The Stone Loves the World

by Brian Hall

A warm, inventive, and multilayered novel about two families - one made up largely of scientists, and the other of artists and mystics - whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter

Mette, a twenty-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman, who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. But she has been recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop, no longer certain of her place in the world.

As Brian Hall's new novel opens, Mette has gone missing. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her. Mette's path will take her across America and then to a fateful visit with her charismatic grandfather, Thomas, who formerly ran the commune north of Ithaca where Saskia was raised, and who now lives as a hermit in a windmill on a remote Danish island.

Playing out over nine decades and three generations, and stitching together a dazzling array of subjects--from cosmology and classical music to number theory and medieval mystery plays--The Stone Loves the World is a story of love, longing, and scientific wonder. It offers a moving reflection on the human search for truth, meaning, and connection in an often incomprehensible universe, and on the genuine surprises that the real world, and human society, can offer.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

464 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 2021

Reviews

[Alix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe 3.5? I was really taken with the writing and the characters at the outset, which is what pushed me to buy the book after reading the sample (I read sometimes a dozen samples before choosing a book). It's a good book with lots of original and well-rounded characters. For my taste there were just too many long passages that would require more math knowledge or a deep familiarity with classical music. I do appreciate that if one is going to write realistic characters who are astronomers and/or math geeks or classical music lovers one would somehow need to represent the contents of their thoughts, but for someone like me these passages produced a feeling that I was missing something.

[Allie Hester · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel of multigenerational family drama takes you deep into the minds of several different characters, probing their interests (in great detail), their desires, and their fears. Each time the focus shifted to a new character, I was sad to leave the structure and cadence of the previous voice behind, but after the first few transitions, trusted that I would become equally enthralled in whatever was next.

[Alia B · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think you really have to like math to enjoy this book. There was so much of it that I just kept getting lost. The writing just wasn't for me.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a novel that features engineers, scientists and mathematicians (coders) this was much more engrossing than Bewilderment, the other current "science" novel. This is a family epic with many timelines including the atomic age and the present. I found the lives of Mette and her engineer grandfather to be most interesting, although the rarely mentioned, dead Susan was also of interest.

Overall this was a very good read but maybe 75 pages too long. Also, it had only a few science info "dumps" while Bewilderment was chock full, which seems to me to be an easy out.
4.5

[Natalie Remiszewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can’t really explain what it was about this book that i loved so much, it just felt so human. oddly enough, all of the main characters that you get a serious perspective from seem almost inhumanly smart and borderline savant-ish, but the way they feel their own emotions and experience internal conflict and grief is so powerfully written.

i went into this book expecting very little. in fact, the way the book flap says that mette has “gone missing” and the story explores three generations to find her, i was genuinely expecting some sort of heartfelt mystery thriller. what i found was so much more beautiful and captivating. the way this book goes through mark’s life and his relationships with his parents and their lives and relationship with each other and how that influenced mark and his understanding of love and the impact it had on his relationship with saskia and their relationships with mette was so perfectly crafted. you get to deeply understand these characters, from the impact of susan’s death on mark to the deep distrust saskia has for thomas to the profound loneliness mette feels especially after her rejection by alex. it really is a beautiful deep dive into the massive collection of history that makes up a person.

if you like books where nothing in particular happens (because if we’re being SO real, all that happened was that mette took a bus to seattle, hopped a plane to denmark, hung out with her grandpa, and then saskia and mark got back together and watched the solar eclipse), but like, in a good way, then this is the story for you. character-building is the whole move and i was obsessed with it. i loved nothing more than getting to hear mark describe a color blue and remember that it was just like his favorite matchbox car from when he was little. would highly recommend if you want to know about what makes people who they are and why we all hate our goddamn parents so much.

