THE STONE LOVES THE WORLD

A young misfit—and her parents and grandparents—navigates through life in this scientifically minded novel.

A 20-year-old woman named Mette, overwhelmed by an abortive romantic entanglement, abruptly leaves the office of her tech job in New York and embarks on a bus trip to Seattle (a destination chosen at random), wondering whether to kill herself. Over the next few days, her parents become increasingly worried by her absence—or, at least, her mother does. Saskia, an unknown actress in New York City, raised Mette on her own after a brief fling with Mark, her astronomy professor in Ithaca, New York, and has always felt hurt by how much Mette is like her father—their predilection for math puzzles, their inability to read other people’s emotions. But when Saskia and Mark learn that Mette has somehow ended up in Denmark, they must reunite and find their daughter. Hall’s sprawling novel, which spans the years 1926 to 2017, isn’t plot-driven, however; instead, it’s largely composed of the characters’ dreamy reminiscences of their childhoods, their parents, their life’s trajectory, and limpid thoughts about the meaning of life: “It occurred to him that beauty, maybe, is always a thing you can only see from the outside. And he has wondered ever since if the key to a happy life is to learn ever more deeply to be satisfied with standing off to the side, perceiving the beauty that is separate from you, but nearly everywhere.” It’s also a book filled with left-brained precocity; besides Mark and Mette, we spend time in the minds of Mark’s father, a physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, and Mark’s mother, who wanted to be an astronomer but was foiled by the sexist norms of her day. Hall does an impressive job channeling his characters’ intensely idiosyncratic personal monologues and their interests in everything from Beethoven string quartets to the story of Joan of Arc to the Drake equation. And while the novel touches on an almost unwieldy array of themes, one constant throughout is the impossibility of exerting logic and control on a fundamentally unpredictable world.

A valiant attempt to encapsulate life, the universe, and everything.