Name: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
ISBN: 9780156031035

Lydia Millet

When a shy librarian in Santa Fe sees Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, she risks her career and relationships to follow them, building a cult following comprised of hippies, bikers, anthropologists, and survivors of the atom bomb to mount a massive march on Washington. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Daryl Houston

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.