DISCOVERIES

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Please, Mr. Einstein

A Novel

Jean-Claude Carriere, translated from the French by John Brownjohn

Harcourt: 192 pp., $22

NOVELS have long examined Albert Einstein’s life and work. We enjoy poking around in the lives of geniuses, perhaps hoping to find something in common. Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere’s “Please, Mr. Einstein” reads like a play: A young woman seeks the great man some 60 years after his death. She finds herself in a nondescript building, in an anteroom with various ordinary people and historical figures. Since she’s the only woman (Einstein had a weakness), she’s let in immediately. Einstein is glad to see her: She’s from the future, proving that the world hasn’t yet been destroyed by nuclear weapons. His guilt as a pacifist whose work was used to nefarious ends is a major theme of their conversations. He explains the subjectivity of time and space, opens doors onto virtual scenes that clarify his theories and his role in history. They discuss recent developments in physics: string theory, dark energy, dark matter. “What a garden of delights it is!” he says of the vital optimism of science. “What an enchanted journey! ... What mental stupefaction and rapture, what daydreams!”

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A Perfect Mess

The Hidden Benefits of Disorder

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

Little, Brown: 336 pp. $25.99

GOOD news! Organization is overrated. Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman offer studies and interviews revealing the tyranny of organizing, our unwarranted guilt about messes, the beauty of mess and how suited it is to the way the mind works. (“Our brains evolved to function in a messy world, and ... when we insist on thinking in neat, orderly ways we’re really holding our minds back from doing what they do best.”) Einstein’s desk at Princeton was an example of “stupendous disarray.” Desk mess seems to grow with education, salary and experience. Whereas neatness “whittle[s] away at ... quantity and diversity,” messiness “comfortably tolerate[s] an exhaustive array of

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Him Her Him Again the End of Him

A Novel

Patricia Marx

Scribner: 232 pp., $24

“I was in high school when I read ‘The Bell Jar’ and thought it was about a lucky girl who wins a contest and gets to go to Europe.” Patricia Marx’s opening riff on Sylvia Plath’s light side, her breeziness over Plath’s “despair and the conclusive oven thing,” exemplify the dark hilarity simmering under Marx’s novel. Like Plath, Marx’s heroine goes off to Cambridge and falls in love with a wrongo, although the path landing her in Eugene Obello’s lap is strewn with lessons: “I must have intuitively known even then ... that if you ask a certain type of guy about himself, it’s as good as winding a wind-up toy. For a given amount of time, [he] requires only minimal attention.... In this way, men are easier than plants.” Eugene is a student in the ego-studies department; their courtship involves conversations about, say, which syllable to stress in “hegemony.” He talks funny: “Your kisses are so recondite, my peach, that they are almost notional.” He’s a jerk in every way. The heroine returns to Philadelphia, her thesis on U.K. race relations understandably incomplete, to pursue a career in comedy writing. Eugene reenters her life, toting wife and child, and sets himself up as a psychologist. Marx, a former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” has a lovely belly-up-to-the-bar style. “You’re a good listener,” she tells us, “Plus, I bet you have a winning way of turning the page.”