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keclark's review
2.0
Like other reviews have noted, I had a hard time with the author's writing style.
jennyshank's review
4.0
From the High Country News August 04, 2014 issue
In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the women, whose physicist husbands suddenly announce, "We are going to the desert," without offering too many details. The women cannot even tell their relatives exactly where they are headed. "Our mothers understood," Nesbit writes. "Our mothers had kept great secrets."
The collective narration gives the prose an incantatory rhythm that suits the story, once the reader becomes accustomed to the frequent contradictions within a sentence: "We arrived in New Mexico and thought we had come to the end of the earth, or we thought we had come home." Out of the threads of each woman's experiences a tapestry is woven, revealing a peculiar, complex and yet temporary society.
The families are assigned houses inside a fenced complex patrolled by Dobermans and mounted guards. "We handed over our cameras. We denied we kept a diary." The women know their scientist husbands are engaged in a secret war project, but most have no idea what is really going on.
Since the wives can't share their lives with people outside the compound, they confide in each other and form a lively society, throwing cocktail parties, swapping clothes and minding each other's children. "The military officially ran the town in one way," Nesbit writes, "and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others."
The suspense for the reader comes from wondering how much the women know about their husbands' work, and what they think about it. The answer varies for each of them, but none of them knows the complete truth until they see the devastation the atom bomb inflicts on Japan. The aftermath leaves them all deeply affected, even as their trajectories splinter from collective to individual again. Some decide the U.S. was justified in using the bombs; others, horrified by the unprecedented destruction, want to dedicate their lives to limiting nuclear weapons. In the end, all of them are bound by the part they played in the atom bomb's creation.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/the-bomb-builders-wives
In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the women, whose physicist husbands suddenly announce, "We are going to the desert," without offering too many details. The women cannot even tell their relatives exactly where they are headed. "Our mothers understood," Nesbit writes. "Our mothers had kept great secrets."
The collective narration gives the prose an incantatory rhythm that suits the story, once the reader becomes accustomed to the frequent contradictions within a sentence: "We arrived in New Mexico and thought we had come to the end of the earth, or we thought we had come home." Out of the threads of each woman's experiences a tapestry is woven, revealing a peculiar, complex and yet temporary society.
The families are assigned houses inside a fenced complex patrolled by Dobermans and mounted guards. "We handed over our cameras. We denied we kept a diary." The women know their scientist husbands are engaged in a secret war project, but most have no idea what is really going on.
Since the wives can't share their lives with people outside the compound, they confide in each other and form a lively society, throwing cocktail parties, swapping clothes and minding each other's children. "The military officially ran the town in one way," Nesbit writes, "and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others."
The suspense for the reader comes from wondering how much the women know about their husbands' work, and what they think about it. The answer varies for each of them, but none of them knows the complete truth until they see the devastation the atom bomb inflicts on Japan. The aftermath leaves them all deeply affected, even as their trajectories splinter from collective to individual again. Some decide the U.S. was justified in using the bombs; others, horrified by the unprecedented destruction, want to dedicate their lives to limiting nuclear weapons. In the end, all of them are bound by the part they played in the atom bomb's creation.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/the-bomb-builders-wives
librarianinthewoods's review
4.0
I've never read a book written in the first person plural, a collective "we," but it was an interesting decision by the author. As Gail Godwin hailed in her review, the author's "brave and brilliant choice of point of view for these women living inside their earth-shattering secret crucible brings home to us in the fullest way possible that our personal story is never just ours." While the story is about these wives of scientist in Los Alamos during WWII who invented the nuclear bomb, in the end I felt this first person plural was more universal in depicting mothers. I enjoyed this book and the way it's written although it might have been better with some personal narrative in the mix?
balzat28's review
2.0
At some point in the of development of their skill, a writer will want to experiment. They'll read other writers who've successfully challenged the tropes and structures of literature--Vonnegut, Grudin, Calvino, Oates--and want to do the same, and at some level this is understandable. For all the freedom and opportunity provided by literature, there are also borders: stories are told in chapters, the audience is never addressed, dialogue is accompanied by verbs and adverbs to signify the speaker and their state of mind, and so on. Writing is, for lack of a better analogy, a prison with no walls--a democracy of one constrained paradoxically by history and tradition. For most writers, open defiance is an understandable--if short-lived--impulse that often produces little publishable material and a large sense of embarrassment. Sometimes, though, the products of these rebellious little diversions find their way to print.
