Los Alamos was one of the three principal sites of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to design and build the world's first atomic weapons. To review, Los Alamos was the site responsible for designing and building the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using fuels supplied by Oak Ridge and Hanford.
Although Ms Nesbit calls her book a novel, it's unlike any novel I have ever read. To me, it fell into a grey area between fiction and non-fiction. It reads more like an aggregated, collective memoir. She tells the stories of the wives who accompanied their scientist husbands to a remote mesa in New Mexico, the minutiae of living in a town under construction, war-time shortages, raising children, building community, being cut off from families and the rest of the world, and not knowing why they were there, except for "the war effort." Her voice is that of all the wives; "we wondered about..., we wore ...," etc. She tells of the aliases the families were given and the distracting answers they were given to answer questions that never should have been asked. She speaks of "the Director" and of "the General" without ever saying "Oppenheimer" or "Groves," but we know who she means and we share her secret. And at the end, as the scientists and their families deal with what they have created, say goodbye to colleagues and neighbors, and prepare to return to their universities or seek new jobs, we share some of their conflicted emotions about the experience.
When my wife and I first visited Los Alamos in the early 1970s, we had already lived in Oak Ridge for nearly four years and had heard many stories about life during the war years. Entering Los Alamos was almost like entering a slightly different Oak Ridge. The houses were of the same age, many of the same design. The greatest difference seemed to be that the deciduous trees of Oak Ridge had been replaced with pines. And the stories Nesbit tells are both the same and different from the Oak Ridge stories; it's like entering a slightly different Oak Ridge.
Thanks for this suggestion. Looks like a book I would enjoy.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll be hornswoggled, Jim! You are back at least briefly. I'm glad to see something got you back to posting. I look forward to more, my friend.
ReplyDeleteI just got the "Girls of Atomic City" in my apartment and it's sitting on the shelf waiting for me to read it and now here is another that sounds so interesting. I need to pick up speed on my reading I think. Thanks for the review Jim. I hope all is well with you.
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you again. I shall certainly investigate...
ReplyDeleteSounds interesting. That halfway between fiction and non-fiction is a weird but necessary place to be when you're writing of real events and people but adding your own speculation into the mix. (She said feelingly..)
ReplyDeleteLooks like an interesting book. And an interesting blog. Following you as A Bit About Britain.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a book I would like. I recently read novels about Frank Lloyd Wright and the love of his life, and about the author Stevenson and his wife; they were excellent books. I like the combination of biography and fiction.
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