Scan barcode
A review by karieh13
The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer
2.0
The premise of “The Infinite Tides” seemed too awful, too heartbreakingly coincidental to bear. The idea that a man, at the moment his lifelong dream came true, would lose his only child, and after the fact, his wife, seemed an idea almost too big to write about.
That turned out not to be true. The main character, Keith, is so mechanical, so incredibly hard to relate to, that by the middle of the book, I’d lost all sympathy for him. The author does a good job laying out exactly how Keith’s mind works (think zeroes and ones, parabolas and straight lines) – and yet Keith is so far removed from nearly all human emotion that it feels almost like a waste of time and energy to try and connect with this person that seems more like a machine.
“It had been just at the moment of his greatness. Of course it had. Were the intersection of vectors to coincide with some other moment, some other instant that was here and then past, would anything have changed?”
The distantness of Keith’s thoughts about the moment of his daughter’s death fits perfectly with his location at the time of the event – but the reader never gets any closer to him than that. Every time he thinks about his daughter or his wife – or the fact that he’s lost them both – his thoughts are so analytical that it is as if he is examining his life under a glass slide. Which is fine, I suppose, but it does present difficulty for any reader who wants to connect with the character.
At some times, Keith seems close to a recognizable emotion…but it then dissolves into facts/equations/solutions. “He did not clearly know where he had been when she had careened into the oak tree in his car. In orbit, somewhere, above Earth. He had occupied some stretch of fluid miles, but what did such a location mean? He had been on the surface during most of her cheerleading activities and had failed to attend a single event. Perhaps that was the true calculus, here as everywhere: the calculus of location and the understanding that the numbers themselves were possessed of a fundamental gravity comprised not of fluid motion but of fixedness.”
The other characters in the book were a bit more human and the description of the sameness of suburban life were interesting, but overall, what seemed like the perfect setup for a touching and emotional novel turned into more of a math textbook instead.
That turned out not to be true. The main character, Keith, is so mechanical, so incredibly hard to relate to, that by the middle of the book, I’d lost all sympathy for him. The author does a good job laying out exactly how Keith’s mind works (think zeroes and ones, parabolas and straight lines) – and yet Keith is so far removed from nearly all human emotion that it feels almost like a waste of time and energy to try and connect with this person that seems more like a machine.
“It had been just at the moment of his greatness. Of course it had. Were the intersection of vectors to coincide with some other moment, some other instant that was here and then past, would anything have changed?”
The distantness of Keith’s thoughts about the moment of his daughter’s death fits perfectly with his location at the time of the event – but the reader never gets any closer to him than that. Every time he thinks about his daughter or his wife – or the fact that he’s lost them both – his thoughts are so analytical that it is as if he is examining his life under a glass slide. Which is fine, I suppose, but it does present difficulty for any reader who wants to connect with the character.
At some times, Keith seems close to a recognizable emotion…but it then dissolves into facts/equations/solutions. “He did not clearly know where he had been when she had careened into the oak tree in his car. In orbit, somewhere, above Earth. He had occupied some stretch of fluid miles, but what did such a location mean? He had been on the surface during most of her cheerleading activities and had failed to attend a single event. Perhaps that was the true calculus, here as everywhere: the calculus of location and the understanding that the numbers themselves were possessed of a fundamental gravity comprised not of fluid motion but of fixedness.”
The other characters in the book were a bit more human and the description of the sameness of suburban life were interesting, but overall, what seemed like the perfect setup for a touching and emotional novel turned into more of a math textbook instead.