Victoria N. Alexander author of “Naked Singularity” and winner of the Washington Prize for fiction explores the depths of a woman’s mind that replaces religion with science and must find the reality of her father’s cancer and death.
The leading character Hali McDonald is expected to carry on the family tradition started by her own father and grandfather.
Assisted Suicide
“If free will shows itself in the effort to change what is inevitably underway, then you are free, Dad. Enjoy your humanity. But there are some who would rather invoke Fate than be doomed to ruminate on what might have been. Easier to attribute death to a mysterious purpose than to think it might have been avoided,” confesses Hali.
The apple of her father’s eye, Hali is chosen from her two other sisters to help him commit suicide as his terminal illness progresses. Hali and her father research methods of assisted suicide and the legal actions that could be brought against Hali.
“Time is working without reason; tritium emits a particle; a universe begins; or water freezes. The as-if-it-were haunts empty space. There is a hesitation, then the door is shut, the die is cast, the story writ. I once thought God governed these thresholds,” says Hali.
Author Alexander thrusts the setting of her book into the Bible belt of Texas to shape the characters. Hali’s mother is a religious God-fearing woman that drives a wedge between her family and organized religion. Hali’s father flirted in and out of his children’s childhood with instances of love and tyrannical temper; consequently, this childhood turned her away from religious beliefs and gave her the mind set to pursue her university studies in the scientific field of teleology.
Alexander’s inspiration to create her character’s background is derived from her own personal studies. Alexander has a Ph.d in English, specializing in narrative teleology and the relationship between art and science.
“Wove into ‘Naked Singularity’s’ metaphors and narrative is a profound understanding of current ideas on chaos and complexity,” said James P. Crutchfeild of the Sante Fe Institute. “It renders esoteric constructs concrete, and in a setting none of us can escape.”
When Hali’s father discusses the different methods of suicide available, Hali accepts what she is expected to do. But when the time comes, emotions and a childhood remembrance of God come into play.
Hali’s love for her father creates a twisted paradox and she seeks help from her father’s male hospice nurse to assist in the complicated suicide.
The book cover elaborates, “Naked Singularity” as portrait of love between father and daughter, done with grace and humor and without sentimentality. That statement is highly disagreeable.
The sentimental implications in the book are secrete and complicated, “involving misplaced love, manipulations and a slow and painful end. Singularities are believed to lurk at the hearts of black holes, which conceal their existence from the outer world. A naked singularity would be a singularity bereft of a concealing black-hole shell, and therefore visible, in principle, to outside observers,” says Hali.
The only things other than singularity that will be left naked after reading this book are your emotions.
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