Joshua HenkinMorningside Heights

Abstract

collection) posits that time will start moving backward at the exact moment when the universe switches from expanding to contracting. This collection also includes three intriguing stories about powerful aliens exploiting the Earth to create art. The most fully developed of these, “Sea of Dreams,” introduces us to an amoral alien whose sole interest is in using any kind of matter in the universe to create spectacular objects. When it visits Earth and learns about “low temperature art,” the alien becomes inspired and turns all the oceans into ice, after which it hauls all the ice blocks into orbit to form a kind of jeweled necklace around the planet. Liu carefully contrasts this cosmic creative act with the suffering and destruction that the lack of water causes on Earth. Eventually , humanity summons its last resources to force the ice blocks back down to the surface to begin the process of planetary regeneration. The mirror-alien in “Ode to Joy,” unlike the ice-cube alien, leaves Earth unscathed but uses it as an instrument in a cosmic concert; unfortunately, Liu has the world leaders in the story all speaking authoritatively about astronomy and physics, which renders farcical a piece that would have otherwise been compelling. Finally, a powerful alien race in “Cloud of Poems” destroys much of the Milky Way (though not Earth) in order to power a quantum computer that will generate all the poetry past and present produced by humans. The two most successful stories in this collection serve as perfect bookends. “The Village Teacher” switches back and forth between a small school in a poor mountain village in China and an intergalactic war between carbon- and silicon-based lifeforms . Thanks to the school’s devoted but dying teacher, the schoolchildren are able to recite Newton’s Laws of Motion when they’re tested by an alien species deciding if humanity should be wiped out or not. In “The Thinker,” an astronomer and a brain surgeon realize, after decades of parallel research, that the twinkling of certain kinds of stars mirrors that of neurons firing in the human brain’s right hemisphere. Their conclusion that the universe might itself be conscious is just one example of Cixin Liu’s unique approach to science fiction. Despite the unevenness of the collection , To Hold Up the Sky is yet another exciting contribution to the genre. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Joshua Henkin Morningside Heights New York. Pantheon Books. 2021. 304 pages. AT FIRST IT APPEARS that Morningside Heights is yet another campus tale of the professor-meets-grad-student variety, but Joshua Henkin’s new novel quickly sidesteps formula. Crisply and at breakneck speed in a brief first section, we learn that Pru Steiner has always had a weakness for older men, so it’s no surprise when she falls for Spence Robin, her charismatic but only slightly older Shakespeare professor at Columbia. After that the novel takes on more texture and depth as it develops the story of a marriage and an oddly blended family . Spence is a certifiable star. After a Guggenheim and a Mellon, he wins a MacArthur, but at the age of fifty-seven, things begin to go awry. He stumbles, in language, in memory, and, eventually, in movement. His dementia appears slowly with his inability to work on, let alone finish , a book he has contracted to write and continues quickly to the point where Pru has to hire a caregiver to help out while she is at work as a development officer at Barnard. In the early years of their marriage, Pru feels that “Spence’s success was her success, too. There was no separating them.” But at fifty years old, Pru is forced to see herself as separate, and the thrust of the narrative follows her growth and the redefinition of her marriage and herself. She has faced some difficulty in the past, mostly with trying to blend Spence’s son from an early marriage, Arlo, into their lives with their daughter, Sarah. But in dealing with Spence’s decline, Pru comes into her own. Henkin touches us most deeply with the small moments and details—the descriptions of a clueless Pru trying to...