Lightbreakers

The first chapter of Aja Gabel’s Lightbreakers opens: “In the beginning, there was happiness.” The scale of this declaration—with its drama and sense of creation and possibility—is a fitting frame for the story that follows. Lightbreakers follows Noah, a physicist living in Los Angeles. When Noah is asked to move to Marfa, Texas, to study time travel as part of the billionaire-funded Janus Project, his wife, Maya, agrees to move with him. Maya, a painter, is entranced by the new landscape and ecology of Marfa. Maya and Noah’s marriage has always been characterized by the difference in their perspectives, which come from the realms of art and science respectively. Now, they have more to navigate, including the possibility of parenthood and increasing echoes of their pasts invading their present—especially Noah’s previous marriage to a woman named Eileen, with whom he had a daughter, Serena, who died very young. As the goals of the Janus Project become increasingly attainable, Noah grows fixated on his greatest wish: to go back in time to see Serena again. The experiments get more and more complicated and stir up painful emotions of loss and grief for both Maya and Noah. The chapters alternate focus between Noah, Maya and Eileen, who is now a biology professor, and comes to see the Janus Project’s work at Noah’s request. Gabel raises a range of questions relating to environmental concerns, family matters and individual voice and collective responsibility, and the prose vividly engages these ideas. Her sentences move fluidly from the small and personal to open statements on what it means to be human in a world so altered by ever-changing technology. Readers will love the novel’s impressive pacing, and the ideas it presents about the intersection of art and science will linger in the mind.