The Diagnosis: A Novel

Alan Lightmans first novel,Einsteins Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written. Michiko Kakutani wrote inThe New York Timesthat the novel creates a magical, metaphysical realm . . . as in Calvinos work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose. WithThe Diagnosis, Lightman gives us his most ambitious and penetrating novel yet. While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum information in the minimum time. When Bills memory returns, his head pounding, remembering too much, a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition. By turns satiric, comic, and tragic,The Diagnosisis a brilliant and disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our spirits.

Author: Alan Lightman

Language: English

Edition: First Edition

Binding: Hardcover

Pages: 384

Publisher: Pantheon

Publication Date: 2000-09-01