The scientific method

ALLEGRA GOODMAN has a gift for entering closed societies that can be difficult for outsiders to understand. She writes with true insight of her subjects’ beliefs, desires and quirks and can thus explore terrain some might consider exotic without committing either of the sins that tend to plague such travelogues: Orientalization or a fusty political correctness. In the novel “Kaaterskill Falls,” for instance, she brought the characters in an Orthodox Jewish vacation community alive with a rare combination of acuity and goodwill. Now, in her third novel, “Intuition,” she probes the minds of scientists and makes their hunger for arcane knowledge intelligible to the rest of us.

Contemporary literary fiction -- with the exceptions of T.C. Boyle’s “The Inner Circle” and Richard Powers’ magnificent “Galatea 2.2” and “The Gold Bug Variations” -- has had much too little engagement with the world of research. Many writers, lacking the specialized vocabulary to engage in technical discourse, see the divide between the arts and sciences as unbridgeable. But in “Intuition,” Goodman writes with wit and intelligence about a biology lab, allowing those of us who believe passionately in what one of her scientists calls “that folly, that strange-feathered bird, the so-called liberal education” to begin to understand the emotions and politics of scientific investigation.

“Intuition” is set in 1985 at the Mendelssohn-Glass cancer research lab at the fictional Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Mass., an institution in constant danger of annexation by Harvard. The scientists who run the lab are a study in opposites. Sandy Glass (ne Sam Glazeroff) possesses “an irresistible liveliness that seemed to override cynicism and doubt, a self-confidence occasionally unbearable, but in many cases deeply reassuring.” Marion Mendelssohn, by contrast, has a more stern outlook; the postdoctoral students in her charge fear her displeasure and behind her back call her “Madame Defarge for her grim, most ungrannylike way of knitting” during their presentations. Everyone in the lab feels excitement when one of the researchers, Cliff Bannaker, finds that despite numerous failed trials in the past, a modified virus he injects into cancerous mice seems to cause full remission. Although Marion has misgivings about rushing to publish before the lab has reproduced Cliff’s results, Sandy decides that they should hurry to make the results public before a better-endowed institution scoops the discovery.

But as Cliff’s luck as a researcher turns, his romantic relationship with a colleague, Robin Decker, begins to sour. Robin, influenced as much by jealousy as by true concern about Cliff’s methods, starts to doubt the integrity of his published results and her suspicions cause her to make charges of misconduct that lead to an official investigation into the lab’s practices.

For the most part, Goodman unfolds the investigation’s story with a natural simplicity. She allows it some setbacks and makes detours at times into the lives and minds of her minor characters, but overall, the plot line of the book remains spare. As a result, “Intuition” moves with a measured grace that calls to mind both Greek tragedy and the slow, exacting rhythms of scientific research itself.

By setting the novel in the mid-1980s, Goodman has the freedom to explore the issues surrounding scientific honesty without entangling herself in the brouhaha over stem-cell research and cloning. She makes just enough references to period films and events (Harvard students camping out in the Yard to demand the college’s divestment from South Africa) to ground the story but never waxes rhapsodic over bands or fashions we might now view with nostalgia and embarrassment. The delicate modeling of the novel’s time and place also allows it to feel more archetypal. This is a novel not merely about questions of integrity in one lab, or even merely about science, but also about the depth of our commitment to and desire for work and discovery.

Cliff, for example, thinks that “his previous work had given him nothing, and that he, in his thirty years, had given nothing to the world. This was his chance now, and with it came a weight of hope and expectation that he could hardly bear.” In one of the book’s loveliest passages, he dissects some of the first mice to go into remission with his virus: “Over and over he looked, and each time he made the discovery again: his virus worked on cancer cells. He had never seen anything more beautiful or more important than that mouse before him on the table. He had never felt so solemn or so full of joy.” Goodman’s understanding of the psychology of scientific research is deep and precise enough to allow even a confirmed nonscientist to partake in the joys and sorrows the researchers feel in their work.

Yet for all the seriousness of Goodman’s intent, she has a fine sense of humor and a wonderfully comic rhythm to her prose. When Sandy startles himself out of a reverie while at the symphony one night with his wife, he finds himself “back in Boston, on a slushy Thursday night. He sat with Ann in a sea of business suits and jersey dresses, ties, turtlenecks, Fair Isle sweaters. This was Symphony Hall in spring: a scent of damp wool and perfume, a glint of old diamonds, a sweep of stoles, the shimmer of silk scarves and squelch of waterproof boots.” No one who’s ever loved or hated (or more to the point: lived in) Boston could mistake this for the symphony in any other town, or help smiling at that wicked little “squelch.” The postdocs in the Mendelssohn-Glass lab groan that they’ll inherit a “tech from the second floor -- a woman highly competent, but kooky as well, whining, droning, mirthless, braless.” In the hands of a less generous writer, such observations could easily devolve into snipes, but Goodman’s bonhomie tempers the sharpness of her eye and tongue.

The division between art and science is not as neat as it sometimes seems. Politics and style might affect the reception of research, and the strictures and procedures of writing fiction, history or criticism bear a structural relationship to the scientific method. Though the disciplines investigate divergent areas of study, they share the common goals of improving our lives and of better understanding our place in the world.

As the metaphor of progress unfolds in “Intuition,” one sees it ever more clearly as a parallel to the notion of epiphany in fiction; there is a lovely balance here between the idea of discovery as something inwardly turned and outwardly directed. Self-knowledge and scientific knowledge eddy and swell in this novel in pleasing parallel to each other, making the book not only satisfying as a story of self-discovery but, in a deeper sense, a richly conceived novel about the rewards of work. *