The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A dog.
Review: Might be good for someone who likes romance novels with literary asprirations. A reminder not to buy 5 star books with less than 10 reviews.

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars and Two Comets
Review: "The Path of Minor Planets" is a reader's delight. Complex. Character-driven. Agile. Beautiful. It's a magnificent, mature work, amazing for a first novelist.

Written in what critics now like to call "psycho-narrative," Greer's book displays a third-person omniscient narrative that bores into its characters heads. It's a risky style: after all, Greer has to populate his characters with enough detail and freshness so that they feel real. And that he does it, not through action or scene or dialog, but for the most part through the subtler, richer stuff of the human brain and its wandering eye. Like "The Waves," "Path..." brings us about as close to our essential humanity as a book can.

"Path..." ostensibly is about a group of astronomers who meet once every six years to celebrate a minor comet discovered by their own academic star, Professor Swift. Their first meeting to witness the comet's passing from a lightless and distant Pacific isle is interrupted by an accident involving the death of a child. Subsequent chapters track characters who were present at the scene through their lives, failed marriages, and stormy careers.

But "Path..." reveals much more. "Path..." shows us the effect of inhabiting different heads, of the space separating human objects in their orbits around one another, of the physical and emotional laws tying us together.

It's unfortunate that Greer's book has thus far been under-appreciated. However, with the talent available to the author, I have no doubt as to his future successes.

Rating:
Summary: Reader's Delight
Review: "The Path of Minor Planets" is a reader's delight. Complex. Character-driven. Agile. Beautiful. It's a magnificent, mature work, amazing for a first novelist.

Written in what critics now like to call "psycho-narrative," Greer's book displays a third-person omniscient narrative that bores into its characters heads. It's a risky style: after all, Greer has to populate his characters with enough detail and freshness so that they feel real. And that he does it, not through action or scene or dialog, but for the most part through the subtler, richer stuff of the human brain and its wandering eye. Like "The Waves," "Path..." brings us about as close to our essential humanity as a book can.

"Path..." ostensibly is about a group of astronomers who meet once every six years to celebrate a minor comet discovered by their own academic star, Professor Swift. Their first meeting to witness the comet's passing from a lightless and distant Pacific isle is interrupted by an accident involving the death of a child. Subsequent chapters track characters who were present at the scene through their lives, failed marriages, and stormy careers.

But "Path..." reveals much more. "Path..." shows us the effect of inhabiting different heads, of the space separating human objects in their orbits around one another, of the physical and emotional laws tying us together.

It's unfortunate that Greer's book has thus far been under-appreciated. However, with the talent available to the author, I have no doubt as to his future successes.

Rating:
Summary: Why 5 stars!
Review: Because it's an outstanding first novel. I bought the book because I was at a reading by Andy and wanted to find out what happened to Lydia. As I soon found out, there are more characters then Lydia and all equally interesting. It was easy to relate to the characters. Even if one is not a scientist you can still relate to the obsessive behaviour and the choices made in love and relationships. I liked how we would meet them again after six years not knowing every detail of their lives but still able to pick up from where we last saw them.

Rating:
Summary: What a find
Review: I picked this book up because I live in Bay Area and I was interested in reading a Bay Area author. This book is truly a find. The characters are fully realized and the writing is quite beautiful. I have to admit, I did find the first section (the first reunion of the comet) to be a little hard to get into, but I plowed forward, and now I am entirely wrapped up in the narrative. There are lines in this that sparkle--the kind you write down to remember long after you have put down the book. Further, the way time works in this novel is quite astonishing--you believe you're on this linear path where you're marching through the years. However, the narrative keeps circling around these moments. While on some levels this isn't Virginia Woolf (and I am also reading MRS DALLOWAY at the same time), I do find that both Greer and Woolf are interested in the "moment" and the ways in which a moment can resonate but not actually change a life--these moments are not Joycian epiphanies that become public acknowledgments of change. Instead these are touchstones in our lives that we return to again and again and ponder. A great book.

Rating:
Summary: What a find
Review: I picked this book up because I live in Bay Area and I was interested in reading a Bay Area author. This book is truly a find. The characters are fully realized and the writing is quite beautiful. I have to admit, I did find the first section (the first reunion of the comet) to be a little hard to get into, but I plowed forward, and now I am entirely wrapped up in the narrative. There are lines in this that sparkle--the kind you write down to remember long after you have put down the book. Further, the way time works in this novel is quite astonishing--you believe you're on this linear path where you're marching through the years. However, the narrative keeps circling around these moments. While on some levels this isn't Virginia Woolf (and I am also reading MRS DALLOWAY at the same time), I do find that both Greer and Woolf are interested in the "moment" and the ways in which a moment can resonate but not actually change a life--these moments are not Joycian epiphanies that become public acknowledgments of change. Instead these are touchstones in our lives that we return to again and again and ponder. A great book.