[M Carolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ambitious, sprawling novel about family ties and intellectual obsession, with a surprisingly moving ending. For fans of The Saskiad, it will be a joy to rediscover Saskia here (these were perhaps my favorite sections of the novel!), and the main character, Mark, is similarly endearing and intriguing. It's a book full of ideas--about art, music, science, video games, the future of the planet, etc.--but at the same time very rooted in its three main characters (Saskia, Mark, and their 20-year-old ​daughter Mette), and in the question of whether this estranged family will be able to come together in crisis or not: because it’s weird, brilliant, depressed Mette’s flight on a Greyhound bus that marks the beginning of the novel, with much of the plot revolving around where she is/what she’ll do and how her parents will react, leading all the way to Denmark and some unexpected confrontations...

Although some readers have pointed out that the math in the book can be intimidating, I will say that for me--someone who knows nothing about math-- I wasn't bothered; the math plays a very small role in the book and is entirely used, it seems, to demonstrate the quirky, "antisocial genius" relationship that Mark and Mette share, and which mom Saskia (and many readers, apparently, including me!) are left out of.

It's a smart, deep, and even funny novel that I highly recommend!

[Diane Bernard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A spectacular panorama of American life in the 21st century. I see some people mentioned the math and science, thinking there was too much. I found it enjoyable, to learn new ideas and also to get inside the heads of people who turn to scientific data as a way to relate to each other. Mette (math and computer whiz) and her parents, Saskia (an actress and voice over artist) and Mark (professor of astronomy) are all on a journey, ostensibly to find Mette as she escapes a romantic setback. But they're also looking to find peace with who they are, their flaws, their gifts and the lifestyles they've chosen. And it's also about relationships--I especially enjoyed going in depth about Mark's parents, a couple who just couldn't connect in a real way. His father's death in the book is heartbreaking, but it will make you think about how you want to relate to people in your own life and it certainly made me want to hear Beethoven. The characters are fully developed and the structure of the book is outstanding. I was especially taken by the ending happening on the "Great American Eclipse" day of 2017, symbolic for astronomy lovers. You will learn about art, music, video games, the nuclear bomb and what it means to work and love in the short time we have on this Earth. An excellent, brainy, read, I hope others will get as much out of it as I did.

[bob walenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brand new title caught my eye in a book store recently and was a total impulse buy. I knew nothing about it or the author, but it just looked different and smart. And it WAS! Brian Hall is a talented author, capable of weaving a spell as he tells a story and he is especially gifted with great dialog from his characters. He delves into smart topics, hits home runs with uncanny perceptions into human thoughts and feelings. Page after page was mesmerizing and clever and original in ways I had not encountered in a long time in a novel.

The characters here are several generations of a family: mostly scientists or academics or New Age hipsters/loners. They are all articulate, clever, thoughtful, insightful and damaged. Relationships and social graces seem to be a difficult issue with them all. They are obtusely brilliant, if there is such a thing. And they crash and collide together throughout their lives like silver balls in a pin ball, never sticking, just caroming and rolling away.

Like I already said, the dialog was especially strong and revealing. Good dialog makes a scene live in your imagination, and the different moments this story provides are stark and memorable. None of it is easy, but the feelings and emotions are left spilled all over the floor. I can't help but appreciate that aspect of Hall's writing.

But there was a huge downside to the novel. Kind of like an 'Episode of Seinfeld' it was mostly about nothing. Well that's not totally fair I suppose, because the story is about a lot of really important things about life, time and relationships. But there was really not much of a plot, in fact none. Despite travelling through generations and the entire life cycles of these characters, events were slim to come by. It opens and closes with a girl who is 'missing'.....not in a detective story kind of way, she just took off and didn't tell anyone. And her Grandfather had in fact abandoned her mother and ran away to live alone in an abandoned windmill in Denmark. And there are THOUGHTS of suicide ...... voice over artists at work ..... mind numbing descriptions of music and vinyl record collecting of classical albums of the past ..... tales of work on the early nuclear weapons of the past .... actors and people of all sorts of scientific and intellectual accomplishment. But very very little real story....not that there's anything wrong with that!!!!

