What makes Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, a sprawling political novel by Lydia Millet, so extraordinary is that it succeeds in doing something that's nearly impossible. Through a perfectly balanced blend of fiction, fact, and magic realism, it not only seduces and transforms its readers, as all successful fiction must, but it also educates through a compelling narrative that maintained my interest for five hundred pages. The novel's true subject is the legacy of the first atomic bomb, though its narrative subject is how three men change the lives of Ann and Ben, a middle-aged couple who live in Santa Fe.
The bomb is a risky subject for a writer to bring to fiction. Unlike most other historical events, the deployment of the atomic bomb is freighted with ideological polarization. At one polarity, people believe it saved lives and brought an end to the war; at the other, it was a scientific test unleashed on an unsuspecting people whose leaders were already moving towards a declaration of surrender. In other words, it's an event about which most people have chosen sides and formed an opinion.
But Millet avoids the muck of already formed opinion by making three narrative decisions: First, she focuses on post Hiroshima events and second, instead of trying to bring actual events into a fictional narrative, she keeps the facts as facts and places them directly in the text, not as footnotes, but as discreet paragraphs. These facts, always placed with care, appear infrequently enough they don't disrupt the story line. The third thing she does involves magic realism. She imports the three scientists who were instrumental in creating the bomb into a 2004 setting, long after each of them has died. Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, and Robert Oppenheimer come back from the dead and Szilard and Oppenheimer organize themselves to work for the cause of nuclear nonproliferation, a cause most readers will be sympathetic with because the unnamed narrator supplies what we assume are true and alarming facts about post 1945 weapons generation in the U.S..
"Under the presidential administration of George W. Bush steps were taken to begin research and development of so-called 'usable nukes.' (Other nicknames included 'bunker busters' and 'mini-nukes.') These weapons, it was argued, might be employed in the battlefield to take out hardened targets.
"At the same time the White House and elements in Congress pressed to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons in conflict. To ensure the military supremacy of the United States, proponents of nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories urged the U.S. to build nuclear weapons small enough not only to deter, but to use" (473).
When the dead scientists return in 2004, they come directly from 1945, Oppenheimer sporting the same porkpie hat and Szilard just as attracted as ever to sweets. Fermi is the only one who seems affected by the transition, preferring to hide in a room as they encounter the complexities of the new century they have been thrust into. Sliding into the twenty first century, they are unmoored and as dependent as children. This is another tactic Millet employs to gain authority over her story. In 1945 they were respected physicists working against the clock to create a nuclear bomb before the Nazis, Szilard at the Met Lab in Chicago, and Fermi and Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, but in 2004 they are unknown and homeless. They lack experience with computers, cell phones, or any of the cultural phenomena we take for granted. Ann, a librarian in Santa Fe, New Mexico who had seen Oppenheimer in her dream, and her husband Ben, a gardener, offer shelter and bring them into their lives, though Ann is initially more receptive to them than Ben. Because Millet transposes the scientists into contemporary life while keeping their well-known personalities intact, she shakes up what is an already resolved story. 1945 visiting 2004: it's a brilliant strategy.
The factual paragraphs, tracing the changes in the arms race since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, make the reader understand why the dead scientists felt the imperative to return. Even so, each plays a separate, independent role. Fermi turns to nature, working on gardens with his host, while Szilard quickly masters digital media and manages communication, shoulder to shoulder with Oppenheimer who, in a characteristically restrained manner, becomes the face and voice of their cause.
Because Millet keeps factual material factual, but ushers in narrative magic by bringing the three physicists into the twenty first century, she escapes the polemics that surround her subject. And because the relationships between Ann and Ben and their three unexpected houseguests stay at a high level of tension, the momentum rarely sags. Soon Ann and Ben leave their normal routines, travelling with the physicists to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then onto Washington, and as the cause for nuclear nonproliferation grows larger and more unpredictable, they are pressed into new and disturbing awareness. Here is Ann at a crowded rally that has turned violent:
"You always had to return to social life, she thought, defeated, because that was where events took place: but it was also the only place tragedy happened. People were taught to love themselves and each other instead of the world, themselves and each other and nothing else, believing all truths were their own. This was what had gone so dead wrong" (400).
In an age when so much contemporary fiction is about personal truths, a novel that looks beyond the self to the wider political world and insists the reader do the same (this, after all, is the effect of the factual paragraphs), is something to celebrate. As time pushes us, inexorably, into a future that seems ever bleaker, our tendency is to turn inward. But this important novel argues for a consistent, steady outward gaze.
Millet, Lydia. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005.
Filed under: Fictionalizing an historic figure