Changing Light: A Novel

Changing Light by Nora Gallagher was a delightfully surprising debut novel—a richly satisfying story, artfully and lyrically told, with profound emotional and intellectual overtones. Tangentially, this is a love story. But more directly, it tells the tales of different life-changing moral dilemmas that three characters must resolve as their lives intertwine during the spring and summer of 1945 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

At the center are two polar opposites: Eleanor Garrigue and Leo Kavan—an artist and a nuclear physicist. Off to the side and pulling each of the other two main characters into a curious triangle is Bill Taylor, the local priest. Eleanor is a woman who has temporarily fled an over-bearing husband and promising art show more career in New York City to find personal freedom and artistic inspiration living in the solitude and grandeur of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just over the hill from Los Alamos. Leo Kavan is a world-renowned Czechoslovakian physicist who is brought to Los Alamos by the United States government to work as a top scientist on the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb. As the local Episcopal priest, Bill Taylor is duty-bound to be Eleanor’s spiritual confessor and advisor, but he is also strongly attracted to her as a woman.

This is a short novel. Gallagher does not waste time developing each main character completely as an author would have to do if this were nothing more than a love story. She gives us just enough information so that the reader feels comfortable filling in the rest. Gallagher expects intelligent readers—readers who are happy to participate in the storytelling by creating their own plausible back-stories and plot resolutions from tidbits of information thrown in to the text to spark the imagination. Don’t we all do exactly this in real life whenever we meet someone new? This technique helps focus the reader’s attention away from the love story, toward the true purpose of the work. But don’t get me wrong—the love story here is completely believable, satisfying, mature, and enchanting—it is just not the focus of this book.

The “changing light” at the core of this novel is more than merely the beautiful artistic light that saturates the Los Alamos countryside, providing Eleanor with inspiration for her paintings. Gallagher wants us to focus on the far subtler inner light—the guiding moral compass—at the core of each character’s being that changes during the course of the novel. Thus the title is apt and points toward the message of the work as a whole.

I look forward to reading more novels by this talented author. show less