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Entertainment Weekly

EW review: Vivid and complex 'Intuition'

Also: Global 'Not Buying It' and kooky 'Best People'

By Jennifer Reese
Entertainment Weekly

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Literature
Fiction

(Entertainment Weekly) -- No one writes 19th-century novels about 20th -- and now 21st -- century America better than Allegra Goodman, whose omniscient narrators and impeccably polished storytelling seem borrowed from an era when authors were expected to issue cool moral judgments rather than exorcise inner demons.

In her first novel, 1998's "Kaaterskill Falls," Goodman captured the subtle currents beneath the surface of an Orthodox Jewish enclave in upstate New York. With her superb new "Intuition," she turns her gimlet eye on another tight-knit community: a cancer research lab.

Sandy Glass and Marion Mendelssohn run a lab at the Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they are, like all of Goodman's characters, cultured, complex, and vividly drawn. A charming, prosperous doctor, Sandy is ''always cheerful, brimming with the irrepressible joy of his own intelligence.'' Married to a lovely, accomplished academic, he has three lovely, accomplished daughters and lives in a luxurious home, for ''appearances were not superficial, but of substantive importance to him.'' By contrast, Marion, a nervous perfectionist, is famed for utterances like ''Accuracy is more important than elegance.'' She shares a dark, cluttered apartment with her husband, Jacob, who has invested himself entirely in her career. ''He was happy because he had discovered early, rather than late, that he would not be winning a Nobel Prize,'' Goodman writes of this slippery, complicated man. ''And he had been granted an insight many of his scientific peers lacked -- that when it came to Nobels, he himself did not need one. No, someday that distinction would belong to his wife.''

And that Nobel depends mightily on the young post-docs at the Philpott, who infect, inject, palpate, and kill scores of mice, year after year, in the frustrating search for cancer therapies. Frustrating, that is, until Cliff, the lab's tall, Stanford-educated golden boy, begins seeing some encouraging results. Marion responds cautiously, Sandy exuberantly, and Robin, Cliff's lab partner and girlfriend, with sudden, violent jealousy.

Where does it come from, titanic jealousy? Goodman makes Robin an immensely sympathetic character who is nearly destroyed by an ugly desire to take Cliff down. ''Note taker, list maker -- inevitably she became secretary for any group to which she belonged,'' Robin is a lifelong good girl who has had enough of watching others get ahead with luck, charm -- and perhaps cheating. Prompted by the Iago-like Jacob (who has devious aims of his own), Robin accuses Cliff of falsifying his records.

Is Robin off her gourd? Did Cliff commit fraud? Maybe both? The tense issue-driven drama -- complete with debates on the role of taxpayer-funded research -- plays out in congressional hearings and law offices. But while you can get thundering courtroom action from John Grisham and "Law & Order" reruns, what you won't often find is such a delicate analysis of how an ethics scandal filters through the sensibility of brilliant and brilliantly realized characters. It's a tricky operation that Goodman performs with the precision of a scientist, and the flair of an artist at the top of her game.

EW Grade: A

'Not Buying It'

Reviewed by Jennifer Armstrong

Judith Levine joins the ranks of authors who do crazy stuff (like reading the "Encyclopedia Britannica") and then write books about it -- in her case, giving up buying anything but ''necessities'' for a year. But Levine lends her project global implications with thorough reporting about everything from consumer psychology to the decline of public libraries. She sells the heavy stuff by interweaving it with her lighter personal quandaries: Can she live without her beloved Smart-Wool socks? Are Q-tips a necessity? And, best of all, while she makes you want to repent for your greed more than a few times, she also points out the absurdities of ''voluntary simplicity'' and recognizes the soul-stirring happiness implicit in finding a perfect new pair of heels, making "Not Buying It" well worth its price.

EW Grade: A-

'Philosophy Made Simple'

Reviewed by Troy Patterson

The bad title ("Philosophy Made Simple") may give you the idea that this book tarts up a survey course for freshmen as sophomoric fiction. There are some close calls, but nothing so thoroughly dreary is on offer. Rudy Harrington, a widower and father of three grown daughters, trades in an overly familiar life of selling avocados in Chicago for a fresh one of growing them in Texas. Wondering about the meaning of it all and the whereabouts of his wife's soul, he starts making time with the titular philosophy text, which does occasion some wince-making moments. Senor Aristotle was right about these glimpses of higher reality, says Rudy's grove manager. You have to be careful. Too true. Though its thoughts on Hume, Kant, and company can be a drag, the novel is best when feeling its way around a father's love and a husband's loss.

EW Grade: B-

'The Best People in the World'

Reviewed by Whitney Pastorek

In an anonymous review, Zadie Smith once described her own debut novel "White Teeth" as ''the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.'' The same can be said of this first novel by Justin Tussing, "The Best People in the World," an Iowa grad featured in New Yorkers 2005 debut fiction issue. When 17-year-old Thomas Mahey runs away from home with Alice, his 25-year-old girlfriend/high school history teacher, and a vagrant named Shiloh, they wind up squatting in a house in Vermont through a long winter. Its a fascinating journey; sadly, vague plot detours, frustratingly kooky-yet-static characters, and a preference for artistic expression over clarity make far too much of that journey a slog. Tussings got oodles of promise, but this book -- with its obvious efforts at seeming spiritual and mysterious, yet grounded in the good-smelling earth of Americana -- is a bit of a mess.

EW Grade: B-


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