Let’s just jump to the question you really want to ask: Does Alan Lightman’s new novel, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, live up to the enormous accomplishment of his first one, Einstein’s Dreams? Comprised of chapters devoted to the dreams young Albert Einstein had while working on his theory of relativity, Einstein’s Dreams was the “it” book of 1992. One could find it both within the backpacks of lit majors and atop strollers of soccer moms. It wasn’t hard to see why. Lightman had a genius for merging seemingly incomprehensible scientific topics into illusive narratives laced with hypnotic lyricism. After reading it, everyone felt smarter and a little more human. Consuming the book in one sitting as a young teenager, Einstein’s Dreams didn’t so much change my reading taste as reveal it. The novel was the perfect first date to a lifelong relationship with fictional fabulists like Borges, Eco, and Calvino. It showed that a fictional world could still be a fantastical place even without fire-breathing dragons flying overhead. Following a series of more traditional narrative novels and non-fiction works that failed to have the impact of his fictional debut, Mr g seems conceived, conceptually and marketing-wise, to deliberately echo Einstein’s Dreams. When put side-by-side, both titles create a sort of cosmic Rashomon; Dreams focused on the secrets of the universe from man’s point-of-view, Mr g is a memoir of the creation as told by God. As a novel, unfortunately, Mr g is a still-born prose universe brought forth by a well-meaning creator who is in over his head. Einstein’s Dreams succeeded in part because the ethereal nature of dreams freed Lightman from worrying about typically essential novelistic elements like characters and plot.  Lightman’s attempt to incorporate those same elements in Mr....