By Kerryn Goldsworthy
The Heart of Henry Quantum
PEPPER HARDING
The Heart of Henry Quantum, by Pepper Harding is a stream-of-consciousness love story.
SCRIBE, $29.99
It is December 23 and Henry Quantum is walking the streets of San Francisco looking for a bottle of Chanel No. 5, a gift at once luxurious and impersonal, as a Christmas present for his wife of 15 years. This quest gets derailed when he bumps into his old lover, Daisy, but Henry is also self-derailing, for he is a former student of philosophy and his mind wanders constantly. It's a reader-accessible American Ulysses, in a way, with a one-day time frame and a one-city setting, using modified stream-of-consciousness and focusing on marriage, love and infidelity. Pepper Harding is the pseudonym of an experienced author, a fact the publicity for this book makes much of. While this disguise and other overegged moments of cleverness are more irritating than otherwise, it's still a well-structured and well-written love story.