TaraShea Nesbit's The Wives of Los Alamos is told entirely in first person plural and by the titular figures--dozens, then hundreds, of women whose husbands have been relocated to New Mexico to help develop the atomic bomb. This itself is not unusual--quite a few books have been written from a collective point-of-view, the most famous being Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides--but it's also a difficult mode in which to tell a story, as it requires consistency. The reason Eugenides' first-person-plural novel works is because all of his narrators share the same memories: their infatuation with the same five girls gives way to horror as each girl commits suicide for no discernible reason. By retelling the story with more than one narrator, Eugenides builds a sense of inevitability and complicity beneath the events, like bystanders watching the injured crawl away from a traffic accident without helping: the boys observe but don't act--cannot act--as though each has passed off responsibility to the next, over and over again.
Nesbit's narrators, while sharing the same basic experiences--the loneliness of the desert, the loss of family life, the growing distance between spouses and neighbors--are also different, pitting themselves against one another as they attempt to reconcile the mundanity of their lives with the need to feel important and do important things. (At one point, the collective women talk of pregnancy as the only true method for getting a better house.) Nesbit's narrators write about neighbors being exiled from house parties, gossip about bed-jumping and thievery, despondency over what they've each given up. And because Nesbit wants to strike this balance throughout her book--individual lives and shared experiences--she is forced to write all 230 pages as a compromise that justifies neither side and makes for a book that is both dull and without a clear destination.
Take, for example, the passage--chosen randomly--about how their husbands' new assignments have affected their marriages:
The occurrence of "or" in this one passage--four notations of difference, of other possibilities and realities--is minor compared to the volume of conjunctions that haunt every chapter. From one chapter to the next, this balance--between the singular and the all--threatens to shake Nesbit's entire story apart.
In a way, the plural narrators are an intelligent, intuitive idea for this subject. Writing of an era when women were relegated to the duties of a mother and housewife and little more, the protagonists serving together adds to the sense of one war being fought alongside another--the soldiers of the United States and the soldiers of feminism, each fighting against dehumanization and tyranny, and the latter looking for a way to assert their own individuality, make their own choices, and be themselves, even--and especially--when conscripted into a faraway domestic-military bureaucracy that prohibits all three. Both are wars for freedom, though one is waged on a global scale while the other is waged quietly in millions of living rooms. And in that sense, yes, Nesbit's gamble makes sense. But attempting to tell the story of strong, independent women by lumping them all together as one voice--except when there is tragedy, gossip, backstabbing, and other sordid events--seems somehow counterproductive, maybe even paradoxical, and it hurts any point Nesbit may be trying to make. Her book is the story of women, pure and simple, but because of a silly narrative choice, The Wives of Los Alamos becomes a book with hundreds of hearts but no soul.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
TaraShea Nesbit's The Wives of Los Alamos is told entirely in first person plural and by the titular figures--dozens, then hundreds, of women whose husbands have been relocated to New Mexico to help develop the atomic bomb. This itself is not unusual--quite a few books have been written from a collective point-of-view, the most famous being Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides--but it's also a difficult mode in which to tell a story, as it requires consistency. The reason Eugenides' first-person-plural novel works is because all of his narrators share the same memories: their infatuation with the same five girls gives way to horror as each girl commits suicide for no discernible reason. By retelling the story with more than one narrator, Eugenides builds a sense of inevitability and complicity beneath the events, like bystanders watching the injured crawl away from a traffic accident without helping: the boys observe but don't act--cannot act--as though each has passed off responsibility to the next, over and over again.
Nesbit's narrators, while sharing the same basic experiences--the loneliness of the desert, the loss of family life, the growing distance between spouses and neighbors--are also different, pitting themselves against one another as they attempt to reconcile the mundanity of their lives with the need to feel important and do important things. (At one point, the collective women talk of pregnancy as the only true method for getting a better house.) Nesbit's narrators write about neighbors being exiled from house parties, gossip about bed-jumping and thievery, despondency over what they've each given up. And because Nesbit wants to strike this balance throughout her book--individual lives and shared experiences--she is forced to write all 230 pages as a compromise that justifies neither side and makes for a book that is both dull and without a clear destination.
Take, for example, the passage--chosen randomly--about how their husbands' new assignments have affected their marriages:
Sometimes our husbands returned from the Tech Area and said they could not stand it anymore. We did not know if it was us or here or their work, but we were concerned it was us. We could not talk to our best friends about this suspicion, because they were back in Idaho, or in New York. A couple of us said, I can't take this, either, and actually left. We returned to our mothers. We became Nevadans and moved to Reno for a quick divorce. And our husbands moved into the singles dorms and were unofficially, or officially, separated.