Two MOST memorable quotes:

" At this moment, every cubic centimeter of space in the universe has approximately three hundred photons passing through it that are a remnant of the Big Bang.
A poet might call this the leftover cry of the universe being born.
In 1965, when my mother was stuck in the house with me, and my father was out in the yard hoping to see Telstar 2 fly over, I sometimes looked at the static on the TV screen when it was tuned to a dead channel.
Approximately 1 percent of that static was the echo of the birth of the universe, dancing in front of my eyes in the form of tiny silver spheres.
If only I had known.
Instead, I turned the dial to watch 'Lost in Space'. "

"The Moon is moving away from Earth about four centimeters each year, so in 600 million years, there will be no more total eclipses. Solar radiation will have increased by 5 percent, leading to an increase in global mean temperature of ten degrees Celsius. There's no way to predict greenhouse warming from this remove, but there's a good chance life will have retreated to the oceans by then. If not, then probably during the next 200 or 300 million years. Complex life on Earth is about halfway through its allotted span. What, too, are the chances that his life would occur at this halfway point?"

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Stone Loves the World,” by Brian Hall, Viking, 464 pages, June 8, 2021.

Mette, 20, is a programmer of visual effects for video games. She lives with her mother, Saskia, in Brooklyn.

Mette is a socially awkward young woman. She was recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop. She abruptly leaves New York and embarks on a bus trip to Seattle. She considers killing herself.

Saskia plans to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an astronomy professor in Ithaca so they can travel together to find Mette.

Mette travels across the U.S., then goes to her grandfather, Thomas, who formerly ran the commune north of Ithaca where Saskia was raised. He now lives in a windmill on a remote Danish island.

This is about physics, astronomy and video games. The characters have a lot of internal monologues and reminiscences of their childhoods. It isn’t plot-driven and it is slow-moving. The novel is also about loneliness across several generations and the strength of family.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for a review.

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suspect I'm going to be an odd reader out on this one. It's a big book and it takes patience. Much patience because there are so so many words. Mette has taken off on a Greyhound bus after an embarrassment, leaving behind her concerned mother Saskia, who reaches out to Mark, Mette's father, for help. Mark's life is described in a steam of consciousness in the first section of the book but it slips over important things like Mette and focuses instead on how he was bullied as a boy and his parents. Saskia, who does voiceovers for video games, is less focused on this sort of thing. Mark and Saskia join forces but unhappily so (of course). There's so much rambling and rolling around in people's heads that it becomes exhausting in spots. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. I didn't read Saskiad so Saskia's family was new to me, as was Hall's style. Fans of that novel will no doubt welcome this one.

[Mishehu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of this novel is 5-star brilliant. Hall is acutely sensitive at building characters and at limning their relationships to one another. The Stone is a terrifically well-written novel. Less one star, though, because it seemed to deflate in its closing section. By the end all steam exited the sails, leaving this reader both far less interested in the fates of the characters I’d come to know well, and relieved to be done with the book in review. Perhaps Hall’s generally not as skilled a closer as he is otherwise. A shame if that’s so, since he’s an immensely talented writer. But not caring for/about a novel in its closing pages is a pretty serious flag. I don’t think my impressions on this score should dissuade you from reading the book yourself (there’s a great deal to commend it), but don’t be surprised if your reading pleasure finds you limping across the finish line…

[Robert Fontenot · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I was embarrassingly deep into this book before I realized that it was a sequel to The Saskiad and even deeper in when I began to realize that I had actually read The Saskiad when it came out and then completely forgotten it. I mostly liked the character of Saskia but the characters Mark and Mette are written as hardcore math and science folk and when coupled with the stream of consciousness writing style, it ends up feeling like the author dropped a times-table, a textbook, and a diary in a blender and hit pulse. I feel like I've been consuming a lot of fiction about scientists lately so I know that these fact based info dumps can be done in a palatable way but here they came across as extraordinarily dry and just made me sleepy.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that came from a list my Uncle Tom suggested. This was a book about 3 generations of a family told in many disparate sections. The dynamics of how relationships develop and shape differently over time is a key to this book. The characters were a bit hard to keep track of for me, but the writing is good with fun use of language and the characters have a logical realism that are shaped by the professional careers of each in a CC way that lends depth of feeling and experience to the strangeness of the story told through out this book. It is a book with no conclusion, that mirrors the on going nature of all stories and seems to be a theme in the books I reading lately. Fun read, yeah for modern fiction.

