I had never heard of Millet until recently, when I read that she was really great. So I picked up her acclaimed longish novel and sort of hated it from the beginning. It was a little hard to get into from the beginning. Once the premise began to unfold, I found it pretty appealing, but I didn't love the way she structured the book or her manner of writing.

The book is often a bit preachy, which I suppose is ok, but I felt like it could be done better. Often I thought the book felt like a mashup of Franzen's Freedom and some of Powers's books that try to ram interpersonal conflict up against some scientific conflict or notion. The result tends to be sort of unbelievable characters I'm not invested in and a general sense that while the aim was lofty and worthy, the execution didn't live up to it. This sort of book is always very disappointing.

Unbelievable characters were one of the chief flaws in this book. I can buy the fantastical idea that the fathers of the nuclear bomb have somehow been zapped into the future to go on a crusade against nuclear weapons -- I like the idea, in fact -- but I feel like when you're mixing absurdity with elements supposedly conforming to reality as we understand it, you sort of have to get the more prosaic reality bits right. So much of this book, and especially the relationship between Ann and Ben felt wooden and basically expedient, as if Millet knew she had to include sections in which people acted like normal people but didn't really know how to write them. In other words, it often felt like your standard potboiler but with lofty ambitions that it came nowhere near living up to.

It seems like another case here of every but me falling down over a wonderful book. Maybe I just didn't get it. Maybe what I read as clumsy writing was intentional, part of some bigger literary purpose I'm too dim to have picked up on. ( )

novels this ambitious (nuclear science military-industrial complex American religion), fascinating, imaginative (Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard come back from the dead!), and funny (great satire of the sun belt rich) don't come along all that often. They should be read when they do.

But, as everyone who has read this book has pointed out, OPRH could have been cut by a quarter without really losing much of anything. The problem is: which quarter do you cut?

* Some readers could do with a great deal less of Ann and Ben's relationship. Their argument is generally not that Ann and Ben could be eliminated--they play an important narrative role, at least--but that there is far too much of them given how uninteresting they are.

* Some readers could do without the history of the USA's nuclear program. Their argument, in short, is "I hate learning. Keep facts out of my novels."

* I don't think anyone would want less of the final quarter: the story of Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard coming back from the dead. All three are wonderful characters; their actions dramatize perfectly the problems of scientific knowledge, social ignorance, political activism, and religious belief. That said, some would probably prefer a more convincing ending. Millet could have left it open, but this is a roman a these, and I understand why she ends as she does.

* Some readers could do without the philosophizing that the characters get up to, particularly Anne, who is given to thinking things like "If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other.... it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy. If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself," (271). Is this satire? Ann/Millet must know that bodies don't know themselves, right? That bodies react to external stimuli without mediation? So if a country were more like a body, not only would it not know itself, it would probably start a war every time someone brought one too many bottles of wine back from the Rhine? (= geopolitical version of a mosquito bite). Later we get even more immortal thought along the bad-Rilke lines of wouldn't it be great to be an object so then you couldn't choose things and then you'd be content, why don't people just accept this objecthood and embrace it??? Because, Ann, then we'd all be dead.
Ben is guilty, too: "It is the world with its animals... tides and seasons, he thought: it is the world that gives us such a soul as we have. It gives us life and we all it our own," (274). If this seems a little less silly than Ann, don't worry, Ben will get absolutely moronic twenty pages later (293): "If the world gave us our souls, why were the souls so impoverished?" Because, you know, the world is so naturally full and perfect. "We have obscured the world, he said to himself... we have forgotten what the world is. We believe we are it. We can't see past ourselves to the world, he thought." Right, that's it! The world is perfect, it gives us our soul, but we've done something wrong with those souls, though I suppose the souls should have caused us to act as we did and... the naturalist's rather theological dilemma: if everything is natural, what causes evil?
Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard also get into a bit of the old cod-philosophizing, but at least with them it's often just a reaction to how much the world has changed since their last memories of it in the mid-century.

Now, you might think I've tipped my hand fairly heavily here, as to what I'd like to see less of. Yes, I like the very short bits on the history of nuclear weapons.

Obviously, you think, I object to the philosophizing. But not so, my friend! If I were to cut, Ann and Ben would get the axe. It's important to have some kind of domestic arrangement here, it holds the book together, but we only need connective tissue. Millet just doesn't make the very mild ups and downs of their relationship matter--in fact, the only time I was at all interested was when I realized Ann's obsession with the scientists could be read meta-narratively, as Millet's obsession with the scientists. That fits well with the most intelligent aspect of the novel: how to make the impossible choice between complete domestic happiness, and social activism. But it's a bad sign for the romance angle when it functions best as commentary on another part of your book.

Now, that said, the philosophy expounded here is *horrific*. I'm fine with books that philosophize, at great length. I object, however, to books that

i) stick words and thoughts in the characters' mouths, when those words and thoughts are fairly obviously those of the author. This is what a narrator is for: to say things the author thinks. Millet is too far into close third person for that to work. This is a technical issue that can't be overcome.

ii) go on at great length with *bad* philosophy. This is my third Millet book, and I'm fairly sure she's setting herself up as the Tolstoy of deep ecology. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to make the case, for goodness sake, at least make it well. There's no reason to become a positivist ("what is is the world, and the world is right"). You can stop just short of that, at nature mystic; at least then you're not claiming that there's any rational basis behind the feelings outlined so clearly by Freud in his work on religion.

iii) expound a philosophy that directly contradicts the book's form, as here. You can't be a positivist, and write close third person. There is no close perspective in positivism, only bodies being pushed around.

That's an awful lot of criticism, so let me repeat: novels this ambitious, fascinating, imaginative, and funny don't come along all that often, and they should be read when they do. And, of course, I might be wrong: Millet might be presenting the deep flaws in ecological thought, and not affirming that thought itself. In any case, Millet forces you to think in ways that the average novelist can only dream of. As I said: Tolstoy of deep ecology. ( )

Hard to get into at first, but as the mysteries start unfolding, it becomes mesmerizing. Very unique plot and storytelling style. ( )

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard are transported to Santa Fe in 2000 immediately after the Trinity testing at Los Alamos. With Ann, a librarian, her husband Ben, a gardener, and Larry, a very rich countercultural layabout and his colorful friends, they set off in a trailer on a quest to convince the world of the evils of nuclear weapons.

The story culminates at the Washington National Monument, where Oppie, Fermi and Szilard are carried off by cranes (the ones made by the girl in Hiroshima?). It's a farce full of librarian jokes, and big swabs at the fundamentalist Christian right. Millet does, however, treat the scientists with respect, honoring their legacies both good and evil. Ann is prone to philosophical ponderings—solitude, responsibility, existential questions. She ends up in a smaller town than Santa Fe, cataloging images for the Very Large Array.

The author's outrage at how the bomb has shifted the whole moral tone is strongly and effectively conveyed. She interrupts the text in places with statistics on bomb tests, degradations to the environment. However, perhaps it is a little overwritten--it's 500 pages and could easily lose 100 of them. ( )

Great idea, interesting characters, not overly interesting. ( )