Re-reading a Gripping Thriller Set Inside a Research Laboratory
During the pandemic, I have taken not just to reading more intensely, but also to re-reading. After all, revisiting books that you remember for the pleasure they evoked, but whose exact contents have frayed like the super-soft pajamas you slip into despite family put downs, is a means of dodging time. One of the books I happened to collide into, when rearranging my book shelf, is Intuition, a thriller set inside a relatively low-profile cancer laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Most thriller and mystery writers are privy to certain rules. For instance, you pretty much need to ensure that there is a dead body somewhere in Chapter One. You can’t, as the contemporary hacks suggest, hold reader interest unless you subscribe to some of those genre-defining basics. Like one of those writers, who occupy the prosaic note-taking front benches of the Thriller Tutorials, I did slip a dead body into Chapter One of my own thriller, No Trespassing.
But writers like Allegra Goodman might balk at or skirt such rules. To do so, requires a talent that surpasses writers who box themselves into certain circumscribed genres. In Intuition, not only is there no dead body in Chapter One, there is no dead body at all. If you then assume that this is going to be one of those plodding literary reads, filled with stunning descriptions and no discernible “action,” the book is anything but that. It possesses a magical appeal, that holds up even on a second reading and more so, in our attention-addled times. Sans any murder, sans any cop chases or amateur detective enquiries, Goodman keeps you turning the pages.
That’s only one of the feats that Goodman pulls off. Another risk she takes (again, going against the grain of most contemporary creative-writing gurus) is to deploy a third-person omniscient point-of-view. An omniscient narrator dips into different character heads, often inside the space of a single scene. This was a technique commonly used by writers in earlier eras – but has been abjured by most 21st Century writers, because we are competing not only with other books, but also with more compelling audio and video narrations.
But Goodman is a masterly writer, and she can keep us from getting confused or from losing the narrative thread, even as she plumbs the depths of relatively minor characters. That’s one of the reasons for the book being such a gripping read : the characters are so well drawn, you feel like you are encountering them in flesh-and-blood inside your own reading nook.
While Goodman herself is not a scientist, she is intimately related to many scientists. Moreover, she has researched the workings of a real laboratory. The story reveals how the pressures to succeed in science, can often lead some of the most intelligent (and even passionate) minds to cross the fine line that divides the ethical and the fraudulent.
The laboratory is directed by two people, who bring the kind of antipodal qualities that is required of successful partnerships. Marion Mendelssohn is first and foremost a scientist, intensely driven by the quest for new discoveries; she’s also disciplined, rigorous, as devoted to the methods and data-led boundaries of her field as she is to achieving breakthroughs.
Sandy Glass, an oncologist is a much flashier persona. He’s exactly the kind of workplace comrade Marion needs. He’s the sort that can draw media attention, raise funds, and push the laboratory towards publishing papers that can win it accolades. But he’s also impatient for success, and prone to exaggerating, ever so slightly. The type who would hover close to the truth, but keep redrawing the edges, so that the truth fans out, ink-like, into unrecognizable shapes. He is somewhat reined in by his deep respect for Marion; he’s in this enterprise, not just for himself, but also for her.
A third character is Jacob, Marion’s professor husband. A man who is many times more intelligent than all the people working in the laboratory, but who had realized, rather early in his career, that his genius was limited to answering questions, not raising new ones. In other words, he is super-bright, a prodigy even, but not creative. And for that reason, he deliberately forsakes his own career, opting for a low-profile academic position, even as he champions his more talented, and ambitious wife. Is he jealous of Marion’s relationship with Glass? Does he resent his wife’s close partnership with a man, who seems to fill gaps in her life, in a manner that he himself can never dream of?
Below the Directors, are the two main protagonists: the suave, charismatic, smooth-talker Cliff, who has exactly the kind of sheen that such a lab might seek. A Stanford degree, a resume sparkling with the kind of eye-catching experiences that the Directors love to flaunt. Then there’s Robin, a more quiet woman, who is diligent with her experiments, and many years older than Cliff. Who also lacks his pedigreed qualifications and jazzy personality. Inevitably, they get tangled up in a romance, with the brash, youthful Cliff willing to overlook the age gap. But suddenly the dynamics change when Cliff’s rats start showing the kind of results the laboratory has always been hankering for: the cancer-ridden rats seem to be tumour free. Is the team on the verge of discovering that much-elusive scientific prize: a cancer cure?
Glass, who had always been waiting for a moment like this, seizes the result. A little prematurely perhaps, against Marion’s best instincts, but she too is trapped by the tidal wave of press announcements and media accolades. And the results are there for everyone to see: the little rats, their squirming, pink bodies no longer sport tumorous bumps. It’s Robin who has to contend with her complex internal emotions. Her ex-boyfriend, and much younger colleague, has overshot her both inside the laboratory’s pecking order and in the larger scientific community. All this is more frustrating and confounding when Robin tries to replicate Cliff’s experiments and the results don’t emerge as expected. Is she intentionally botching the experiment? Is she just sloppy or incapable? Is she seething with so much resentment, that her subjective interpretations no longer count for anything?
And then Jacob, Marion’s genius and incredibly supportive husband seeds Robin with exactly the kind of suspicion that she might have been seeking. He makes her wonder if Cliff’s results are not just astounding, but too astounding. Robin then turns into an investigator of sorts, even as she recalls instances of Cliff killing rats in a manner that wasn’t normal; why had he been doing so? What if her inability to replicate his experiment wasn’t her fault at all, but his? She even trips back from a friend’s wedding, in a bridesmaid’s dress to examine his lab records, and paperwork trails, finding in the process, some data sets that had been willfully (or carelessly) ignored.
Like in any large crisis, small incidents keep getting blown into larger and larger ones. Robin’s suspicions invoke an internal enquiry, and then a larger one, eventually involving the fraud detection team at the National Institute of Health. There is even a Congressional Enquiry, as Robin, now turned into a public whistleblower and also political pawn of sorts, morphs into the kind of nemesis that enterprises dread. The point, at the end, is not whether Cliff lied or not, but about the manner in which the unbridled pursuit of success can corrupt any endeavor, scientific ones included. Everyone is both an agent and a victim of larger forces – the pressure to publish papers first, the competition for limited funds, the unspoken rivalry throbbing inside laboratories, the seemingly impossible attempt to separate the objective from the subjective, or to guard rational data sets from messier human interpretations.
Goodman is attuned to all these nuances and to deeper human motivations, that are often inaccessible even to the characters who possess them. Real scientific frauds have always punctuated the history of science, which progresses not so much at a linear rate, but in fits and bumps. In his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn had observed the manner in which old paradigms are shattered, leading to revolutionary ways of seeing. In modern scientific labs that operate under intense competitive pressures, ways of seeing might morph into ways of cheating. Sometimes, the cheated is not just the public, or the government (whose funds are being wasted or deployed in such experiments), but the scientists themselves. Who are after all, like other human beings, as susceptible to deluding themselves as they might be to tricking others. This is a book, that is worth reading for laypersons and would-be scientists, for anyone who would wish to understand what science really feels like from the inside.
References
Allegra Goodman, Intuition, Atlantic Books, London 2009 (First Published in 2006 by the Dial Press, in New York)