On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: A disappointing collection of paint-by-numbers short stories. The collection is about half contemporary academia grad-student romances and half odd-ball Victorian historical romance; neither half is sufficiently well done to represent an advance in either (admittedly tired) genre. Iagnemma has a few good plots, but they are stretched too thinly over too many pages. The language lacks precision and his sentences meander; Iagnemma needs a sharper-eyed editor.

These are the kind of stories where a character reads something profound about his life in an e-mail and the narrative is concerned enough to let us know he "clicks 'delete'." The self-consciously clever use of equations in the first story is, finally, just for show, and the story itself works fine without it. Much of rest reads like an MfA thesis by someone with heart, but not enough to say.

Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Debut from a Talented New Writer
Review: Karl Iagnemma is a research scientist in the mechanical engineering department at MIT, but in his spare time he writes incredibly enjoyable stories about Ph.D. students who describe their love using Venn diagrams, love triangles and sabotage between mathematicians, and a phrenologist and his mysterious traveling companion. There's a rare fictional combination of scientific logic and romantic empathy that makes these stories some of the best I've read in years. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Artist and Scientist in One
Review: When I first read the title story of this collection, "On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction" in Paris Review a couple of years ago, I was immediately hit by the opening: "When students here can't stand another minute, they get drunk and hurl themselves off the top floor of the Gehring building, the shortest building on campus." A writer myself, I know very well how difficult it is to find a great opening. Nowadays, many writers-- including some high-profile ones-- seem to seek a shocking effect for its own sake, so it's often forced and unnatural. Karl Iagnemma does not have this problem. His stories are as real as they are impressive. The aforementioned opening passage resonates with my years in MIT where students are as crazy and talented as Karl's characters, yet it sends a strong signal to the reader of a non-boring campus story. Oddly, this opening also reminds me of Ha Jin's award-wining novel, Waiting, which opens with: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Here, two talented writers "sing different tunes with equal skill," as a Chinese proverb says. These openings simply make you want to read on.

And here's more: none of the stories in this collection disappointed me. I'm a picky reader. At first, I thought Karl's stories attracted me because he and I have something in common: we both are scientists trained at MIT (though I didn't know him), and we both are writers. Soon I realized it's the in-depth portrayal of human nature that resonates the most. In his story "Zilkowski's Theorem", a mathematician writes his girlfriend's Ph.D dissertation. He does it for love. But after his girlfriend is converted to a new religion and becomes another man's finance, she wants to be "honest" and publicize the fact that the dissertation wasn't hers. This "honest" act would put the mathematician's career in jeopardy, in favor of his rival - the girl's husband-to-be. Every character in this story did what seemed reasonable, yet a moral dilemma remained. Different readers may have different takes on the story; "the benevolent see benevolence and the wise see wisdom." That is the beauty of this story.

It's worth noting that, two stories in this collection, "Zilkowski's Theorem" and "the Confessional Approach" were translated into Chinese and published in the prestigious Writers literary magazine in China. Unlike most short stories by unknown foreign writers that went largely unnoticed by Chinese media and readers, China's most popular weekly newspaper Southern Weekend devoted an entire page to reviewing Karl's stories and had high praise. As unusual as this is, it shows, more importantly, good stories go a long way, across oceans and cultures.

Another thing worth mentioning: Karl has a unique way with language and story structure. It's so brilliantly different from other writes I have read. I like to think it's because he is both an artist and scientist. Sometimes, our profession impacts our personality and style, perhaps.

Xujun Eberlein