Edition: U.S. / Global

Quantum Fizz

By Dennis Overbye
Published: July 22, 2001


By Jenny McPhee.

248 pp. New York:

Doubleday. $22.95.

POOR Marie Brown. It's hard to decide which of the two tasks she has set for herself is more impossible: finding true love or understanding what modern physics says about the nature of reality. And that's not to mention the MacGuffin that sets Jenny McPhee's strangely engaging first novel, ''The Center of Things,'' in motion -- namely, the imminent demise of a film siren and femme fatale called Nora Mars, a sort of cross between Marilyn Monroe and Mae West, who is lying in a coma in a New York hospital.

If Marie, an aspiring tabloid writer and longtime movie fan, can dig up fresh news about Nora's slithery, scandal-soaked life, she can write the obituary and move up from being a researcher and part-time reporter to feature-writer status at The Gotham City Star, and also perhaps bed handsome, dissolute Rex Mars, the third of Nora's five husbands. But Marie's brain won't always cooperate, and she's likely to blurt out some irrelevant fact -- say, about what age really means to an Eskimo -- in the middle of an otherwise promising interview. Among her other drawbacks: she's too tall, too old (39), partly deaf in one ear and prone to being too early for any appointment.

Worst of all, Marie would rather be sitting in the library talking about physics with a goateed little man in blue pajamas named Marco Trentadue: ''Freelance intellectual, New York City. Spontaneous encounters only,'' it says on the business card he hands her when they first meet.

Initially, this meeting doesn't seem auspicious. Marco interrupts her work -- Marie is still trying to finish an essay on the philosophy of science that she abandoned (along with graduate school) 15 years earlier -- to ask if she has ever thought to connect the astronomer Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929 with the stock market collapse the same year. She lies and says she hasn't, but she keeps talking while he pretends to read magazines. She has found a soul mate.

A few pages later, Marie is telling Marco about one of the most bizarre and baffling notions in all of physics, the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which says that a pair of subatomic particles once linked remain linked forever, so that measuring a property of one will simultaneously affect the results of measuring its mate, even if by then they're millions of light-years apart. ''This phenomenon,'' Marie explains, ''is called nonlocality because it is independent of space and time, like consciousness or information.'' To which Marco, ''his Peter Lorre eyes wide,'' replies: ''Fantastic. You're . . . it's simply fantastic.''

When they started talking like this -- and they talk a lot -- I got a little nervous. The dialogue sounds canned, like precocious youngsters showing off. Moreover, I didn't know how much of this was going to be on the quiz. Was this book progressing toward some grand unified theory of the human condition, with the plot turning on some clever -- or, worse, cheesy -- quantum physics metaphor?

In her acknowledgments, McPhee says she's spent a lot of time with the weekly science section of this newspaper. Having worked on that section as an editor and writer for the last several years, I had many pleasurable shocks of recognition reading this book: McPhee seems to have done her homework well. There are very few Big Ideas out there for which Marie doesn't provide a brief learned disquisition -- from the notion that space is full of mysterious dark matter that astronomers can feel but not see to the so-called anthropic principle, which holds that there are an infinite number of possible universes but that life is only possible in a very few whose properties have been delicately tuned. That assertion puts humanity, as Marco remarks, ''squarely back at the center of things.'' Hence the novel's title. Marie's real ambition, it seems, is to be a science writer.

Luckily, McPhee, the daughter of the New Yorker writer John McPhee, knows how to keep things light. All her cosmic vamping adds a teasing hint of intellectual relief to a tale of tangled lives that for all its complexity might seem a shade cartoonish told straight out. The story of Nora and Rex leads Marie back to Nora's twin sister, Maud, who may or may not be Rex's mother. Marco, meanwhile, is clearly some kind of substitute for Marie's long-lost brother, Michael, whom she mysteriously betrayed 15 years earlier and hasn't heard from since -- but of course they too are still entangled. Part of the fun is trying to figure out which of these plot twists and cosmic parables will prove significant, or at least relevant, and which are red herrings.

Nora Mars herself provides another kind of relief from the action in the form of the bons mots from her various movies that are sprinkled strategically throughout the text and serve to comment wryly on the action. (''Love is like playing checkers. You have to know which man to move.'') Alas, we never meet her.

Circling back and forth between physics in the library and lust in Rex Mars's apartment (Nora has always made her husbands take her name), McPhee keeps us just sufficiently off balance not to notice that she has hidden the answer to the mystery of Nora Mars in plain sight -- a realization that brought a smile to my face. Another nice piece of business, despite the clunkiness of their dialogue, is the evolution of Marie and Marco's intimacy. At some point, we realize that Marco and Marie have exchanged identities -- now she's the one reaching for the magazines -- like an old married couple or a pair of particles condemned by some quantum law to share complementary characteristics.

Cartoonish? Yes, but it works. It's impossible not to like Marie, marshaling what turn out to be not inconsiderable resources as she fumbles toward the breakthrough of her career. There's even something endearing about poor passive Marco. I never warmed up to him, but I never doubted for a moment that he was the one for Marie.

We suspect there is kismet for these bookworms, and we like this novel even when we think we know where it's going. We even buy the ending, a fairy-tale triumph so fantastical to a professional science writer that I dare not reveal it. One can only say, ''Welcome to the trade, Marie.''

Drawing (Peter O. Zierlein)