Rating: 
Summary: Diagnosis: boring
Review: I have read "Einstein's Dreams" many times, often recommending it to friends with short attention spans. I read "Good Benito" more than once, also. Lightman struck me as a powerful storyteller; his colorful use of imagery, movement and time painted a nice, full picture. I was disappointed with "The Dianosis". I never said Lightman had a way with character development, but in the other books there were ideas and philosophizing enough to entertain. This book was just boring--I think it could have been written 100 pages lighter.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: I was really looking forward to reading this book after reading a book review in a major newspaper. While originally taken with the story line, it degenerates into a story I couln't wait to be over. I would not recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A book too hastily dismissed
Review: As is often the case with writers of the magnitude of Alan Lightman who set a benchmark such as his "Einstein's Dreams" early in their writing career, subsequent novels are placed under such intense dissection that they can fall by the wayside, establishing the author as a "one note song" man. Reviews that disparage "The Diagnosis" can prevent many readers from the pleasures (?) to be found in this book. Lightman has chosen a theme that is terrifyingly real in 2001: what happens to the cloned automatons that have been produced by this age of information? The main character starts out as being very familiar to us all - a man driven by exacting time frames, scheduled advances in a competitive career involving computer inormation, depersonalization to the point of communicating with his son by email, subject to his wife's infidelity via an online romance. In his highspeed race to continue competing he suddenly confronts nature in the form of a mugging with resultant amnesia and deterioration of his nervous system (his prior overactive network of neurotic adaptation) and gradually the complete deterioration of his physical body. Forced to confront all the demons created by his parental Information Age Wizardry (organized Healthplans, physicians who realte to computer screens rather than the patient, colleagues who are quick to point out his diminished productivity, etc.), he liquifies into an angry helpless drooling and empty man. His only real conection to the son he "loves" is via an email pirating of a Plato Online course. This is a sad but too true evaluation of where we happen to find ourselves in this cold, distant world of instant information and gratification. Lightman writes beautifully and many pages of this novel read with fine poetic perception. But the main reason to read this excellent book is to become aware of just how much damage we have done to our spiritual life - before we each step into the shoes of Lightman's characters. Sobering and insightful.
Rating: 
Summary: A Book That Is Certainly Not For Everyone
Review: Having read Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams" first and felt it was, perhaps, the best book I had ever read and then read Lightman's "Good Benito" and concluded it was among one of the worst books I ever read, I both expected and hoped that "Diagnosis" would be somewhere in the middle. This book does take its share of risks (as reflected by the wide array of reviews). For example, there is a parallel plot to the main plot that takes place in Ancient Greece (or, possibly, the main plot IS in Ancient Greece and the contemporary story is merely the parallel plot). In many analogous ways, this is like a sophisticated joke (or, perhaps, analogous to watching Dennis Miller commentary on Monday Night Football) in that if you get the whole parallel plot, you see that it is indeed a nice stroke of literature and quite well-done. However, if you do not get the parallel plot, it is like missing the punchline to a joke in that everything that preceeded doesn't make any sense and seems (as well as amounts) to a waste of time. However, "Diagnosis" is also a book with flaws. Perhaps the most glaring is that the character of Bill Chalmers' wife (whose name is prtected to protect the innocent) is woefully developed. Lightman suffered similar difficulty developing the main female character in "Good Benito." As a book, I would rate "Diagnosis" as a qualified success. Its strengths lie with the parallel plot and it wonderful depiction of Diagnosis-mania in this country. Its weaknesses are poorly developed characters and its stoggy plot development. I must also reaffirm a view expressed by a previous reviewer of this book that stated that the "Kafka-esque" First Chapter is perhaps one of the best chapters written this year.
Rating: 
Summary: Diagnosing this book, Chalmer's disease, a welcome challenge
Review: Toni Morrison once said in an interview that she was amused by a reader's exclamation: "Your books are very hard to read!" Her classic response was, "They should be; they are very hard to write!" Likewise, Lightman does not serve up a story that is easy to digest. This book is neither a mere "whodunit" nor a polemic suggesting that one spirited interpretation can be taken from the book. The number of reviews that mistakenly see this as some simple mystery are allowing them to be distracted by the same yearning for easy-answers that afflicts Chalmers. The diagnosis of his disease, and that of the deeper meaning of the book, are both meant to be a challenge. If one looks for the answer just as one deciphers a simple mystery novel, then one is just as inattentionally blind as Chalmers' doctors.
Rating: 
Summary: Maybe I misunderstood
Review: I didn't like this book at all. It didn't seem to go anywhere. I felt I was always on the verge of something that never arrived. And the whole greek part. Completely boring. And then the book just ends. Terrible.
Rating:
Summary: Why?
Review: I agree with all the negative reviews.
This book is horrible. But I'd like to
pose a question: why did the author
towards the latter part of the book
suddenly start lifting sections
from James Joyce's story, "The Dead"?
It's as if he had lost total confidence
in his writing ability and so turned
to someone else's.