Rating:
Summary: Misguided focus; review based on both Greer's novels
Review: I read both of Greer's books nearly in succession (one book between), first "The Path of Minor Planets" then "The Confessions of Max Tivoli." I felt similarly about each. Both use time as a plot device, though in each case the stories are romances. "Planets" is a sort of soap opera of many lives, loves, regrets, and affairs; and "Max Tivoli" is a character in love with a woman he met at fourteen-years old and can never have, but for a few years he's in his 30's where he looks close enough to his true age. Born at the age of 70, living life backward to childhood, he is at first and old man to the young girl, and finally and young boy to an older woman.

I believe that both books use time not as a genre, but as an allegory: these are books about "being out of time" and being out of place in the world. It is impossible for Max to be with his love, due to his appearance, his secret, his not being "right." It's a lonely existence, being out of time. "The Path of Minor Planets" employs a number of characters, each chapter six years after the previous one. The writing is a valiant first effort, though Greer's writing, and more importantly editing, is much improved in the second novel. Though the driving force is "time," time--in the "The Path of Minor Planets"--does not mean anything to the characters; when they do have the benefit of hindsight and when they don't, they choose the same actions simply because things are the way they are -- the message: we can not change even when real-world able. Often the characters make choices not to say/do what they can with the plot-devised benefit of hindsight. These are people out of place in their own lives, similar in feeling to the way Max Tivoli chooses to keep his true self a secret from his true love.

Both books left me feeling very, very melancholy. However, both books were largely uninteresting throughout, until near their endings. The characters' feelings don't ring true. Greer's first book is soapy (not the "inner lives of smart people" as the jacket promises but cardboard affairs, crushes, adultery, and a hackneyed lifecycle from youth to death to a new birth). The second, "Max Tivoli" - I didn't feel Max's feelings for Alice.What I did feel, but not until far too late in the books, was intese sadness, loneliness for some characters, and their isolation. These feelings had nothing to do with time and everything to do with displacement, isolation, resignation, loss of self, secrets.

I will venture a thought that I haven't seen mentioned about these books. In each book I found the gay characters the most interesting and well-drawn (in "Planets," the man with the gay son is the most interesting and even his son, not in the book for long, seems more "real" than most characters). Hughie and Max Tivoli have a wonderful, lifelong frienship, and Hughie is a more vivid and interesting character than Max, who waxes poetic about
Alice for a couple hundred pages. (He lives in Alice's Wonderland - shrinking, not real.) Hughie has a relationship with Teddy that we hear very little of, yet seems far more true--Hughie's actions and feelings--than Max's with Alice.

In both books the same line appears: "I should have realized [he was gay]." In "Max Tivoli" Hugie, as a homosexual, is called a "monster." I'll buy this with the time the book takes place, turn of the century, though ultimately Hughie, Max says, is just an old queer who's just like himself -- a man out of time, out of place, alone, sad, not his true self. Since both books read more like romance novels than time-genre books, and since both have as their central theme love and love lost, I feel that if this author were to focus more on the relationship between the men or the romances between the men that the books would be outstanding long before their final chapters, which they aren't now due to the hackeyed portrayal of love.

While I was intesely sad at the end of both, I was largely bored during "Max Tivoli" and truly underwhelmed during "The Path of Minor Planets." I think this author has something to say, though. I think he's smart. I don't think "time" came from nowhere as an interest of his (his parents are scientists, he tells us in an introduction), but I think if the issue of feeling isolated, alone and displaced were addressed more honestly--and I'm guessing through gay romantic relationships or friendships--the books would be great throughout. Me, I won't read another book of his unless the romance or friendship is between men, or the book not a romance. I don't think this author pulls off male/female feelings for one another as he does male/male feelings. I have no preference for reading about male relations to male/female relationships; this is purely my response to reading Greer's books.

Neither book, truly "about" time. Each is about--or an allergory for--feeling out of time and displaced, as well as a reason/device for, or revelation about, secrets then how to cope with them. In both cases the intense melancholy of the characters' lives doesn't come through until the final chapters. Major flaw -- I'd like to be more interested earlier. I like books that use time -- time travel, etc. -- but these aren't those books. These are romance novels. Suggestion to Greer, if you read these: Write more of Hughie, if you write a romance; write of feeling displaced and show it throughout, not just at the end. The profound sadness at the end of "Max Tivoli" has nothing to do with Max and Alice, and everything to do with Max and Hughie. The end shocked me and broke my heart. I think Greer has it in him to do this, but not through what are essentially romance novels disguised as something else.

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars and Two Comets
Review: This novel is a remarkable find. Beautifully written, with many highly individualized characters, described with sharp and subtle insight. They interact through a cyclical plot that documents the effects of time on ambition (declining)and compassion (increasing). Never predictable, it is always intelligent and profoundly sympathetic to the human condition. The story moves with Comet Swift, from its discovery through two orbits (24 years),with periodic reunions at aphelion and perihelion. The second comet is discovered along the way by the protagonists, the reluctant lovers whose sad and joyous affair is the backbone of the narrative. One of the best I've read in recent years.