Ratner's Star

Don DeLillo · 1976 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

A fourteen-year-old who has already won a Nobel for his work in mathematics is flown to a windowless research colony and asked to decode a pulse arriving from a distant star. The scientists around him speak in disciplines that no longer connect, the corridors curve, and the signal keeps refusing the meanings assigned to it. DeLillo's longest early book pushes the comic-encyclopedic manner further than anything else he wrote.

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