This is fiction, but just barely. It's a somewhat impressionistic group portrait of the women married to scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico. This is the lab where the atomic bomb was developed.
J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes. Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).
I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group. One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot. Of course it does. Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed. I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.
The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives. Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers. Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.
I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today. Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.
J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes. Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).
I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group. One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot. Of course it does. Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed. I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.
The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives. Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers. Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.
I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today. Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.
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