I’ve always found scientific language surprisingly poetic. Words like “entropy,” “inertia,” and “phosphorescence” sound like they belong in some study on the meaning of things. It’s not just the vocabulary though; as an adolescent the concepts of physics—the understanding that it is around us operating always—struck me as so beautiful and unbelievable that I felt, instinctively, science and art must be inextricably linked. Physics, poetry, and philosophy: I assumed that each leaned on the other, bled into it, and from it drew inspiration and clarity.
The title of Krista Foss’s latest novel, Half Life, immediately brings that connection to mind. A nuclear half-life refers to the time required for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to become disintegrated. Foss’s story revolves around Elin, a middle-aged high school physics teacher and single mother of a teenage daughter. The book blurs the line between nature and art, choosing instead to focus on the parallels between the two. Elin thinks in scientific terms, yet throughout the novel, her odd observations and thoughtful rumination come across as quietly profound. Foss’s word choice makes the mundane extraordinary by illuminating the living things all around us: quantum computing is modelled in a browning dieffenbachia, the smell of rain is “petrichor,” and even that’s alive (think bacteria). Her fresh metaphors create convincing imagery that draws the reader in, making us see the world with new eyes. By juxtaposing scientific facts with the slippery experience of looking for one’s purpose, Foss reminds us that all truth is ambiguous, ever-shifting depending on whom it belongs to.
The story itself contains two separate truths: that of Elin’s perception, experience, and assumption, and that of the outside world. What really happens? The reader is left to ponder this question on their own, parsing fact from fiction and real from remembered through the book’s unpunctuated dialogue. We go through this journey with Elin, experiencing her internal and external worlds and having to question whether or not what we’re reading is really what’s happened. Scientists like to be exact, and yet exactness seems contradictory to Elin’s very being. Her real search is for “a way of doing science that is open-hearted [and] undaunted by paradox.” She understands the need for personal interpretation in making sense of the world. She senses the way story imbues mathematics with meaning, making people care about the minutia of how our world operates.
Over the course of the novel, we come to understand what Elin is truly grappling with: a period of exile from her family, a job she doesn’t quite fit into, and a nagging feeling that she was meant to do something bigger with her life. I found Elin’s search for identity rather comforting. Regardless of age, most of us have felt at one point or another that there must be something more out there for us. Unfortunately, the high hopes we have as young people are often eroded by familial expectations, little disappointments, and jaded pessimists offering “realistic” suggestions. Elin’s narrative reminds us that, at any point, we might have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, and that it’s never too late to try to become the people we always hoped to be.
Half Life is a touching meditation on many things at once. It depicts a woman broken down by the world, yet still vulnerable to the wonders of it, evident through her infatuation with the copper beech outside her window and her thoughtful reflections on nature. It deals with grief and family and painful personal history, but its heaviness is outweighed by its sense of hope. Half of Elin’s life may have been spent searching, trying, and failing, but she sees that it’s not over yet. The story ends as it begins: with the "knocking on wood" sound of someone at her door, and the welcome surprise of possibility.
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