Rating: 
Summary: Amusing...
Review: Lethem probably upset quite a few members of the elite academe across North America with this one. His characterizations are right on the mark in my opinion and very very funny.In typical Lethem style the actual boundaries of the tale seem more important than the main characters. There's not much development here but they do provide a good way to string together some very weird secondary plot and people developments. His treatment of 'modern love' is a little to close for comfort when one looks around at holds many young couples together. A good rainy-Saturday-afternoon bit of brain candy. Enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: relationship counseling from the Nth dimension.
Review: Make that four stars if the subject matter really appeals to you. The book is carefully crafted, and reflects the general care Letham takes with his novels. However the amazing imagination behind it is so well disguised as the mundane that you fail to appreciate it until the end. I miss the in your face strangeness of his previous work.
Rating:
Summary: It was okay...
Review: My girlfriend loved this... I thought it was okay--a fast read, a bit odd, defintely not like other stuff I read. We (my girlfriend and I) exchanged the books we had just read. She gave me this, and I gave her Watership Down. I think she got the better end of the deal... she thought I got the better end. *smile*
Rating:
Summary: physics, metaphysics, reality, perception, Love and Lack
Review: Professor Soft has created something spectacular at the physics department of his university. It has captivated the attention of the entire university, but grabbed one physics professor in particular - Alice Coombs. She lives with our narrator and her boyfriend, Professor of Anthropology Phillip Engstrand. Ironically, it is Phillip's job to study the interaction of people at a university. Lethem takes us through the story of the "Lack," what was first thought to be another universe but is now seen as something of a void. This Lack, though, seems to have a personality. When certain things are put into the Lack, the Lack seemingly absorbs them. Other things pass through and fall out on the other side of the table. A story unfolds in which Alice and Phillip's relationship is strained by her attention to the Lack. With the added twist of neurotic dyad Garth and Evan, two blind men that spend all their time together and in detailed conversation, the book is funny but also in a roundabout way introduces some important questions about the nature of reality and perception. Lethem brings us a funny story while at the same time exploring some important human condition questions and even a few questions about the nature of the universe. Whether it is a study in metaphysics, physics, or anthropology, As She Climbed Across the Table is a humorous exploration that was fun to read.
Rating:
Summary: physics, metaphysics, reality, perception, Love and Lack
Review: Professor Soft has created something spectacular at the physics department of his university. It has captivated the attention of the entire university, but grabbed one physics professor in particular - Alice Coombs. She lives with our narrator and her boyfriend, Professor of Anthropology Phillip Engstrand. Ironically, it is Phillip's job to study the interaction of people at a university. Lethem takes us through the story of the "Lack," what was first thought to be another universe but is now seen as something of a void. This Lack, though, seems to have a personality. When certain things are put into the Lack, the Lack seemingly absorbs them. Other things pass through and fall out on the other side of the table. A story unfolds in which Alice and Phillip's relationship is strained by her attention to the Lack. With the added twist of neurotic dyad Garth and Evan, two blind men that spend all their time together and in detailed conversation, the book is funny but also in a roundabout way introduces some important questions about the nature of reality and perception. Lethem brings us a funny story while at the same time exploring some important human condition questions and even a few questions about the nature of the universe. Whether it is a study in metaphysics, physics, or anthropology, As She Climbed Across the Table is a humorous exploration that was fun to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful - Bizarre story.
Review: The first Lethem I read was Gun with... and I fell in love with his writing style immediately. As She Climbed Across the Table was my 2nd book and my favorite. It is a great love story - boy meets girl boy falls in love with girl - girl falls in love with non-human void that absorbs everything. It is science - fantasy and love all rolled into one. This has been the book I have found myself buying again and again as gifts for friends and relatives looking for a new author to try. I highly recommend this book. I was not able to put it down and have read it several times.
Rating:
Summary: Think "Salvadore Dali does Alice in Wonderland"......
