The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind

by Rebecca Goldstein

A sensual love story, drawing on Plato and Spinoza to examine the conflicting claims of reason and desire.Eva Mueller, a professor of Plato and Spinoza at a small college, undertakes the philosophical education of Michael Fields, who is handsome, clever, and only twenty.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Novels, Literary Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. As she described it,

"To me the process is still mysterious. I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. In the course of grieving for my father and glorying in my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most `unprofessional’ sorts of questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life? How does it relate to life as it’s really lived? I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert `real life’ intimately into the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically motivated novel."

The Mind-Body Problem was published by Random House and went on to become a critical and popular success.

More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer’s Award, Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award. Her 2005 book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, was featured in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, received numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Sun. Goldstein’s most recent published book is, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity, published in May 2006, and winner of the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. Her new novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, will be published by Pantheon Books.

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In awarding her the prize, the MacArthur Foundation described her work in the following words:

"Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being. Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence."

Goldstein is married to linguist and author Steven Pinker. She lives in Boston and in Truro, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Lena]

i fuck with this

[Christina]

3.5

“How very stubborn foolishness is. One starves it, for years and years withholding all nourishment. And it shrivels up so that one thinks it is guite done and gone. But let some few random droplets of human kindness fall and it swells up with that rank throbbing assertiveness that is its nature, demanding its due. One can never relax one's guard. To be human is to wrestle forever with the condition of foolishness, the multitudinous forms of self-deception suspended above us, like iron cages, always waiting for their chance to descend.”


5 ⭐️ for cover + title

[Alice]

While I was reading it I wasn't sure whether I liked it, and some of dialog is truly leaden, but I also couldn't put it down. Sort of hypnotic, sort of sexy, a little too smart. Totally electric finish.

[Gonny Nir]

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. While I think that Goldstein’s prose and character-building are both excellent (two consistent features across her writings), they unfortunately don’t save this work.

Very briefly, Late-Summer Passion is about a rigid professor of philosophy and her infatuation with an undergraduate student over the course of a summer where the former tutors the latter on Spinoza’s “Ethics.”The professor, Eva, is 47, and the student, Michael, is 20.

I think it’s possible to write an age-gap infatuation (or even a relationship) in *a right* way. But I don’t think Goldstein succeeds here. Despite the constant references to Michael as a boy (and the very sudden switch to man-boy at the end of the book which reads as underdeveloped), Goldstein never actually writes the characters in a way that allows them to properly engage with the fruits of their age-dynamic. And this a shame because it makes the infatuation seem one-dimensional and flat, which makes it easier to dismiss (which I don’t believe to be Goldstein’s intention).

Along similar lines, I think Goldstein’s plot is developed unevenly. While the backstory given to Eva, particularly her father, is developed in great detail, her present story is not developed enough. Particularly, in certain interactions she has with Michael, such as his having access to her phone number and home address which seems like an absurd thing for an undergraduate with little connection to his professor prior to the present summer to have. Events in the present plot seem to happen for the convenience of page count as opposed to happening out of organic plot development. And worst of all, the past and the present don’t seem to connect in the way that Goldstein clearly intends. Perhaps that’s my own failing as a reader with little background in psychoanalysis and the significance of Wagner in the Third Reich.

Nevertheless, despite being a big fan of Goldstein, I’m sorry to say, this book fell flat for me. Read the Mind-Body Problem instead.

[Readings n' Musings]

"She still possessed her beauty, though it had under¬ gone, over the years (she would be turning forty-seven at mid¬ summer), a purification which now left it perceptible only to those who were themselves of a certain spiritual development."

"This is the hard insoluble truth encased in Plato’s “one noble lie,” to be told .the inhabitants of his utopia: that some souls are composed of gold, others silver, and yet others, the vast indistinguishable majority, iron and brass. Or perhaps copper, Eva thought, thinking of the weepy one of the afternoon visitation.
She scooped the hairpin up with a tissue, depositing it into the trash."

"They take their ethics from the popular junk in which they marinate their brains."

"Passivity is pain."

"In this world of foolish vanities, none is so foolish as the pride of the young. Did they do something special to earn the right to be young? Shall they be young forever? No, it is given, given to all . . . for a time."

"So beautifully that it was beginning to hurt."

"But young. The young found so much to embarrass them."

"What an easy thing it was for the brand-new wrapping of sophistication to come undone. They are just feeling their way into the world, still wet and wobbly."

"These sounds were the grunts and moans of spiritual grotesque"

"How very foolish he sounded, with that slick sophistication covering his trembling rawness."

"Had she really been beautiful when they first met?"

"She was the portrait of banality, clumsily framed in affectation."

"I keep thinking how ironic it is, how bad things can go. I mean you do something just to make a person happy and they end up hating you."

[Ashley Sparks]

I rated this book low because the truth is I will forget these words ever existed. For me the structure of this book was insane. Woman interested in her student suddenly remembers her abortion from years ago. Then suddenly she reflects on her Nazi father. Then she finely hooks up with the student and she thinks how much she dislikes her father while having sex. Like I just didn't enjoy but also it's okay cuz I will forget

[Melissa Hedges- Rankin]

This was a book on my mom’s shelf, written early in the 90s.
My thoughts were all over the place when I completed the book. Overall enjoyed this unique book.
I gave it a 3.5 ⭐️’s: interesting usage of dialogue, intertwined with philosophy. However several chapters were hard to follow. The book was also a love story with protagonist Ava Mueller, in her 40’s who thinks she’s in love with a 20-year-old.

[John Blochberger]

I picked up this book because I love philosophical fiction works that entertain with a narrative while at the same time giving you new worldviews and ideas to mull over. It always kept my attention and was hard to put down. Some parts about philosophy I found a little too extensive and hard to follow. I enjoyed the heavy satire throughout the book and the ending was great!

[Dr D]

A very... juicy read.

[Izzi Trindade]

what the fuck did i actually just read. holy shit. unbelievable. brilliant

[Priscilla Oppenheimer]

I love the writing of Rebecca Goldstein but this is certainly a strange example.

The book tells the story of a 47-year-old German-American philosophy professor at a small college in upstate New York who has sealed off her emotional life. She lives only for her study of Plato and Spinoza, until she falls in love, or at least in heat, with a handsome young student.

Some parts of the book are a bit too dense for my taste, with long passages about philosophy, German history, the character's strange relationship with her dead father, etc. Plus, there are too many arcane and foreign words. The author should have at least translated the French passage from Colette!

[Carol]

It feels as if this is two separate books. The connection the author makes between the Professor's passion and the holocaust feels contrived.

[Mary Cassidy]

Fascinating and philosophical. A bit uneven. I plan to read more of her.