You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Louis B. Jones, the author most recently of Particles and Luck, published by Pantheon. He wrote Ordinary Money, his first novel, and was at that time one of the first

guests on my show, and so this is a reunion of sorts.

I guess one of the things I like most about particles in luck is that it asserts something I already believe,

which is that we live individually in separate universes and that we are incapable of

perceiving and interpreting each other's worlds, each other's surrounds.

And this in turn leads to a certain amount of loneliness in your characters and a certain level of

bizarreness when they attempt to bond. Can you talk about that?

It's funny. I wouldn't have thought my book asserted that. In fact, I think what I,

these two guys in my book, Mark the brilliant physicist from Berkeley and Roger, the unlucky pizza parlor owner, they do live in separate universes, but that what I was interested in was the tangency and the friction and trouble at the tangency.

And I guess, Mike, this particular protagonist is an isolated person. He's kind of a science nerd, and his reflections are isolated

more than most. Yes, and to some extent, for instance, when Mark, Mark Purdue, the physicist,

picks up a toy belonging to Roger, his neighbor, the old-fashioned pizza shop owner's children.

He's fascinated by the toy as it becomes an object of science.

When it leaves the child's hand as a toy but enters Mark's paw as an experimental

subject.

And that's what I guess I mean, that the objects in this world passed from character to character are going to be transformed

by their perceptual field.

...