Review: Think "Salvadore Dali does Alice in Wonderland" and you'll have a pretty good idea what's in store for you with this unusual and inventive remake of the "Alice" concept. Narrator Phillip Engstrand is a university professor who has made a career out of studying academic environments. Engstrand is obsessed with Alice Coombs, a particle physicist engaged in a bold attempt to replicate the origins of the universe. That effort results in Lack, a singularity of unusual scope and behavior which Alice has become obsessed with. Analyzing the twin obsessions cited above from a particle physics viewpoint (Alice at one point says, "Some people think the observer's consciousness determines the spin or even the existence of the electron." Phillip tells her, "I'm not sure I really exist except under your observation.") Lethem examines various aspects of love. Because of Alice's obsession, Phillip becomes obsessed as well, particularly when he learns that Alice has tried to enter Lack, unsuccessfully. This failure merely inflames her obsession. Why does Lack only accept certain items? Where do they go? Phillip decides that only chance he has is to enter Lack himself-with unusual and unforeseen results. Lethem is a gifted and creative genius. This is an engrossing and fascinating story-for those not overwhelmed by the arcane and often mystical aspects of physics and metaphysics that color and complicate the story. While this is not Lethem's best work it is far from his worst. This nover requires the reader to put in a bit of effort to get into the spirit of things and hang in there at time when the tale is at its most esoteric. Don't let that stop you. The effort will be richly rewarded.
Rating: 
Summary: Half-baked
Review: This is the scatterbrained novel of a man in love with words, but not with ideas. The science is punk, the plot incoherent, and one doesn't give a hoot for the characters.
Rating:
Summary: No lack of imagination...
Review: We all lack something. And, in Jonathan Lethem's clever As She Climbed Across the Table, we learn that sometimes lacking EVERYTHING can be very appealing. Meet Lack. Lack is a black hole, a rift in the time-space continuum contained in a physics lab on a California college campus. But, far from being a nonentity without taste, Lack prefers certain things over others: an argyle sock it absorbs, while a bow tie passes right through it. Now meet Alice. Alice is a particle physicist who lives with Philip. As much as Philip loves Alice, he cannot pull her away from the thing that will not love her back: Lack. Alice tries everything from cutting her hair to painting self portraits, all in vain as Lack rejects everything she offers it - including herself. Part comic relief and part reminder of the type of void we can understand, Lethem introduces Garth and Evan, a blind pair of men who constantly measure everything - from time to distance to texture to spatial relations. At first, Philip finds their rapport amusing, even charming. But he soon learns to appreciate them as friends as Alice slips away from his life, drawn by the inimitable, unfathomable Lack. The story ends with... well, you'll just have to read it. Lethem is at his best in this book - quirky, clever, funny, and right on the money when he tackles big issues (like the meaning of life) and small ones (like petty academic rivalry over who gets "Lack time"). In As She Climbed Across the Table, Lethem casts a bemused eye over the state of modern relationships and the voids we have to live with every day.
Rating:
Summary: Doo-do-do-do, Doo-do-do-do, Doo-do-do-do, Doo-do-do-do
Review: You are about to enter The Lethem Zone. In this soap opera spun in a cyclotron, Philip, an academia anthropologist, is in love with Alice, a particle physicist. But Alice is in love with Lack, a void in space, a rather benign black hole that sits on a table sucking in what it likes and spitting out what it doesn't. The hard-nosed head of the physics department, Professor Soft, is jealous of Alice, so he enlists the charismatic Italian Carmo Braxia to reclaim Lack under the guise of grand unification. Meanwhile, the libidinous pyschoanalyst, Cynthia Janger, tries to seduce Philip away from Alice. But Philip joins up with Lack to win over Alice together. It all concludes in a kind of Oedipus-over-easy happy ending in which our hero mistakes the love of a mother for the love of a lover, proving that you can't judge a void by looking at the cover. If this all sounds loony, it is just a normal day in Brooklyn for Jonathan Lethem, an author with one of the most fertile imaginations in authordom. Although it is not his best work, "As She Climbed Across the Table" is a good read, full of Lethem's unhinged humor and dead-on scientific satire, right down to Evan and Garth, the quantum roommates. As a companion piece, I recommend Lee Smolin's "The Life of the Cosmos." Like "As She Climbed Across the Table," it speculates a Darwinian evolution of universes connected by black holes. You may find it somewhat difficult to distinguish Smolin's serious metaphysics from Lethem's hyperbolic humor. The latter is infinitely more fun.
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