What the lab-rats knew

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INTUITION

By Allegra Goodman,

Dial Press, $24.95, 344 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

This is a wonderful novel for at least three reasons. First of all, it disproves the base canard that Bachelor of Arts types are totally ignorant of the world inhabited by Bachelor of Science types. Way back in the middle of the last century, college students debated -- okay, some college students debated -- the central argument of C. P. Snow's famous essay "The Two Cultures" in which he claimed that while scientists were at least familiar with, for example, a work of Shakespeare, literary types were woefully ignorant of basic scientific principles.

How many English majors, he and his disciples asked, could name the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Quick, you on the couch, name the First.) That's why, scolded the scientists, there are so few good novels about science, except of course those by Snow himself. Well, this is a good novel and it is definitely about science.

Secondly, "Intuition" is an exception to another rule, the one that says American novels seldom deal with work, the actual details of what the characters do to put bread on the table, keep body and soul together, (add your own cliche).

F. Scott Fitzgerald provides no specifics as to how Jay Gatsby got so filthy rich, nor did Tom Wolfe, several generations later, in "Bonfire of the Vanities," explain how his master-of-the-universe protagonist became so filthy rich, and while John Updike had the middle-aged Rabbit Angstrom working as a Toyota dealer in "Rabbit at Rest," we rarely saw him in action.

Not true of Allegra Goodman. She takes us right down there into the nitty-gritty quotidian stuff that lab rats -- the human kind -- do day after day after day while conducting experiments they hope will eventually provide something of value for the rest of humankind (and if they also make them rich and famous, so much the better).