Aja Gabel’s 2018 debut novel, The Ensemble, chronicled four young orchestra performers navigating the cutthroat world of classical music. Her new novel returns to the realm of fine arts, but this time fuses art and science in a fantastical story that explores time travel and the mysteries of the universe.
Lightbreakers opens with a young couple who find each other in the wake of devastating loss. Noah is a quantum physicist obsessed with the secrets of time and consciousness. Maya is a visual artist focused on the nature of beauty, and the here and now. They’re happy newlyweds, for the most part, but the relationship is haunted by Serena, the toddler daughter that Noah lost during his previous marriage with a fellow scientist.
When an eccentric billionaire invites Noah to take part in a secretive experiment in the west Texas town of Marfa, he jumps at the chance. Maya goes along willingly and even excitedly, thinking this escape might be just what the couple needs to get away and start a family of their own. Maya is also intrigued by the thriving art community in Marfa, which is a globally recognized hub for contemporary, high-concept art, and she hopes the desert landscape will reignite her own stalled art career.
But things begin to unravel when they learn that the so-called Janus Project involves experiments on human consciousness that allow subjects to “reexperience” memories through folds in time. Noah is drawn to the experiment because he desperately wants to see his daughter again. As the project gets more complex and the experiments ever riskier, it stirs up complicated emotions for both Noah and Maya, and they struggle to find ways to communicate openly and honestly.
Maya and Noah’s marriage is characterized by their distinct perspectives as artist and scientist. Gabel’s beautiful writing explores that intersection, along with the painful experience of losing a child.
In one episode, Noah reflects on the life-altering experience of fathering a child: “Becoming a parent made real the abstract idea that life could be both sturdy and delicate, willful and mutable, here and then gone,” Gabel writes. “You had to hold on to it, but not too tight or it would slip away, and not too loose or it would fall away, and learning how to love that life properly was learning how to remake yourself around it, a person with the empty shape of another person inside them.”
Gabel also does an incredible job describing the town of Marfa, which is situated on the high plains of the Chihuahuan Desert. Thousands of art enthusiasts travel to the city each year to marvel at the works of Donald Judd, who was a leading figure of the minimalist movement and known for his geometric sculptures crafted from concrete or galvanized iron. This speculative novel is rooted in real-life mysteries like the Marfa Lights and the wild pronghorn who inhabit the grasslands.
Lightbreakers explores a wide range of topics ranging from environmental concerns to deep personal loss, and Gabel’s writing presents them all as worthy questions to ponder: How accurate is memory? Can we ever truly revisit the past? And how do we maintain human connections amid a world of ever-changing technology? A lot to think about in a novel to treasure.
