Particles and Luck

by Louis B. Jones

Book Overview

Mark Perdue is a young physicist who has been catapulted into fame and fortune by nothing other than good luck. His neighbor, Roger Hoberman, has seen only luck's downside. Now, luck--in the form of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679745998
• ISBN13: 9780679745990
• Release Date: June 1994
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Quirky in the extreme; a delight!

PaL is packed with some of the oddest dialogue, description, and characterization I've ever come across. It is, by turns, laugh-out-loud funny and meditative. It reminds me a little of Don DeLillo's superb -- and also supremely quirky -- "Ratner's Star". These, and novels like them, are difficult to describe, short of quoting them at length. Rather than assume the mantle of reviewer-as-proxy-for-author, therefore, I should simply say, read this novel and enjoy!

Funniest novel since a Confederacy of Dunces

In "Particles and Luck" Louis B. Jones created the funniest andmost successful contemporary picaresque novel since the lateand much lamented Duncan O'Toole's "Confederacy of Dunces".Unfortunately the book is still by and large unknown -- take achance, you'll be glad you did!

a delicious meditation on the cosmos, disguised as a comedy

... or vice versa, a hilarious and poignant human comedy with a sly thread of cosmic musing woven throughout. The balance between the epistemology and the compulsively readable story is utterly deft. One thinks of John Updike at his best, reading this book--there is the same high elegance, the richness of language and inventiveness, the rootedness in perfectly-observed suburban reality, and the wedding of cosmic and local realities in a dazzlingly graceful prose. The meaning is never imposed; it glints through the touching, inevitably ridiculous particularities of the characters in language that is itself a kind of music and a kind of forgiveness. The hero, Mark Perdue, is a soul at once lost and found, and searching; and in his neighbor Mark, Jones has given us one of the most poignant minor characters I've encountered in literature, deftly realized, quixotic, ludicrous and noble. And like all of Jones's work, the payoff is the quiet glory of the humanly real, the tested gold of faithfulness affirmed through temptation and the vistas of vastness that can only truly open out from limitations embraced. There is also an unobtrusive subtext on the ways and obscure means of creativity itself, its vicissitudes and unforeseen flowerings. A lovely book, perfectly shaped and vividly paced. It will send you in search of Jones's terrific first novel, Ordinary Money and his most recent, California's Over, which is a joy too.

An American Classic.

This book is as clear a statement of religious piety as you could find, in these agnostic, post-religious times. It's about physics. It's about ultimate "reality." The plot involves one night in the life of a Berkeley physicist, in which he almost commits adultery, confronts his neighbor in a property-line dispute, and contemplates the ultimate nature of physical reality. Obviously, Jones did a lot of research into Quantum Physics. He presents Quantum Physics's weirdness, here, in a most lucid poetry. Basically, this book is about faith. The necessity of faith. (Fidelity in a marriage, as well as faith in the weird idea that the physical world will go on existing from minute to minute.) I wish I could quote whole long passages here, to show how the book feels.

Check out his new book - it's fab!

Jones has definitely not stopped publishing! His new book California's Over(Pantheon, 9/97) is hilarious