In her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein bridged the gap between the comedy of manners and the novel of ideas with a deftness that suggested an American Iris Murdoch. In The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, Goldstein accomplishes an even more impressive feat of architecture, interlacing high romance with an elegant meditation on the conflicting claims of reason and desire. When the ethereal Eva Mueller, a professor of Plato and Spinoza at a small college, undertakes the philosophical education of Michael Fields, who is handsome, clever, and only twenty, she suddenly finds herself in an emotional whirlpool—and in the process discovers the terrifying extremes that unbridled passion and inhuman intellect have led her to in her past.
