irene don't get the same treatment, and because we know what will happen to them, some of the suspense and momentum ebbs away. Ultimately, though, Netzer's fans are likely to be quite entertained by this second charmingly weird novel of hers that grapples with big questions. Is love written in the stars? Where does inspiration come from? Who decides our fates? Netzer's wise answer: "The most important things are mysteries." ALENA GRAEDON'S first novel, "The Word Exchange," was published in April.
Library Journal Review
For a whimsical and occasionally bittersweet love story that incorporates black holes, astronomy, video games, lucid dreaming, ancient gods, professional psychics, astrology, and star-crossed lovers, look no further! Quirky is an understatement in terms of both the characters and the plot-there's really not a single word that can describe this strange and utterly out-of-the-box romance between George Dermont, who's trying to prove the existence of God, and Irene Sparks, who creates black holes at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. Narrator Joshilyn Jackson is well suited to conveying the book's inherent sense of wonder. Her youthful voice is perfect for Irene, and while her depiction of George is more restrained, she conveys his surreal visions without missing a beat. VERDICT Recommended for most libraries; while it might be too bizarre for some, the unusual story will have a strong attraction for many listeners. ["The imaginative characters are full of eccentricities, adding a touch of humor to a story that's also tinged with remorse and regret," read the review of the St. Martin's hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 6/27/14.]-Victoria A. Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 At the time her mother fell down the stairs to her death in Toledo, Irene was far away in Pittsburgh, working in a lab. As her mother bounced down a flight of stairs in a bright city on the sparkling shore of Lake Erie, Irene sat in a dark room, in the basement of an ugly building, in a drab university, in an abandoned steel town. Irene's mother was named Bernice. They had not spoken to each other in years. Irene pulled her lab coat around her and stared intently into a small glass window on a large metal apparatus. She wasn't thinking about her mother at all. In fact, all she was thinking about was her work. As her mother landed at the bottom of the stairs, arms and legs cracking, Irene concentrated only on recording the data from her machine. All of her recent days had been spent alone, just like this, compressed into the space in her own head. Yes, she had a boyfriend, a mother, a boss. But there was her and there was everything else. There was her and there was the world. She had a reason for this. It wasn't only vanity. As her mother's limbs banged and broke and settled into place around her on the floor, Irene peered again into the window in the middle of her machine. It was as big as the whole room, and had the shape of an 8, made of bright metal. She leaned over it and looked down into it, where the two sides of the 8 connected. The machine buzzed under her hand. Inside, the little particles were whirring around. She was an astrophysicist, attempting to observe a black hole by exciting the particles in the machine. It was all she had been doing and trying and thinking about for months: proving that there are black holes all around us, and we have been walking through them all our lives. It was her work, and her entire focus was there. In Toledo, Bernice's spinal fluid leaked into the tissue around her cervical vertebrae, and there was thick blood coming out her ear. In Pittsburgh, Irene concentrated on turning a little numbered dial, click by click. Although her eyes were heavy and she was tired, she would not quit. She adjusted a different knob on the control panel and flicked a switch. She adjusted and peered, over and over. There are a lot of fractions between zero and one. There are a lot of sort-ofs between off and on. She had to test everything. For an almost innumerable number of failures, she had continued. She had to assume that this day would be no different, but she would carry on anyway. Never once had she felt the desire to hit the machine, to jostle it, berate it. But she had considered what it would feel like to slide it gently into the water, where the two rivers of Pittsburgh converged, then jump in after it. She would ride it down to the sea, like a barrel over the falls. Then, sleeping peacefully, they would drift out on the waves. These things had occurred to her. She had stood for panting, tense minutes at the railing of the George Westinghouse Bridge, glaring down at the train tracks below, flanked by green, thinking of jumping. In Toledo, her mother was finally dying, and one last breath came out. Irene did not know the fight her mother was having, right at that exact moment. Outside Pittsburgh, there was a green forest to hike in, with rivers and bald eagles. Inside the city, there were buildings you could look at, visit, and enjoy. A funicular went up and down, up and down, but Irene had never been in it. Irene didn't care about all that. She just leaned over the experiment, her back bent. There are elements common to all cities. University laboratories, suicide bridges, small apartments to live in, boyfriends to have. Irene kept her face steady, her eyes open, pointed at the machine. If she worked until her face melted into the detector, if her brain fell down into the path of the accelerator, if it was penetrated by pions and if a small black hole was created in her skull, then at least she would have finished all the data for this set. She blinked her eyes to wake herself up, clicked the knob, and peered into the machine, like every time before. But her mother had nothing left with which to blink herself awake. She could not stop. Far away, her mother died. And this time, when Irene looked into that little