[Doug Schaefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geraldine Brooks mostly said it best: “A brilliant, brainy book about physics, astronomy, video games, and the American Century” (from the blurb on the back dust jacket). More math than physics, which occasionally got too out of my league to truly understand, although the extended segment involving one character’s obsession with classical music was actually the most difficult part for me to get through. Also, even though one of the main characters is a video game designer, I wouldn’t say it really involves video games that much. It’s a great story that moves along at a good pace with complex characters. Definitely enjoyable and I’d read something else by this author again.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me a little bit to get into this one because of the non-linear storyline and changing narration. It was a little hard to follow at first, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I appreciated the insights I got into each character (some of whom I like far more than others). Also serendipitous was the ending, for me specifically - I finished the book on April 8, 2024, a date that comes up as the story ends!

[Zoe · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book mainly made me feel dumb, and I couldn't bring myself to care enough about each character to finish it. I found my eyes glazing over every passage about math and astronomy until I realized I had skipped entire chapters. I think someone smarter (and more patient) than me would appreciate this a lot more.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read. I would call this a multigenerational portait of neurodiversity from an insider’s point of view. The author must have firsthand experience with giftedness and all that that might involve in terms of managing the social and emotional challenges of being extraordinary.

But what does the title mean?

[Rebecca O’Dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a real way to explain the relationships of nerds and artists. I enjoyed the book and the characters quite a bit, the history really helped to make me understand how they turned out the way they did. A great story of family dysfunction.

[Rena]

ODD book

[KO · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of science and math so it could be a tiresome read for some. I really liked how it was weaves through the story of interesting and yet very flawed people.

[Vincent Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

What’s it all about? There is no single “meaning of life”; we each have our own. The trick is finding it.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a puzzle, a theorem perhaps, about what matters. Enjoyed each of the characters but occasionally had a hard time keeping them all straight.

[Jane Williams-grube · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tour de force; brilliant on many levels; exhausting to read but worth it.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

…And Tommy Loves This Book!

[Debra Moniz]

Liked it at first but got bogged down in all the physics and astronomy

[Lydia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its hard to describe this book. There is no plot, and it often felt like the author just wanted to showoff how knowledgeable he is on a variety of topics. But the writing was engaging - mostly. I skipped who passages about astronomy, classical music and mathematics. This quote from page 413 sums up how I felt the author was treating his audience: "She wonders if he'd be happy to sit here all day and keep slinging bullshit in her direction."

[marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Benjamin Lounsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Polymath Author Shows Us A Good Time

Mr. Hall clearly knows well or has studied thoroughly more subjects than most of us could ever master. He also understands psychology and human nature extremely well. And finally, he has a homey way of writing about his erudite subjects to make them interesting and even funny. If you decide to tackle this epic, be ready to read lengthy passages about things you never thought you would read about in such detail. But also be ready to spend several hours per day reading because you won’t be able to put it down until you reach the last page. It struck so ma

[Adrianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A colossal waste of time to read. Beautiful writing gone to waste on a shit-boring plot with too many prattling characters.
The book gives away the fact that the author -by trade- is a journalist. Rather than reading like a novel, it reads like several (varying) haughty articles from the New Yorker, mushed together and dragged behind the plot like cans on the back of a “just married” jalopy.
Despite the pretty words the novel comes across as a braggardly flex on the author’s ability to write and research topics (see: whole sections on mathematics and musical composition). Bonus points awarded for plot ties to Upstate NY.