Lightbreakers
Aja Gabel
Riverhead Books
What would you do if you could relive the past? Would you go back and see someone who isn’t here anymore? Make a different choice at a major turning point in life? Invest in Google?
In Aja Gabel’s newest novel “Lightbreakers,” protagonist and quantum physicist Noah is recruited to work on the Janus Project to help unravel the secrets of time travel. The catch? He’s a lab rat, not a scientist, and he’s tasked with reliving his own memories with his daughter Serena, who suddenly passed away as a toddler.
The novel rotates between Noah, his current partner Maya and his ex-wife Eileen’s perspectives. Through them, Gabel paints a portrait of people who struggle to move on after things go wrong. Noah is remarried but consumed by his grief, and as a result, he fails to show up for Maya or prioritize their relationship. Eileen is dating someone new, but can’t help but ruminate on her past relationship with Noah. Serena is a ghost that metaphorically haunts them both.
In the last couple of years, there have been a growing number of soft sci-fi books exploring time travel, such as “All This and More” and “The Ministry of Time,” and others that explore memory, such as “Meet Me at Blue Hour.” “Lightbreakers” manages to be both.
When Noah relives the past, he’s living his memory of the past, not necessarily what actually happened. It’s an interesting take on the rules of time travel. At one point, he travels back to a pivotal conversation when Eileen tells him he should major in physics. He tries to alter the timeline, but even though he tells Eileen way more than he should about the future, she responds simply with the same thing he remembers her saying the first time, as if he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary.
But according to Eileen, his memory of the whole conversation is wrong. He misremembered the justification for why he should major in physics entirely. At first, Noah is crestfallen; what does that mean for all the work he’s been doing at the Janus Project? But Eileen doesn’t see it that way. Memories, she says, are made of people’s experiences.
“All of it [the different experiences] happening at once, the truth of it somewhere in the middle, the objective truth not even important at all,” she says.
What’s important, she continues, is “that you heard me say what you needed to hear. I heard myself say what I needed to hear. That’s the truth.”
Likewise, readers of “Lightbreakers” will hear what they need to hear. Gabel walks readers through grief, not in a linear way, not the way people tell you it works, but in all its messiness, nonsensicalness and confusion. Noah and Eileen self-sabotage, lash out and ice each other and their new partners out sometimes, but they’re so deftly written and relatable to anyone who’s dealt with loss.
Some might take issue with the way the novel sits in the middle of literary fiction and sci-fi. Those who are accustomed to the former might find the physics confusing. Those who love the latter might find the core of the book much too deep into the character’s relationships and inner lives. I believe that’s the beauty of the book. “Lightbreakers” is unashamedly part sci-fi adventure, part love story, and all heart.
Despite the sad elements of the book that ruminate on characters’ pasts, “Lightbreakers” is a deeply hopeful book. At its core, the novel is a call to the present to look toward the future. A glowing reminder that we don’t have to be defined by our pasts. We have our tomorrows too.
