his is a strange book.  I bought it about the same time I got Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury and The Beach by Alex Garland in the late nineties.  I read the other two, but in between moving to and from South America and then to Nebraska and finally getting married, the end of the century was a little busy for me and I forgot it.  Until the recent move when I collected all my stuff, at least the books, from my mother.

It is a short book, only 212 pages of spacious print.  Still a novel, but not about to give you eye strain.  It is the story of Philip, anthropology professor at a California university and boyfriend of a physics professor named Alice.  One of the other physics professors, Dr. Soft, creates a void that gets named Lack.  Alice becomes obsessed with Lack, eventually leaving Philip for the void.  So Philip goes about trying to cure Alice of her obsession and win her back by simultaneously enabling her and hindering her.  Then an internationally known Italian physicist comes to study Lack and a deconstructionist from the English department gets involved.

It is clever.  It is darkly funny, but not going to make you laugh out loud.  It is honest and scathing in its commentary on university life.  Soft, the physicist, and De Tooth, the deconstructionist with a blonde wig are characters you have to have spent time amid campus politics and prejudice to find funny.

It is also, like the two books I bought it with, unmistakably Generation X in the late 1990s.  This book never forgets it is a book.  De Tooth even goes into a discussion of the text of the void and death of the author that could double for the book.  It almost begs to be deconstructed.  Or perhaps just enjoyed.  It is intelligent, funny, and a refreshing science fiction novel where the setting is the present and the people are people you know.  No aliens.  No far future.  No space ships.  Just some professors and some theories and a funny love story with a void.