Cox, Richard: The God Particle

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Richard Cox's The God Particle is told from multiple points of view, but principally through the eyes of its two good-guy male protagonists. The first is Steve Keeley--a super-charged businessman type who's looking to gain the vice presidency of his company within a few weeks of the book's opening, and looking to propose to his girlfriend within twenty-four hours. His path will eventually cross that of Mike McNair, the brilliant physicist in charge of a 12-billion-dollar independently-funded super collider in Texas aimed at discovering the "God particle" of the book's title, a theoretical particle physicists believe gives mass to other particles.  The book opens promisingly: readers quickly feel a sick sense of dread as Steve, on a business trip to Switzerland, is pursued by an overly aggressive female employee whom we suspect--and whom he suspects--might very well "tumble off her precarious ledge of good judgment and fall into the Fatal Attraction abyss." But nothing comes of this, and more unpleasant events propel Steve toward his true fate, a fall from a third-floor window that leaves him with a serious head injury. He undergoes brain surgery and survives, but during his convalescence Steve begins hallucinating and finds that, among other things, he can sometimes read people's minds.

Steve's story eventually becomes the less frequently visited of the book's two storylines. We read about Mike McNair's work and his incipient relationship with a certain Kelly, an attractive anchorwoman with whom he exchanges emails laced with scientific and religious musings. One cares about Mike and wants his relationship with Kelly to work out, but in the end what happens between the two does not matter very much to the story. And while some of their weighty philosophical back-and-forth is necessary to provide readers with background information about Mike's work, it tends to slow the narrative down, particularly when they continue the discussion as the book's denouement approaches. In the end, Steve's and Mike's stories intersect, as Steve's hallucinations, he begins to think, are somehow related to the God particle, though precisely why he and the book's bad guys converge on Mike's super collider at the same time was never very clear to me. By the book's end, meanwhile, Steve has become a secondary character, and the people who filled out his story at the book's beginning--his parents, his amorous employee, his would-be fiancée--have been mostly forgotten. After an unsatisfying ending one leaves the novel feeling that the story never quite came together--that several characters in the book never fulfilled the promise of their introductions.