How am I supposed to have sympathy for characters that don’t bother showing any personality ?

Notes on infinity, to me, feels pretty empty for a book that seemed so long to finish, a reason for that might be that Austin Taylor fails to tell us about the main subject of the story : Zoe and Jack. Except for big landmarks of their partner/relationship the author constantly forgot about them as individuals or as a couple, except maybe mid-book when Taylor seems to remember that Jack exists and throw a long and dark backstory at him…

Instead of writing about her characters the author takes multiple paragraphs to explain Zoe’s theory, which I would argue most reader either fail to understand or care for. The irony is that when it comes to basic explanations or descriptions, they are completely dumped away : if you’ve never set a foot in an american university or don’t know anything about start up in the US you might quickly feel lost (wtf is Kendall and why am I supposed to know that it’s the hot place for tech startups ?!)….

Moreover it’s hard to really understand what this book is trying to say as the author never dug enough on anything : the academic system is frustrating for the characters but never critiqued and much more so right at the end, if Zoe struggles as a woman in stem she never voices it and the fact that she doesn’t feel legitimate is brushed over rapidly, even the main subject that is the scientific method is never much more than a plot device…. As a result the book feel more like a draft than a full fleshed story.