Victoria Alexander's Naked Singularity

Reviewer Magazine , San Diego

No. 14, March 2003, p 3

Not only is she a talented novelist and a Ph.D., but Victoria Alexander, like the heroine of her first novel, used to be a stripper in New York. Her novels are fascinating because they incorporate so many different perspectives. They're sexy, smart, and creative.

Victoria is known for her work in "teleology," which she describes as "the study of the belief that things are meant to be." She was trained by leading physicists at the premier center for complexity sciences, the Santa Fe Institute. She is also an arts community leader as co-founder and President of New York based Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities, which has featured programs with such diverse participants as science writer, Stephen Jay Gould, film director Larry Clark (who did Kids and, more lately, Ken Park), actor Willem Dafoe, veteran film director Norman Jewison, photographer/ music video director Yelena Yemchuk (of Smashing Pumpkins fame), and professional skateboarder Jason Dill, who was recently featured on The Osbournes.

Okay, so Victoria does a lot of different things. What is different about her work? In Naked Singularity Victoria uses physics to explore questions about the origins of order or the existence of a god. She relates this to difficult moral decisions like euthanasia. The novel tells the story of Hali whose terminally ill father asks her to help him commit suicide. She agonizes for months then finally decides to secretly slip him a fatal dose. But her first attempts fail, and she is forced to accept the help of a shady hospice nurse who's either fallen in love with her or is out to get something. It's a beautifully written story and well as a dramatic one. It would have been easy to write a senselessly bleak postmodern version of these events, but she doesn't. She doesn't regress to 'nostalgic humanism' or 'essentialism' either. The story reflects Victoria claims that Derrida's post-structuralism is a theory based on a dubious understanding of the origins of structure. (So all of you who said you would "wait for the movie" rather than read Derrida's painfully boring books, don't feel obliged to see the new documentary on his life that's just come out.) Victoria says, "I want to go forward. I want art to get over the slump it's been in for the past fifty years or more."

Post-structuralism has been compared, by its own inventors, to masturbation without climax. If you look at it this way, then you can see why someone like Victoria might get tired of it. It's nice to find someone actually achieving something in the art/literary world. S.K.