Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Human Traces draws heavily on a reader's scientific reasoning and intellectual imagination. It's even more taxing to merely hold the book. In both size and content, Sebastian Faulks' 557-page novel could be mistaken for a college textbook.
The action begins in late 19th-century Europe as two young men, Thomas Midwinter and Jacques Rebiere, embark on parallel careers in brain-doctoring. Psychology is a nascent field, and as the budding scholars set about ordering their romantic lives, they simultaneously navigate academic life at the birth of a new discipline.
Faulks' unwavering embrace of medical history is admirable, because fiction writers so often shy away from science. At moments, Human Traces profits greatly from this focus: There are isolated passages of gruesome and thrilling anatomical detail and episodes of medical casework that read like the best detective fiction.
But all this comes at the cost of an 18-page speech in which our central doctor "reflects on 25 years in psychiatric practice."
Non-fictional concerns are often the backdrops of great literature (Victor Hugo will be forever identified with the plight of the poor, Leo Tolstoy with land-use economics), but Faulks allows the scientific theme of his book -- exploring why "madness [is] the defining human disease" -- to become the foreground. What might have been a sweeping medical-historical epic becomes a treatise with a meandering plot splash-painted on top.
Much of the novel's dialogue reads like lines from a summer blockbuster in which scientists stiffly convey their theories solely for the audience's edification: "Ah yes, the nervous system," one character blithely says, before expounding at (unfortunate) length.
Faulks, whose Birdsong was an international best seller and whose Charlotte Gray was made into a 2001 film, is an otherwise masterful writer undone by infatuation with his subject matter.
The academic focus of Human Traces results in a novel leeched of human flavor. For a book so keen about human psychology, it is oddly lacking in human emotions, the wondrous stuff that brings us to fiction in the first place.
Schrefer is the author of Glamorous Disasters.
Human Traces
By Sebastian Faulks
Random House, 557 pp., $25.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
