From the author of the best-selling Einstein's Dreams comes a wonderfully original, deeply moving, and wryly funny novel about the clash between the absolutes of science and the vagaries of human experience.

Bennett always knew he would live a life of science. From the homemade rockets and experiments of his childhood to the complex equations he solved as a professor of physics, his vision has transformed the uncertainty and frailty of life into an order and beauty that he inhabits with deep satisfaction.

But his vision betrays him, revealing a profound incompleteness, an inadequacy to confront the contradictions of his life: the black maid who raises him and loves him but cannot welcome him into her own house, the mentally absent father who wishes he'd died a hero in World War II, the self-destructive wife who invites Bennett's cruelty.

As Bennett struggles between reason and intuition, he slowly learns to allow the imperfections of daily life - the chaos he has worked so hard to control - to broaden his understanding of the world and his place in it. Written with lyrical sparseness, hilarity mixed with sadness, the story of Bennett's struggle becomes both a beautifully rendered portrait of the emotional life of a scientist and a resonant tale of the disillusionment that haunts us all.