Novel: As She Climbed Across the Table

Overview
As She Climbed Across the Table is a comic, slightly surreal novel framed in the language and culture of contemporary physics. The narrator, a young researcher embedded in a university physics department, becomes drawn into an odd triangle of affection, professional rivalry, and experimental obsession. The novel juxtaposes scientific method and romantic yearning, using physics metaphors to map out emotional confusion and longing.
Jonathan Lethem mixes deadpan wit with philosophical curiosity, letting the conventions of academic life, seminars, jargon, petty egos, collide with the unpredictable absurdities of human attachment. The story feels at once like a love story, a campus satire, and a metaphysical fable; its voice balances playfulness with a quietly melancholic undertone.

Plot outline
The narrator is absorbed by both his work and the woman he adores, a brilliant but elusive figure whose distance becomes the central mystery. At the same time, a neurologist or cognitive scientist in the community launches provocative studies that promise to render mind and feeling measurable, drawing the narrator's attention toward questions of perception, consciousness, and the limits of empirical knowledge. The narrator's attempts to analyze his own desire in scientific terms produce comic misfires and earnest failures.
As the narrative advances, experiments, both literal and metaphorical, escalate. Laboratory protocols and romantic gambits are treated in parallel, and the boundary between an experiment's subject and an observer's longing grows porous. Lethem heightens the ambiguity so that scientific instruments and emotional investment feed into each other, revealing how attempts to control or quantify phenomena can warp the phenomena themselves.

Characters and dynamics
The narrator functions as both a clumsy scientist and an intimate confessor, meditating on his colleagues' quirks while trying to understand the woman at the center of his obsession. She is depicted as brilliant, remote, and difficult to possess; her allure lies partly in her inscrutability and partly in the narrator's desire to turn her into a known variable. The neurologist figure offers a foil: methodical, persuasive, and convinced that subjective states can be captured through instruments and protocols.
Secondary figures populate the department with a mix of rivalries, loyalties, and small moral compromises, creating a textured social world that satirizes academic life even as it empathizes with its inhabitants. The interactions among these characters reveal how scientific rhetoric can be used to justify romantic behavior and how romantic rhetoric can masquerade as scientific insight.

Themes and style
Lethem explores the tension between explanation and enchantment, asking whether empirical tools can ever fully account for human feeling. Quantum and neurological metaphors recur, not as rigid allegory but as playful conceptual scaffolding: uncertainty principles, observer effects, and measurement paradoxes become ways to talk about intimacy, attention, and loss. The novel probes how the desire to know can be mistaken for love, and how the need to control outcomes undermines the spontaneity that makes life meaningful.
Stylistically, Lethem's prose is conversational, wry, and alive to odd details. Humor lightens philosophical weight, while moments of melancholy prevent the book from becoming mere satire. The blend of specificity, academic banter, experimental description, and imaginative flights gives the book a distinctive tone that is both skeptical and tender.

Resonance
As She Climbed Across the Table reads like an affectionate parody of academe that continually morphs into a meditation on knowledge, desire, and the limits of language. It asks how far formal systems can take us toward understanding others, and whether some phenomena, love among them, must remain, in part, unmeasured. The novel lingers as a witty, humane exploration of the strange ways science and romance intersect.