THE PHYSICS OF RELATIONSHIPS

Reading Group Questions

1.    In allowing Danielle to stay and establish her jewelry business was Lexi being too lenient? When Danielle overstays her welcome and sets up shop, Tasha says she’s “scamming” her mother (Chapter 5: p.37print / p.77digital). Is she correct on some level?

2.    At one point Lexi declares that she had achieved a sort of Zen enlightenment. As she put it, “I needed to do nothing more than to eat my toast and jam, to drink my tea … and to carry on.” (Chapter 6: p.43/93) What do you think of her declaration of “enlightenment”?

3.    Was Lexi’s friend, Amy, justified in leaving her husband? (Chapter 12)

4.    What do you think of Amy’s assessment of Danielle? “She’s shrunken, physically and emotionally. She’s like a wraith, flitting about the house.” (Chapter 14: p.88/197) Do you agree with her campaign to bring some “joie de vivre” into her life by tempting her with food and wine?

5.    Was Lexi right to get morally indignant when Amy kept Andrea’s business card after their meeting at the museum? (Chapter 15: p.96/216)

6.    Should Lexi have seriously considered Amy’s proposal to live with her and her husband, Phil? (Chapter 25: p.146/335) Consider what she would have gained and what she would have lost.

7.    At one point, Lexi asked Amy, “Do we expect too much of our men? Do we expect them to read our minds?” (Chapter 33: p.190/439) How would you answer that question? Do women, in general, need to be more forgiving of men? Or do you agree with Amy: “If we help them, tell them what to think and do, they’ll never change. They’ll never get better.” 

8.    In Lexi’s shoes, would you have let your ex-husband back into your life? (Chapter 29) Why? Why not?

9.    Lexi’s son seems to argue that the human brain is simply a computer. Lexi seems to hold that human consciousness is qualitatively different than computer “consciousness”. (Chapter 31: p.173/399) In the age of A.I., this debate will undoubtedly continue. Where do you stand on this question? Will computers ever have human-like consciousness?

10. Lexi quotes Proust: “The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.” (Chapter 40: p. 220/510) What do you think Proust meant by that statement? What do you think it meant to Lexi?

11. Lexi compares life and relationships to physics concepts. Yet she also confesses that she doesn’t understand modern, quantum physics. Did you find her comparisons apt?

Here are a few quotes to refresh your memory:

This was the law of entropy at work, the second law of thermodynamics that states that any isolated system naturally evolves toward disorder. And, while I was fighting a personal battle with entropy, I had no energy left to extend that battle to my whole house. (p.22/42)

But I learned that she [Amy] was capable of secrecy. I could not undo that knowledge. That constituted a small disturbance in the force field that bound us together. Would it have a ripple effect that would magnify over time? (p.102/230)

In any rational theory, we [ex-husband Greg & I] would have been particles that repelled each other. Or to put it another way, the atom of our family had been split, and the resulting energy had been released long  ago….. But there it was, an unexplained attraction. (p.207/480)

It was as if he [Greg] were a comet, a castoff from an earlier explosion. Yet forces were drawing his orbit ever closer to me. (p.209/483)

12.  In the end, Lexi finds herself alone again. She reconciles herself to her alone-ness with two thoughts: (1) That she still has people in her orbit, to whom she is connected “by various forms of love, blood, and obligation.”(Chapter 39: p.213/493) (2) She intends to fill the emptiness in her solitary life with a commitment to writing…writing as Proust did, to discover what is real. (Chapter 40) Is Lexi just justifying her lonely life? Or is she truly satisfied with her new reality? How do you imagine her life going forward?