DARK MATTER (2016)
Blake Crouch
Crown Publishers, 352
pp.
* * * *
We all make choices in life. Dr. Jason Dessen was a
brilliant young physicist working on cutting-edge quantum mechanics. Daniela
Vargas was a rising star in Chicago's art world. They met, fell in love, and bore
fruit: a son named Charlie, who became their top priority. Move the clock
forward fifteen years. Jason is teaching undergrad physics at Lakemont College,
a run-of-the-diploma-mill school, and Dani only fiddles with art. Both watch as
those with far less intellect and talent pass them by. Jason's former
classmate, Ryan Holder, has just won the prestigious Pavia Prize for work on the
multiverse that Jason pioneered; Dani has seen friends make splashes where she could have raised waves. Do they have
regrets? Of course they do, but only a few. They made their choices and are
comfortable with the smaller world they built. They'd do it again the same
way–in this universe, at least.
But what if
another Jason in another universe cracked the code for moving from one parallel
universe to another? And what if that
Jason got sick of his big world and decided to downsize by pulling a switcheroo
with the Jason of this universe? If that sounds far-fetched, hold that thought.
Author Blake Crouch has not constructed his novel from premises confined to
crackpot sci-fi. Among quantum theorists, luminaries such as Stephen Hawking,
Brian Greene, Leonard Susskind, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are among those who
think that science suggests the strong possibility that parallel universes
exist in dimensions beyond the one we perceive. Perhaps the multiverse is
highly speculative, but it's not crazy to imagine it. How many parallel
universes? Perhaps an infinite number.
Crouch constructs a fascinating crime/romance/drama that's
equal parts Star Trek, Run Lola Run, and
Lassie Come Home. He works from the
premise that parallel universes are synchronous, but subject to the butterfly
effect–each altered choice sets off a cascade of variant results. (See the film
Run Lola Run for a brilliant look at
how a single change leads to radically different outcomes.) Translation: You
probably wouldn't want to open doors in which your parallel selves reside.
There might be untold numbers of you–some unspeakably sad or awful, but also
some so familiar that they might be able to pass as you.
Dark Matter is a
journey and chase across dimensions via procedures that are partly
controllable, but also highly random and/or subjective. Crouch describes the
multiverse as a never-ending corridor with an infinite numbers of doors that
could be opened, but only a finite opportunity of picking the correct portal.
This is fascinating stuff and the descriptions of alt.Chicago alone make the
book worth reading. Truth be told, the novel is often more intelligent than
literary, and Crouch is certainly open to charges of sentimentality and
contrivance. Nonetheless, I loved this book because it induced, if you will, a
quantum leap in how I imagined the characters and, indeed, myself. What would I
be like in other dimensions? The mind boggles! I ripped through this book at
the speed of sight. Rob Weir
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