In the Field : A Novel
Author(s): Rachel Pastan
In 1920, having persuaded her resistant mother to send her to college, Kate Croft falls in love with science. Painfully rebuffed by a girl she longs for, and in flight from her own confusing sexuality, Kate finds refuge in the calm rationality of biology: its vision of a deeply interconnected world, and the promise that the new field of genetics can explain the way people are.
But science, too, turns out to be marred by human weakness. Despite her hard work and extraordinary gifts, Kate struggles, facing discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. At the same time, a love affair is threatened by Kate’s obsession with figuring out the meaning of the puzzling changes she sees in her experiments. The novel explores what it takes to triumph in the ruthless world of mid-20th-century genetics, following Kate as she decides what she is—and is not—willing to sacrifice to succeed.
Review(s):
"An inspiring story of triumph against the odds in a historical based loosely on the life of Nobel-winning scientist Barbara McClintock... spirited. This swift story educates as much as it excites."
"The novel, sensual, stirring—suspenseful . . . a story splendidly imagined, but with all the dimension and complexity that comes from the author’s original fascination and respect for the real-life character."
“. . .offers a compelling journey through the frustrating, stymied, yet often fascinating world of scientific innovation. . . . Pastan displays the distinctly human side of scientific discovery—its many pitfalls, thrills, and missteps.”
"With In the Field, Rachel Pastan (Alena) offers a compassionate, clear-eyed story of self-determination, love and science. In the Field excels in its multifaceted view of a complex woman: scientist, lover, friend, student of life in both biology and philosophy. Readers will be better for time spent with this patient, tender, loving examination of a life devoted to examination of life. Kate is a character who will stay with readers for a long time."
“Rachel Pastan has written a compelling and compulsively readable tale about a complex woman’s path to success in biological science—showing us, through subtle social conflicts and in lucid evocative prose, the difficulties of entering any field as an unconventional, impassioned participant.”
“Rachel Pastan’s In the Field is a thoroughly engrossing and timely adjacentto-reality story about many things at once, both intimate and ‘public.’ I was most compelled by its reminder that the pursuit of scientific discovery challenges its actors with painful moral dilemmas, dramatic choices at every turn. Her Barbara McClintock stand-in travels a road littered with so many boulders that her ultimate ‘success’ is a cheering but complicated destination.”
Praise for Alena: "Alena is so eerie and elegantly suspenseful that I could see myself rereading it, the way I reread Rebecca every few years or so."
"Alena is often a brilliant takedown of the self-serious art world, rendering it helplessly camp by sprinkling some of its august and/or provocative names..."
"In her luminous and sure-footed new novel, Alena, Rachel Pastan has taken on a daunting task: borrowing the basic story of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, transporting it to contemporary times and setting it in an isolated art museum on Cape Cod."
"Rachel Pastan's Alena is at once a meticulously reconstructed death scene and an intelligent conversation about the nature of art; this skillfully crafted novel, which sustains the tension of a ghost story, is both an homage to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and an insightful meditation on our obsessive preoccupation with death—simultaneously creepy and entrancing."
ISBN: 9781953002037