FICTION

GOOD BENITO by Alan Lightman (Pantheon: $21; 224 pp.) This is an uneven book, a pleasant account of a young physicist growing up inside his own problem-solving head. Lightman, who teaches physics at MIT, and whose first novel, “Einstein’s Dreams,” was far more experimental and far-ranging, could have been a little more patient with his autobiographical material, giving us more details about how Bennett Lang’s mind developed. He has this to show us, what it feels like to learn you have a mind suited to science: “The answer appeared in his mind as a beautiful curve and he tingled and shivered. It had to be right . . . but the sensation of planning, that swift soaring breath of discovery, was not an illusion.” The beginning, in which Bennett takes a position as an assistant professor at a small university and works with an older physicist, is more generous this way, but Lightman retreats in most of the novel to more mundane details about the academic world. Maybe someone told him to write something popular.