Review of Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
Posted: 23 Jun 2024, 17:23
[Following is a volunteer review of "Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise" by John K Danenbarger.]
The idea of quantum entanglement has been showing up a lot in my life lately, both in the books I read and in discussions with the people around me, so I figured it was time for me to dig into this novel that I’ve been putting off for far too long. Having just come off another book about the same topic, which I have absolutely loved, my expectations were high.
Wanting something along the exact same lines was, I think, my first mistake and something I can’t deny affected my enjoyment of this book because, while it does deal with the phenomenon of entanglement, it comes at it in a very different way.
Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise starts out quite slow and, depending on your own definition, might be said to stay slow all throughout. Rather than a plot that picks up at definite points, we follow the stories of several characters whose lives—whether it's through blood, tragedy or random happenstance—stay intertwined through the years. We’re first introduced to a woman named Geena getting news that her father is dead, and it leads to the author unraveling Geena’s family history little by little: there’s her mother Beth, who was saved from a life of drugs and prostitution only to end up in potentially worse hands; Joe, the man who saved Beth, who ends up becoming a close family friend; Kevin, Beth’s future husband and a cop harboring dark secrets; their children, lifelong nemeses and mere acquaintances, all tangled in one deep web you never see the end of.
We find out, for example, that Joe’s lover Martin is helping Beth’s and Kevin’s adopted child’s birth mother with her PHD; at one point, a song that comes on the radio is performed by a kid Beth met in Bermuda; an ex-lover of Beth’s gets involved in a bank robbery that Kevin investigates. The further you read, the more connections you can find, both in the forefront and in random background details, and if I were to reread the novel, I’d probably pick up even more echoes bouncing off one character to the other. I thought this would be the point of the whole book—that even in the face of an apparently meaningless reality, what matters is the connections we make throughout our lives; that this is the only answer quantum physics can hope to find.
However, unless I’ve badly misunderstood the point of the novel, the story ended up being much more bleak than I expected. These characters just seem to suffer and suffer and never get a break: they finally find their happiness, only for their loved ones to die and for them to never recover from that blow; perfectly good and innocent people are killed in a classic case of mistaken identity; lifelong friendships fall apart over misunderstandings, and every single one of us will meet our end at some point and eventually be forgotten by the world. What this book seemed to suggest was that even our bonds ultimately don’t matter in the face of death, and that death is the only true end goal we spend our lives marching towards. There is one character who is a minor exception to this and who does manage to get a somewhat happy ending—possibly the only one to learn the lesson everyone else ignored—but mostly, a sense of sadness and hopelessness is all this book gave me.
Don’t get me wrong, though: the book is beautifully written and does what it set out to do incredibly well. It was my own expectations and personal preferences that caused me to be disappointed.
I also came across a few weird phrasings and punctuation choices, which didn't affect my overall reading experience but made it so that sometimes I had to read a sentence multiple times to make sense of it. That, along with my inability to reconcile with the finale, is why I’m giving the book 4/5 stars. Overall, a marvelous and compelling read, which unfortunately was just too pessimistic for my own sake.
******
Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
The idea of quantum entanglement has been showing up a lot in my life lately, both in the books I read and in discussions with the people around me, so I figured it was time for me to dig into this novel that I’ve been putting off for far too long. Having just come off another book about the same topic, which I have absolutely loved, my expectations were high.
Wanting something along the exact same lines was, I think, my first mistake and something I can’t deny affected my enjoyment of this book because, while it does deal with the phenomenon of entanglement, it comes at it in a very different way.
Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise starts out quite slow and, depending on your own definition, might be said to stay slow all throughout. Rather than a plot that picks up at definite points, we follow the stories of several characters whose lives—whether it's through blood, tragedy or random happenstance—stay intertwined through the years. We’re first introduced to a woman named Geena getting news that her father is dead, and it leads to the author unraveling Geena’s family history little by little: there’s her mother Beth, who was saved from a life of drugs and prostitution only to end up in potentially worse hands; Joe, the man who saved Beth, who ends up becoming a close family friend; Kevin, Beth’s future husband and a cop harboring dark secrets; their children, lifelong nemeses and mere acquaintances, all tangled in one deep web you never see the end of.
We find out, for example, that Joe’s lover Martin is helping Beth’s and Kevin’s adopted child’s birth mother with her PHD; at one point, a song that comes on the radio is performed by a kid Beth met in Bermuda; an ex-lover of Beth’s gets involved in a bank robbery that Kevin investigates. The further you read, the more connections you can find, both in the forefront and in random background details, and if I were to reread the novel, I’d probably pick up even more echoes bouncing off one character to the other. I thought this would be the point of the whole book—that even in the face of an apparently meaningless reality, what matters is the connections we make throughout our lives; that this is the only answer quantum physics can hope to find.
However, unless I’ve badly misunderstood the point of the novel, the story ended up being much more bleak than I expected. These characters just seem to suffer and suffer and never get a break: they finally find their happiness, only for their loved ones to die and for them to never recover from that blow; perfectly good and innocent people are killed in a classic case of mistaken identity; lifelong friendships fall apart over misunderstandings, and every single one of us will meet our end at some point and eventually be forgotten by the world. What this book seemed to suggest was that even our bonds ultimately don’t matter in the face of death, and that death is the only true end goal we spend our lives marching towards. There is one character who is a minor exception to this and who does manage to get a somewhat happy ending—possibly the only one to learn the lesson everyone else ignored—but mostly, a sense of sadness and hopelessness is all this book gave me.
Don’t get me wrong, though: the book is beautifully written and does what it set out to do incredibly well. It was my own expectations and personal preferences that caused me to be disappointed.
I also came across a few weird phrasings and punctuation choices, which didn't affect my overall reading experience but made it so that sometimes I had to read a sentence multiple times to make sense of it. That, along with my inability to reconcile with the finale, is why I’m giving the book 4/5 stars. Overall, a marvelous and compelling read, which unfortunately was just too pessimistic for my own sake.
******
Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon