John Banville, The Newton Letter, 1982

An Irish writer retires to an country lodge to finish his book on Isaac Newton, but he comes up against the impossibility of explaining the reasons behind Newton’s mental breakdown at age fifty, a time when Newton felt that all he had achieved was ultimately meaningless. Instead, our writer becomes distracted by his emotional entanglements in the lives of the strange family he is staying with, ultimately abandoning his book. There are some great if too-brief character portraits here, and Banville’s style consciously carries the concise intensity of poetry as he compares the rationality of science with the irrationality of the heart, while the writer experiences in his own small way why the heart will always win out. A clever and sharply delineated book, and with a particularly deep meaning that can be divined from its mere hundred pages.  PY

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