The Physics of Sunset Galley with Color Covers

by Jane Vandenburgh

A novel that concerns adultery between a married Jewish architect and an almost-divorced poet--in Berkeley, no less--had better have a sense of humor about its subject. Fortunately, The Physics of Sunset does. Yes, Jane Vandenburgh populates her tale with characters named Alec and Gina and Carlo and Veronique; yes, they all have glamorous occupations such as poet and painter and experimental musician; and, yes, they dine at Chez Pannisse. But into the mix, the author stirs a bracing dollop of irony and not a little satire. Take, for example, this commentary on Berkeley What one did in order to demonstrate that you were a successful Berkeley couple, Anna noticed, was manage to stay together long enough to get the family's portrait done by Elizabeth Smythe and therefore have irrefutable evidence. And then there are the chapter titles--spiky little headings, such as "Technically Daylight" or "Suicide Haiku" or "Schmutz," that add a frisson of anticipation of what is to follow. What does follow is the history of two marriages, and the point where they intersect. Architect Alec Baxter and his wife, Gina, have entered a lull in their relationship; Gina, an artist, has become so involved in her latest venture, Video Family , that "her love for this project--she called it 'Bungalow'--was so intense, her love for her own family paled by comparison." Though Alec is proud of his wife and of her dedication, he is also beginning to think "vaguely of other women." Enter poet Anna Shay, a neighbor whose own marriage to her musician husband, Charlie, is on the rocks. Over a period of years, Alec and Anna--both East Coast transplants to Berkeley--are drawn to each other and finally into an affair that threatens to shatter the careful balance each has achieved in life. Though The Physics of Sunset is not a particularly long book, Vandenburgh doesn't rush Anna and Alec--or the reader--into this affair. Instead she carefully lays the groundwork, introducing us to her protagonists' pasts, to their friends and passions and preoccupations, before finally allowing them to indulge in some very kinky sexual adventuring. Indeed, one could describe this book as an erotic novel for intellectuals, for in between the graphic love scenes are meditations on subjects as diverse as physics, architecture, and ethnography. In her second novel, Jane Vandenburgh has taken an old subject and given it a uniquely imagined new twist. --Alix Wilber

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published May 25, 1999

About the author

Jane Vandenburgh is a fifth-generation Californian, who says, “My writing concerns itself with place — both temporal and geographic — and how place entwines with personal history. I’m interested in what’s its been to be a Westerner and a female and a member of Generation Huge, the 77 million who came of age just as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements were causing the culture of the U.S. to drastically change.”

She has taught literature and writing at U.C. Davis, at Georgetown and at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, and has been a Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary’s in Moraga, California.

Married and the mother of two children, she is also the author of the novels, Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset, the nonfiction book, The Architecture of the Novel, and the memoirs, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, and most recently, The Wrong Dog Dream. She lives in Point Richmond, California.

Reviews

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretentious

[Silvergirl354 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I have been complaining recently about how the books I am reading are good, but don't have a truly moving beauty of language that I have been craving. This one does. This is a wonderful book. It's definitely my sort of thing, it's a bit nerdy, and has a Jewish bent to it. There are lots of references that it makes me happy to get. :) But what makes it wonderful is that it is just so well written. It's achingly gorgeous. All the characters, and the observations, and the way metaphor is used without hitting you over the head about it. The way a mother's withdrawing from her family into her work is shown by her increasingly strange and unnourishing dinners. And the feeling of being caged by your previous accomplishments portrayed through an architect who lives in his own house, which is his greatest success. Everything in this book is seen in such clarity, and with a certain light. I reread paragraphs just to hear them again in my head. The two main characters are Anna and Alec - both married to other people, with children - who have an affair. There is a huge amount of sex in this book. Kinky sex. Anna and Alec have an odd relationship, and there is a distinct element of dominant/submissive in it. Alec positions Anna, directs her what to do, threatens her, hits her. It has a violent edge, but it is all concentual. There is an anal sex scene which was both beautiful and disturbing. I was surprised, because the sex doesn't begin until maybe two thirds of the way through the book. But once it begins, it is central. In a way this makes sense, though. The characters all live in Berkeley, CA, which operates (in the book at least) as a village or small town. Anna and Alec's relationship can't really exist outside the bedroom, because they can never appear in public together. Everyone knows them. They only truly begin to understand themselves through each other, and they only know each other through sex, so it has to be central. But despite that, it is a complete book. You are brought into the families of the characters, their relationships with their parents and with their children, and with religion, and all sorts of smaller details. You see the world as they do, ironically, through a book, because the way they see the world is in numbers and science, with words used to distort and conceal things. Anna's calling as a poet combined with her distrust of language and her related attraction to a withdrawn architect color all that is seen in the book, and also subtly comment on the inability of the reader to ever truly understand what is going on, either in this story, or in life.