Stella Maris

If you are a novelist who hangs around with physicists and mathematicians long enough, it's bound to work its way into your books. I still don't understand much of what Alicia Western (and her brother, Bobby, in the previous novel) are talking about when they declaim on these subjects, but the other 80 percent is penetrating and insightful. I especially like in Stella Maris that Alicia gets an interlocutor who stands in for a better-than-average intelligent reader. The novel consists entirely of a dialogue between Alicia and the shrink. It ends with me wishing he had mentioned The Myth of Sisyphus as an argument to keep on living.