The Syme Papers
Benjamin Markovits Faber & Faber, 495pp, 12.99
ISBN 0571217907
In a string of reviews for newspapers and magazines (including this one), the young American writer Benjamin Markovits has established himself as a formidable voice. He invariably opens with an observation so sharp, so telling, that the body of the review seems almost superfluous. I've got this writer's number, he seems to say; the rest is detail. "Milan Kundera's novels," he pronounced last year, "are built around ideas . . . like cities around Metro stops. His characters live as close to them as possible, meet others of a like mind or misery, then depart for the next stop and the next conception." If only it were possible to be so definitive about his own grandiose, vaunting, impressive but impressionable first novel, which is more like a network of Metro stops without the accompanying city: coursing with ideas but lacking the story to service them.
Like other writers who flit between theory and practice, Markovits utilises an intensely self-conscious narrator, who is always reflecting on his own shortcomings. Douglas Pitt is a historian who has become obsessed with the (fictional) 19th-century American geologist Samuel Highgate Syme, in whose work he sees the first glimmerings of the theory of continental drift. If Pitt can pin tectonic plates on Syme, then his own career is made: he will get tenure; his wife won't return to her Jewish grandmother in Queens; his sons may even come to respect him. Unfortunately, Syme in the 1820s was as much ill at ease with the blandishments of American academia as is Pitt in the 1990s, and left few traces of his discoveries. He shunned New Haven for Pactaw, Virginia, where he laboured under the attractive delusion that the earth is composed of concentric spheres that rotate inside each other.
Only in the eyewitness accounts of Syme's acolyte Friedrich Muller, aka "Phidy", does Pitt find meagre evidence that the concentric-sphere theory contained the seeds of continental drift theory. But Phidy's testimony, which occupies the heart of the book, is itself complicated by his love for Syme. While Syme observes the jigsaw correspondence between the coastlines of Africa and South America, Phidy is more interested in the proximity of their bodies.
What strikes first the reader, and then Pitt's tenure committee, and finally Pitt himself, is that this glimpse of an idea is not enough to rewrite scientific history. The futility of Pitt's quest is compounded by the futility of Syme's before him. Both give Markovits a hard time. What Pitt optimistically terms "the Inspiration of Error" does not necessarily make for marketable research, or an engrossing novel.
Markovits, however, manages to keep things moving with bravura alone. He rarely writes a dull sentence, though he is sometimes drawn to repeat his best ones. He reads like the bastard son of Philip Roth and A S Byatt, describing a romp through the archives that is doomed to end in failure, and the return home of the scholar with his tail flaccid between his legs. Whereas the protagonists of Possession finally made a discovery worth waiting for, Pitt, like his readers, is thwarted by Markovits's refusal to countenance such a satisfying resolution.
His characters are sacrificed to his ideas about the futile search for lost beginnings, the distances that grow up between lovers and the petty rivalries that contaminate scholarship - all of which are uneasily subsumed within the dominant metaphor of continental drift, the fault line that Syme traces on the map between the Old World and the New. Markovits's stylistic brilliance is not enough to compensate for his lack of a plot.
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