window, she saw something completely different. This time, even before her forehead pressed against the humming steel, she saw a tiny purple glow. A little bit of light came out the window she had been looking in. Light that had not been there before. Her stomach dropped. Her brain woke up. She took a deep breath in, and she felt her heart tremble and thump against her ribs. The lab was perfectly quiet, a heavy door blocking out any sounds of the hallway. There was no window and no potted plant, no ticking clock, no stars marching across the firmament, no heavenly witnesses. Irene sat frozen, vibrating, the purple glow from the apparatus window lighting up her eyes. At that moment, she almost couldn't look. It was too much to take. As the person who had been standing in the upstairs hallway in her mother's house came slowly down the stairs, step by step, toward the body, Irene pressed her face up to the experiment one final time in faith, opened her eyes wide, and stared at the evidence. For the first time, it was there. More beautiful than she had ever imagined. A tiny pinprick in space, absorbing and draining particles, leaking radiation that came to her as light through the detector she had made. It flared up from a deep violet to the fiercest lavender and back again, the size of a speck of dust, as far as her human eye could tell. Her breath came faster. Her eyes did not want to pull away, did not want to leave the window, and the purple light bathed the sharp lines of her face, her pointed chin, tired eyelids, the pencil forgotten in her ear. Her finger pushed a button and recorded an image. Another image. Then in a mist of lavender, it was gone. She blinked. Her heart surged and hurt against the back of her sternum. She felt prickles of adrenaline rippling down her limbs. Her hand reached into her lap and fished around in her lab coat, picked up a pencil. The hand felt the distance between the coils and the other edge of the notebook, felt its way halfway down the page, and then while her face was still glued to the machine, she wrote. Irradiated Argon. Polarization 60%. Frequency 16 PHz. Wavelength 47nm. Visible Hawking radiation from possible black hole. Estimated mass, 1 ng. Estimated radius of anomaly, 0 nm. Estimated density, infinite. Halflife She stopped writing. Had it lived for two breaths? Three seconds? Had she been watching for an hour? She leaned back over the machine and looked into the detector. The particles continued to whirr through the collider. Soon, there would be another one. Now she had no trouble staying awake. One hour passed. Two hours more, and she was still looking. She saw one more, two more, but it was not enough for her. She was hungry for these results. Just one more, her brain said. Show me one more. Then I'll sleep. "More gas," her hand now wrote. A purer substrate. Try protons, for a perfect leptonic decay. The color of irises in spring. When she finally pulled away from the machine, a visor shape was marked into the pale skin of her face by the pressure of her observation. She waved her hand through the air in front of her body and smiled. Black holes had formed and decayed, without taking the universe or even Pittsburgh with them. Each left a puff of radiation, just like it was supposed to, and then was gone. A leak of energy that could be measured, documented, graphed, applied to paper, faxed, e-mailed, and reported to the world. The smallest collision, the smallest suction of mass into a singularity, the quickest fade, the sweetest moment of bright purple light in dissolution, like a shallow breath let out quickly. Because of her design, it had been visible. She had seen X-rays it emitted, like no one else on earth had ever done. All around the earth in space, these tiny collisions were happening all the time. Matter rippling like a puddle in a rainstorm. Irene felt better than she had ever felt in her entire life. If she had known a song, she might have sung it. If there had been someone there, she probably would have spoken to them in an elevated tone. She might have even let that person clasp her hand in congratulations. Her phone rang. She walked on stiff legs to her desk and picked up the phone from where she had set it down what seemed like years ago. A glance at the time surprised her. So much of it had passed. She slid the phone on and clicked to answer. "Sparks," she said. Irene was a small girl with a face like a trapezoid. Her smile, when it appeared, could have been called winning, but her voice was not charming. It grated, and was not pretty. At times, she cultivated this ugliness. She tried for a caustic manner. Small women have to do this, she had told herself often. It's bad enough I have to be short. At least I don't have to be cute. "Irene? Is that you?" The voice on the phone had the unmistakable buttery tone of her mother's pastor. "Hello, Father Allen," said Irene. Why was he calling? She had not talked to him since the last time her mother had an episode. Inside her happiness, a tiny speck of doubt took hold, spiraled around, and sent a plume of anxiety through her body. "Honey," said Blake Allen, his voice sounding like a waterfall of olive oil. "Are you alone? Are you with someone?" "Yes." She walked back over to the machine and leaned her face on the metal. It was cool on her forehead. She felt her breath start to come out fast. She felt the blood coursing through the arteries in her head. Something deep inside her chest sent out a little pain. Something bad was about to happen. "Okay, Irene, I'm with your mom." "Where is she?" "She's here at home, Irene. I'm at her home right now, and I'm sorry, but she has passed away." "What? What are you talking about?" This was not what Irene had expected him to say. Passed out, maybe. Past hope. But not away. "I'm so, so sorry, Irene. I hate to have to tell you this. But she has passed." "Where is she? Where are you?" Irene's voice scraped along her throat, tears starting up