Singer Distance

August 15, 2022
A math genius figures out how to communicate with Martians but not with the earthlings who love her. In Chatagnier's debut novel, humans have been exchanging messages with Martians since 1894 by carving giant symbols into the Earth's surface, filling the grooves with petroleum, and setting them on fire at the exact moment of Mars' opposition. The first message earthlings sent was three parallel lines, which the Martians answered with four parallel lines of their own. In subsequent oppositions, the Martians used a Socratic system of quizzes to teach humans the Martian notational system and increasingly sophisticated mathematics until nobody alive on Earth was smart enough to solve the extraterrestrial puzzles except Einstein, and finally not even he could. Then the Martians fell silent for decades, ignoring our puny attempts at communication. As the novel begins, in the winter of 1960, five MIT math grad students are driving west to dig Martian notation into the Arizona desert in time for the next opposition. The group comprises the narrator, Rick Hayworth; his girlfriend, Crystal Singer, the genius whose formula they're planning to beam to Mars; and two other men and one other woman. Chatagnier describes the scenery of the American past with lyrical zest, but he doesn't seem to have devoted much effort to imagining or researching what people's lives were like back then. In his fantasy version of the novel's timeline, unlike the same period on actual Earth, women, including women of color, are allowed to be mathematicians and scientists just like men. Women in his novel run telescopes and are professors at prestigious universities in more than token numbers. (In contrast, for example, in the real world it wasn't until 1959 that MIT appointed the first woman to its science faculty, and from 1965 to 1975, less than 5% of the graduate students in the MIT physics department were women.) After the Martians respond to Crystal's message, she buries herself deeper and deeper in her research, ultimately vanishing from Rick's life and public view. Her disappearance sets the scene for the novel's exploration of the difficulties of truly understanding the self and others. Chatagnier expresses this theme in descriptions of Crystal's research: "Her voice came into my mind...I heard her say: Light-years of distance separate us even from ourselves." For all the charm of these wistful musings, the plot makes little sense. (How has Crystal been supporting herself? Why hasn't some reporter found her long ago?) And the novel's ultimate revelation, when it comes, is a clich�. Lyrical writing and a suspenseful story fall apart when anachronisms and lazy plotting undermine them.

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Starred review from August 22, 2022
Chatagnier’s soaring debut novel (after the collection Warnings from the Future) centers on a group of five MIT grad students who head west in their attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings. In the early 1960s, Rick and his girlfriend Crystal, along with three friends Ronnie, Otis, and Priya, spend their Christmas traveling along Route 66. Crystal’s father, an academic statistician, told her stories when she was a little girl about Mars and the mathematical messages rumored in the early 1920s to have been carved into its surface in response to contact attempts. After scrutiny, she thinks she has solved the mystery of the latest Martian mathematical message and attempts to respond by planting flags in the Arizona desert. When lovestruck Rick realizes Crystal has gone missing, he searches for clues to her whereabouts and ends up looking for her in California. Chatagnier does an excellent job channeling the hippie students’ grit, joy, and constant self-awareness. Rick, describing the group in his narration, says they’re “dirty as beggars but we were grinning,” and he offers enriching development of all the characters as Rick incrementally solves the mystery of Crystal’s whereabouts. The elements of astronomy, numerology, love, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life are structured perfectly as each of the five commit to their “long-shot missions and desperate hopes.” Readers are in for a memorable adventure.

September 15, 2022
Chatagnier's imaginative debut is set in a world in which nineteenth-century earthlings discovered that life existed on Mars. In 1960, five MIT graduate students, including narrator Rick Hayworth and his girlfriend, Crystal Singer, set off on a cross-country journey to Arizona, where they intend to send a message to Mars. The only way the mysterious denizens of Mars will communicate is via mathematical problems, and it's been decades since Einstein solved the previous one. Crystal thinks she has the answer, and Rick will do anything to support her. Rick is utterly besotted with Crystal, and she claims to feel the same for him, but in the months following their mission, Crystal retreats, taking a postdoc position at Stanford before disappearing altogether. Rick eventually follows her to California, but he's unable to track her down, and in the years that follow, he finds himself unable to move on until a startling revelation gives him hope of a potential reunion. Blending mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and passion, Chatagnier has concocted a compelling science fiction yarn that will also appeal to general fiction readers.

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October 4, 2022

DEBUT Following the story collection Warnings from the Future, Pushcart Prize winner Chatagnier sets his debut novel in an alternative past, with Earth discovering in the early 20th century that Mars is inhabited. Communication with the Martians begins with monumental-scale writing in the desert, set afire, and the exchange of similar luminescent writing from the surface of Mars. These exchanges progress, all in mathematics, until the latest Martian math problems confound Earth. Cut to 1960, the novel's present day, when a hapless band of MIT grad students go to the desert to illustrate a proof, a solution to one of the Martian problems, by one of their brilliant members, Crystal. The group of five, led by Crystal's boyfriend Rick, use a van and agricultural equipment to draw the message to the Martians. They all become instant celebrities when the Martians respond with yet another math challenge. Rick and Crystal are in love but are then separated for 13 years, during which Rick discovers what Crystal has been hiding, leading to a different direction in communication with the Martians. VERDICT A compelling bildungsroman, set in a fictional past, that examines the interplay of obsession and personal relationships and reads like Jaroslav Kalfar's Spaceman of Bohemia meets Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow in its intersection of alternate space history, alien life, and singing.--Henry Bankhead

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