Radiance

Mark Perdue has so many problems that when he starts feeling chest pains on the tarmac at LAX, it dawns on him that a heart attack might be an efficient way out. Once an eminent physicist, he hasn’t published or had a new idea in a decade. The younger professors at UC Berkeley pity him, and he’s taken to using the back staircases to avoid their looks. At home, his wife has been inconsolable since the recent late-term abortion of their afflicted fetus. And he can’t deny it any longer?he is decidedly losing his mental faculties to chronic Lyme disease.

Now Mark is visiting Los Angeles with his ambitious daughter, Carlotta, so she can attend a ?Celebrity Fantasy Vacation,” in which she is promised three days and two nights of the rock star lifestyle. On stage, Carlotta sings her way to a new self-confidence, giving Mark a glimmer of joy in her sense of victory. But then she disappears with her newly acquired paraplegic boyfriend to take an excursion to the Hollywood sign and gets them all arrested, Mark included. Mark now faces a night in jail?and maybe a hint of what he really needs to be happy.

Louis B. Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Ordinary Money, Particles and Luck, and most recently, California’s Over. He lives in the Sierra Nevada.