Jason Dessen is a physics professor at a local college. He lives in Chicago with his wife Daniela and his son Charlie. Once upon a time, Jason was a promising young scientist, destined for greatness, who gave it all up when his girlfriend turned out to be pregnant. Jason’s life is not unpleasant, but it is dull and sedate and the what-ifs occasionally nag at the back of his head. But then, suddenly, Jason is abducted at gunpoint. His assailant stabs him with a syringe. He passes out and wakes up strapped to a gurney, with people applauding his return. Jason has no idea where he is or who he is supposed to be, and soon has to risk everything to get back to his wife and son.
I’m not sure this is a good book by any means. I suspect the degree to which you’ll enjoy this depends on your knowledge of physics. Fortunately, I know next to nothing about physics, because I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t how any of that works.
The grand idea that Jason had – and subsequently abandoned when fatherhood came calling – is that of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment: if a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time, then so can a person. And if a person can be both dead and alive, they can be in many other states at the same time as well.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but suffice to say that I had a blast reading about Jason’s traipsing through the multiverse, finding wonderful worlds and depressing ones and downright dangerous ones, too. Crouch milks the idea for all it’s worth. There is a twist towards the end that takes the tension up another notch.
The characters have just enough depth that they’re not completely flat, and they don’t really need to be any more than that; they’re mostly vessels for the story rather than well-rounded individuals (and, of course, their personalities change with every iteration of the multiverse). The writing is barebones, supple enough to carry the break-neck pace of the book, though I will admit that Blake tends to have a lot of prose.
Like this.
With a new fragment.
On every line.
Constantly.
It didn’t irk me that much, but it sometimes felt a bit repetitive.
Ultimately, it’s a fun book that doesn’t have much of an impact, but I couldn’t wait to get back into it at the end of the day.