Rating:
Summary: A novel of despair and dark humor
Review: This is a novel about the numbing our of lives. What is our disease? We don't know. What is the cure? There is no cure. Is this the price we pay for the guilt we feel for never being man enough? How is it that we fail in the midst of success? We are sick, but what is the disease? What is the diagnosis? Where is the pain? It is not physical. We feel it in our minds and in our souls. We are tired, weary. We know the prognosis--it is death, of course--but what is the cause? In this tortured comédie noire, Professsor Alan Lightman gives us his vision of the materialistic horror that is our lives, the information and subsistence overload that is suffocating us to death. Bill Chalmers, second level management cog, begins to unravel. First his memory goes, and then is recovered, but then the numbness sets in, in his fingers, his legs. And it advances. We watch as he fills up with bile, bile, everything is bile. We are angry, but like Bill Chalmers we cannot lash out. We are married to the corporation, as Chalmers is to Plymouth where he "processes information." We do not learn that he does anything more specific. It doesn't matter what the information is. He processes it. The company's motto is "The maximum information in the minimum time." The vagueness of the content of their information mirrors the emptiness of our lives. More information for what? Faster for what? To what end? We do not know. The doctors, who would diagnosis us, Lightman assures us, are like gleeful clowns in their vast ignorance, playing with their high tech toys, a cyclotron for PET scans, a "cell separator...like a portable washing machine...," spinning dials and writing articles for the Annals of Psychosomatic Disease, comparing notes with colleagues over the Internet, by cell phone. Meanwhile the patient is but a curiosity, a subject for examination and study. Lightman uses the empty dialogue of our lives for comedic effect. We say nothing to one another and we answer with nothing, although sometimes we cry out, and life goes on. Chalmers's wife is numbing herself with alcohol while she conducts a bloodless affair by e-mail. Like Chalmers and his wife, we are estranged from life itself. "He hated the mall the same way he hated himself, except that he hated himself more because he was a part of the mall and he knew it" (pp. 343-344). Yes, the mall and our vast hunger to consume are symptoms of our disease. Chalmers is angry (as his shrink Dr. Kripke so astutely discerns, although that is all he discerns). Chalmers cries out in his mind: "I'm going to break every machine on this planet...I'm going to rip the phones out of the wall" (p. 303, no exclamation marks). But he never has and he never will, and that is "the problem" that has become "an illness." How real is Lightman's "diagnosis" of our society? Consider this, the fastest growing class of disease in this country is autoimmune disease, e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, etc., diseases of unclear cause in which the body is apparently assaulting itself. (Compare Lightman's delineation on p. 274). Juxtaposed among the pages is a tale of the last days of Socrates and of one of the men who condemned him. Somehow Anytus, the ancient Greek, and Chalmers, the American, are brothers in their strange failure amid the trappings of worldly success. Anytus killed Socrates, the flower of Grecian civilization. Chalmers is killing himself. Why? Again, they do not know. We have a stupendous wealth of information, but all of it is useless, as Mrs. Stumm, the wife of one of the information executives, tells Chalmers as she waves a hand at a stack of papers, "What is this crap?...Useless. This stuff is useless." (p. 255). She speaks the truth, but they cannot hear it. Lightman's art owes something to the imagination of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, in the latter chapters, and something to the spirit of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 throughout. There are shades and echos of the black humor of Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West. This is a fine novel with a strong sense of the spiritual emptiness of our corporate existence. One senses that Lightman feels that in love there is a flicker of hope, but that is all. The mind goes, like the mind of Chalmers's mother, and with it, the possibility of love. Or perhaps there is a moment of redemption in the intense experience of the minutia of our lives, as when Chalmers studies and lovingly draws the leaf he sees outside his bedroom window. Only this and nothing more interrupts the bleak and lonely landscape of Lightman's vision.
Rating:
Summary: The Diagnosis
Review: I too wish you could rate a book as 0. The plot was slow, boring, and never seemed to go anywhere but downhill. The only mildly interesting part was the sokrates. I agree with others who figure the wife was in on it but frankly, I didn't care by the end of the book anyway. If you have a choice of reading the toothpaste tube ingredients or this book, I'd take the toothpaste tube ingredients.
Rating:
Summary: Diagnosis needs a prognosis
Review: I loved Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams". I thought it one of the most creative books I have read so I had high hopes for "Diagnosis". Medical science at the beginning of the thrid millenieum is still in it's infancy. Any one who has witnessed a loved one slowly die from a cancer that cannot be found until it is too late or someone who slowly deteriorates from "uknown" causes can identify with the inaccuracy and undependability of the modern day doctoring profession. We watch too many miracle cures on television and hear too much hype from medical professionals. Our hopes are high that any malady can be cured. Doctors are very good at some things: setting broken bones, diagnosing common viruses, relieving pain from injuries. And doctors are well meaning and optomistic for the most part, perhaps too much so -- optimism that is galloping far ahead of the actual applied science. That is the theme of "Diagnosis". My problem with the book is not in it's theme, I wholeheartedly agree with that. It is the progression of the book, very detailed in the beginning, then skipping fowrard faster and faster. Unfortunately, as the pace quickens nothing else changes. There is no progress to the theme, no progress for the character in the book, no advancement of a new thought or idea. Both character and reader are caught in a web. Perhaps the author himself could not figure out how to save his character, he would not be the first to fall into that trap. There is no resolution, no enlightened moment, no epiphany here. In the end I hoped Lightman would give us something: a fresh idea, a new approach, something to give us hope, something to grasp on to. Alas, he just sets us adrift with nothing.
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