A middle-aged physics professor, Helen, receives a missed call from an estranged best friend, Charlie (Charlotte), which she returns immediately to no response. Soon afterwards she finds out from Charlie’s husband that Charlie had in fact passed away a couple of days before the call. Helen is a woman of science and does not believe in ghosts, but it’s hard not to hope for the impossible when it comes to the permanent absence of a friend dearly loved. Lost and Wanted explores grief, closure, female friendship, intersectionality, the cloistered world of Ivy league and academia, astrophysics, coming-of-age, conversational dynamics, parenting, and the tension of unexpressed romantic feelings, and it does that all with a sensitivity and self-awareness I found thoroughly absorbing.
There are many so strong moments within the novel. One of them is near the end, after the characters find the location of Charlie’s phone. Helen sneaks into Charlie’s family’s home (they were renting from her) to retrieve it, in order to search for any message Charlie could have drafted to Helen before her assisted suicide. It’s clearly wrong, but at the same time so understandable it was delicious to hold that tension within the reader’s mind — that sort of desire to have any sort of explanation, whether for Charlie’s treatment of Helen in the last few years, or what Charlie thought of their friendship. There was none, which, while not explicitly stated by Helen, rings as a betrayal and a final denial of closure. After that it is revealed that Charlie does mention Helen in her final letter to her parents, which, while paltry, is still a comfort of sorts, a last goodbye. I sat with that for a while, letting a kind of sadness pass through, from the loss of a dear friend, from ebbing friendships, from the force of feeling towards a friend that has either become unreciprocated or suppressed by the other side due to reasons unknown.
Another is when Helen re-evaluates her perception of Charlie’s marriage, a perception she shared with Charlie’s parents, that Charlie had not married someone of her level, aka someone highly educated or successful, that she had married to spite her parents. It’s a notion that feels that it would be taken for granted for someone with an Ivy league background, and I thought that Helen’s moment of realisation of Terrence’s strengths was moving and convincing: “I’d automatically agreed with Charlie’s parents, when I’d first heard about Terrence from Charlie, that he was somehow beneath her — now I realised how stupid that was. Which woman wouldn’t want to be with a handsome surfer who cared about his daughter’s education in math, and loved to cook? It was true that Terrence had gone to a two-year community college, did a job that had nothing to do with what he’d learned there. Wasn’t the kind of education Charlie and I had received simply a set of words and references that connected you to a group of people like yourself? In physics we say we do science for science’s sake, and that there is value in that. Our knowledge of our universe itself, from its explosive early inflation to its current growth rate, has become exponentially more precise in my lifetime. We could all give a quote to a journalist, or end an undergraduate lecture with a few sentences about scientific thinking as a key component of our humanity, and I think most of us really believe those words. When a practical application is available, though — the ramifications of closing the freedom-of-choice loophole for cybersecurity, for example — we rush to emphasize it. While someone services our car, cooks our meal, or bathes our children, the sentences and paragraphs about our fundamental utility spin out like magic.”
While secure in her abilities in physics and math, Helen is also incredibly human in her insecurities regarding her looks and social aptitude, as well as her reluctance in changing the state of her friendship with her long-time friend and crush, Neel, where she claims to savour the possibility of what could be. When Neel returns to Boston with a fiancee, she tries to suppress her disappointment, yet the understatedness of Freudenberger’s writing conveys so well her mixture of emotions — anticipation of Neel’s company, a sort of mental comparison with Neel’s fiancee, discomfort at trying too hard with her outfit at their engagement party.
Finally, I enjoyed the book being set specifically at the time of Laser Interference Gravitational Wave Observatory’s detection of the gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes, and the peppering of references to one model or another. Helen’s work is something that is strongly integrated with the novel, and the nerdy excitement from proving Einstein’s theory was infectious. There’s also a significant bit about Charlie’s undergraduate thesis on Dangerous Liaisons by Laclos, which I eagerly lapped up — I don’t pretend to have a theory about the symbolism of Dangerous Liaisons within Lost and Wanted, but I think in general I am seduced by the depth, passion, esotericism of academia; I love the lingo of different fields, and thinking about things because they are inherently interesting.
I have a minor quibble: the incident with the letters in the log — Exeunt — feels a little tacked-on, too much in the direction of something supernatural. I think the book could have left it at Helen and Simmi’s remembrance of a non-memory to retain that sense of something bigger than what humanity has discovered.
Rating: 4.5/5
— Lost and Wanted (Nell Freudenberger, 2019)
Melody stays a child 