in her eyes. "She's here in her home, and I'm with her. Honey, she appears to have fallen down the stairs." "Are you sure she is dead? Did somebody really check? She can be--a deep sleeper," said Irene. Her tears were now making her face wet. Irene used her hand to swab her eyes. She used her lab coat, leaving a rumpled wet patch on it. She began to flick switches on the control panel, powering down, shutting everything off. She was thinking off, off, off as she clicked the metal switches. "Yes, I'm sorry. It seems that--" Here he coughed. Blake Allen was pastor of the Unitarian Church. Her mother attended weekly, prayed with a prayer circle, knitted shawls for the bereaved. Of course, she also practiced palm reading, tarot, and other astrological divinations. The recitation of liturgy, the meditative chants, altar clothes, tie-dye with bells, a crystal ball, a chalice. All the accoutrements of firm belief. "It seems that the neighbor came by to see her. I guess they usually had afternoon tea together. Anyway, she found her." "Are you telling me she's lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs?" "Yes, but the coroner will take her away soon. I want you to know that I'm going to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of here. Don't worry about anything like that." Irene paused. She felt like there was too much oxygen in the room. Her lungs just kept filling up and replenishing her oxygen supply and then going back, inexorably, for more oxygen. It was like the damn brooms at the well. She could see her mother, curled innocently on the floor next to the bottom step, one hand closed under her chin, one fist open, palm exposed, as if to say, "Come with me." "Is she broken? Did she break--" Irene began to cough. "We don't know the cause of death. She may have had a stroke at the top of the stairs, a heart attack, we just don't know." There were times when her mother would say, I'm dying. I need to get a haircut and make a will. Irene would just roll her eyes at that. That was before Irene had said, I am leaving Toledo and I will never come back. I will never speak to you again. "I'm so, so sorry. I know you and your mom were not close," said the rector. "We were close," said Irene. She choked back a sob. "Of course, of course. She spoke of you so often." The rector said a few words to someone else in the room there in her mother's house in Toledo. She imagined him stepping nimbly over the corpse of her mother, trotting adroitly over to the front door, stepping out onto the porch. She could hear traffic sounds. He was probably wearing a bespoke suit. He was such a natty dresser. "I don't want to come home," said Irene stupidly. She didn't know what else to say. "Really?" Blake Allen wanted to know. "Your mother always said it was your dream to come back to Toledo." Her dream was to come back to Toledo, and work at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. But it was not something she could ever do while her mother was there, or while her experiment was unsuccessful. But now ... "I don't--" Irene began. "Irene, excuse me for one moment," said Blake Allen. He put his hand over the phone and Irene waited, listening to the silence on the line, feeling her heart tap against her ribs in an irregular rhythm. I need to sit down, she thought. I'm going to have a heart attack, too. I'm going to fall down some stairs. "Irene, I've just talked to the coroner. From what he was able to determine, sweetie, there was no suffering in the end." "Was she just tired or was she confused or was she--" Irene wanted to say drunk, but that was not something she would ever say out loud. Still, her mind would not comply: Was she blasted? Wasted? Hammered? Was she? Was she like, "Whee! Down we go!" "Sweetie, we just don't know. We don't know. Listen, I need to speak to some people here that have just arrived. I will call you again later." Irene turned the phone off and put it down. There was a dense, strange feeling in her chest, like the residual joy at having successfully observed results in her experiments had collided with the grotesque horror of having her mother die of a broken neck, and a black hole had been created in the center of her chest, sucking in all her feelings and her will. She began to cry. She sat down in her chair and put her hands in her lap, coughing and sobbing. Does death always make you feel sad? What do you do when someone dies? What if the person was a terrible and unsolvable lifelong problem for you? What if the person was your mother? Irene cried and cried, in spite of herself. Her mother had been a bad mother, yet she was sad anyway. She couldn't make the sadness stop, just because it was reasonable to feel relief. She tried to figure out what she would say to someone else in this situation. Maybe the years of awfulness dissolve, when a bad mother dies, so that all you really have to feel is sadness. Or maybe Irene would say to the person, "I'm sorry for your loss," and that would be the end of it. Exhausted from her tears, Irene finally looked up and saw her gleaming machine. She remembered the good thing that had happened to her, and what she must now do. Then she gathered her backpack and keys and went outside the lab and up the stairs. She did not fall. She did not die. She locked the door. Outside, she saw it was midafternoon. The blue autumn sky seemed to hover just above the colorless buildings. The breeze felt cool but there was warmth radiating off the pavement all around. She felt sure it was a Monday. A rumbling of shouts came from the stadium, and she knew there was a sports practice going on there. A group of men shouting rhythmically as they ran forward, sideways, backward, or hunched in squats. Irene opened her phone and placed a call to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. On the phone, her tone was full of spirit. Copyright © 2014 by Lydia Netzer Excerpted from How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
