Particle fiction

Herman WOUK, who began his career as a novelist in the late 1940s, is now in his 89th year and still going strong. This is not to say that his new novel, “A Hole in Texas,” is as brilliant as “The Caine Mutiny” or as powerful and ambitious as “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” but it’s certainly better than “Inside, Outside,” his earlier foray into Washington politics.

At a time like the present, when politicians vie with one another to see how many government programs they can slash or eliminate, it is refreshing and salutary to encounter a novel by a writer who wants to remind us that one of the features that characterizes a great nation and ensures its continuing greatness is its commitment to big projects, in this case, scientific research. “A Hole in Texas” is an entertaining, eminently readable novel that sheds light on what happens when politicians vote to scrap projects in basic science.

The eponymous hole is all that remains of the plan to build a giant super-collider in Texas that would rival, indeed, surpass the CERN collider near Geneva. In 1987, Congress appropriated several billion dollars for the project, given the go-ahead by President Reagan.

“Then,” as we’re informed in a brief prologue, “when this gargantuan project, the Superconducting Super Collider -- the largest basic science project in world history -- was well underway, [in 1993] Congress abruptly pulled the plug, killed the project, and voted another billion dollars just to close it down.”

The project was killed by a combination of those no-longer-so-strange bedfellows, Republicans and Democrats, the former always hungry to cut government programs, the latter happy, in this case, to cut a project that benefited Texas. Wouk’s fictional reconstruction of the real-life politics that led to this shutdown is reasonably accurate, though he perhaps underrates the influence of right-wing anti-government ideology.

For the large number of us who can’t quite recall why anyone would want to build a supercollider in the first place, Wouk’s novel explains why. By accelerating beams of subatomic particles and smashing them into targets or each other, a supercollider enables scientists to detect as-yet-undiscovered particles and, hence, learn more about the essential mysteries of nature.

Wouk’s novel focuses on one particle in particular: the Higgs boson, an as-yet-undiscovered particle that may have been an essential part of the process by which matter was generated. Whatever may have gotten the universe started, what sets this novel in motion is the disturbing news that the Higgs boson has been discovered by the Chinese. It’s also rumored that this discovery could lead to the development of a weapon many times more powerful than any hydrogen bomb.

The story hits the mainstream media, panic sets in, a congressional investigation is launched, and Hollywood blithely plans a Boson bomb disaster movie. Finding himself at the center of it all is a mild-mannered, 61-year-old physicist who’s been leading a pleasant, uneventful life in Southern California with his wife and newborn baby. Guy Carpenter was one of the scientists who worked on the Texas Super Collider project. Years before that, as a student at Cornell, he formed an attachment to a fellow physics student, the lovely Wen Mei Lei, a.k.a. Wendy, who subsequently returned to her native China. And now, the physicist credited with discovering the Higgs boson turns out to be -- who else, but Wendy!

From a cultural perspective, it’s amusing and perhaps heartening to note that this novel’s hero is 61 -- solid evidence of the current mantra that 60 is the new 40. Guy Carpenter is exactly the kind of hero who, in novels of an earlier vintage, used to be in his 40s: mature but still young enough to be given some kind of romantic interest. Guy’s old flame, Wendy, is a couple of years older, and even more appealing now, with those delicately etched lines that add character to her face. In addition to Wendy and his shapely 50-year-young wife, Penny, Guy also becomes close to the attractive, intelligent Congresswoman Myra Kadane, who’s on the committee investigating the matter.

Wouk’s satire deftly targets the media as well as the politicians. Even as members of Congress -- along with much of the rest of the country -- are racked with fear and anxiety at the prospect of a Chinese Boson bomb, a handful of Hollywood insiders, who hire Guy Carpenter as a consultant, are busily planning their film featuring the aforementioned weapon. To them, the prospect of a real-life bomb seems far less real than the movie they want to make. Back in the nation’s capital, the big story of the Boson bomb, which has captured the attention of the media, is upstaged by the trivial story of a striptease artist who claims that the national security advisor is the father of her child.

Although this novel broaches some fairly disturbing matters, a certain lightness of tone -- a kind of coziness -- prevails, so that we’re hardly surprised when all’s well that ends well. At the same time, however, Wouk has given us a portrait of a country with the attention span of a mosquito, easily distracted from serious public concerns by the merest whiff of personal scandal, full of people ready to ignore the public interest for private gain and, indeed, to ignore their own long-term interests for the quick fix of instant gratification. *