Title: The Wives of Los Alamos Author: TaraShea Nesbit
Published: February 25, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 240
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago—and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. box for an address in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of a project that didn’t exist as far as the public knew. Though they were strangers, they joined together—adapting to a landscape as fierce as it was absorbing, full of the banalities of everyday life and the drama of scientific discovery.
And while the bomb was being invented, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos gradually transformed from an abandoned school on a hill into a real community: one that was strained by the words they couldn’t say out loud, the letters they couldn’t send home, the freedom they didn’t have. But the end of the war would bring even bigger challenges to the people of Los Alamos, as the scientists and their families struggled with the burden of their contribution to the most destructive force in the history of mankind.
At the heart of TaraShea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos is a sense of community, of solidarity. It’s about women who are forced together by situation and who forge bonds in spite of their differences. It’s about women dealing with everyday problems of budgeting and childrearing and social calls, but dealing with these problems together, as one.
All this is accomplished, of course, by the author’s unusual stylistic choice: first person plural. There are no characters in this book, only a collective “we”. It’s a bold move, and, honestly, practically the only reason I attempted to read The Wives of Los Alamos—curiosity. I wanted to see how Nesbit managed with such an unusual perspective. And, honestly, I think she did a fine job, but I also don’t think I ever need to experience first person plural again. It’s not conducive to writing the kind of intimate, character-focused fiction I prefer to read.
Because, as I said, there are no characters in this book. No individuality, no personality that comes out and allows the reader to forge a connection. There is a collective voice, speaking for hundreds of women, generalizing on their experience. What this does is allow these women to be seen as a whole, working together towards a goal they’ve been hidden from. But I wonder if I wouldn’t have liked the book more had it been told more directly, from the perspective of “I”—a single woman who I could have gotten to know intimately, rather than a mass, nameless mob who I saw only at the surface level.
Nesbit’s perspective choice really drives the novel, and will most likely be the deciding factor for readers. This is historical fiction than isn’t rich on detail or culture. By the very nature of its collectiveness and generalizations, The Wives of Los Alamos struggles to go into depth anywhere. When your narrator is a hundred women, you can’t really go into specifics.
So, yes, first person plural is very interesting and unique, but does it work? A book about the lives of the women whose husbands created the atomic bomb is worthwhile and exciting, but does not the perspective limit the author’s options? The Wives of Los Alamos is a good book; TaraShea Nesbit has talent. But I felt that the book was too caught up in the technical details of its delivery, and the story suffered because of that. I liked this, absolutely, but I was constantly feeling that the vagueness and universality of the text was off-putting, and lacked a personal element.