The occurrence of "or" in this one passage--four notations of difference, of other possibilities and realities--is minor compared to the volume of conjunctions that haunt every chapter. From one chapter to the next, this balance--between the singular and the all--threatens to shake Nesbit's entire story apart.
In a way, the plural narrators are an intelligent, intuitive idea for this subject. Writing of an era when women were relegated to the duties of a mother and housewife and little more, the protagonists serving together adds to the sense of one war being fought alongside another--the soldiers of the United States and the soldiers of feminism, each fighting against dehumanization and tyranny, and the latter looking for a way to assert their own individuality, make their own choices, and be themselves, even--and especially--when conscripted into a faraway domestic-military bureaucracy that prohibits all three. Both are wars for freedom, though one is waged on a global scale while the other is waged quietly in millions of living rooms. And in that sense, yes, Nesbit's gamble makes sense. But attempting to tell the story of strong, independent women by lumping them all together as one voice--except when there is tragedy, gossip, backstabbing, and other sordid events--seems somehow counterproductive, maybe even paradoxical, and it hurts any point Nesbit may be trying to make. Her book is the story of women, pure and simple, but because of a silly narrative choice, The Wives of Los Alamos becomes a book with hundreds of hearts but no soul.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
leahrock's review
4.0
I read this in one sitting on a flight. It's unlike anything I've read lately, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought the first person plural (for the entire novel) was a unique choice, and although it didn't allow for character development individually, I felt that the development of the chorus as a whole was a more than satisfactory substitute. The language is sparse, beautifully evoking the environment of Los Alamos. Looking forward to reading more from this author.
mg_espi's review against another edition
2.0
Me ha perdido completamente con la voz "de la colmena", me he sentido alejadÃsima de la historia y he perdido todo el interés por el libro.
chelsea_not_chels's review
2.0
More reviews available at my blog, Beauty and the Bookworm.
This seems to be a contentious book for one reason and one reason only: it's written in first-person plural. Pretty much every review about it begins that way, and if I had read them before I requested the book from the library, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. It doesn't have a solid core narrative. It doesn't have real, distinct characters; different women are mentioned by name at several points, but no one is ever really given the chance to develop because of the amorphous "we" talking about "our" sometimes contradictory experiences. I understand why this device was used; it's supposed to give you a feel for the lives of the women of Los Alamos as a whole, instead of just picking or making up one or two to flesh out more fully and stand in for the rest. It's meant to capture a wider range of experiences. Is it successful? I didn't really think so. Some of the women are so obviously outsiders that they're clearly not contained within the "we," and that means that their experiences are completely left out of the book.
Each chapter has a theme, such as "Children" or "Foreigners," and the snippets that compose each chapter--because each chapter is composed of a series of one-paragraph snippets, instead of a more traditional narrative--adhere to that theme. It's a sort of experimental style, and while some people loved it, I didn't. I didn't hate it. I did hate it to begin with, but as with most writing, I got used to it after a while, and it didn't grate on my nerves so much. But I never really liked it, and was left feeling like Nesbit could have offered a much richer picture of Los Alamos if she had just been fuller in her telling. I guess that's just my preference; I like books with real characters and central narratives, even if those narratives don't move quickly and are more character-driven than anything else. An amorphous, ever-changing central figure who isn't even one figure but a conglomerate of many left me feeling like I was reading about a hive mind, which is kind of demeaning to a group of women who no doubt went through a lot of hardships to support their husbands.
By choosing the narrative style she did, Nesbit avoided a great deal of detail. This probably saves her from being savaged by people who are sticklers for historical accuracy, but I felt it distanced me more than intrigued me, and I felt left out more than anything else. A novel needs to draw readers in and connect them with the characters, and I felt that wasn't accomplished here; looking at other reviews, some people clearly disagree, but hey, that's the nature of personal preferences, and I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. To me, this was an okay book, with a really good premise--I feel like these women haven't had a lot of historical fiction written about them, and they are truly fascinating subjects--but it just fell flat because of its strange delivery. Experimental styles, I feel, are sometimes better left to subjects that have already been widely explored in more traditional mediums, as then the new style brings a new light to the subject. I'm not sure this particular subject, these women and this place and time, were quite ready for being experimented with before we were better acquainted.
2 stars out of 5.
This seems to be a contentious book for one reason and one reason only: it's written in first-person plural. Pretty much every review about it begins that way, and if I had read them before I requested the book from the library, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. It doesn't have a solid core narrative. It doesn't have real, distinct characters; different women are mentioned by name at several points, but no one is ever really given the chance to develop because of the amorphous "we" talking about "our" sometimes contradictory experiences. I understand why this device was used; it's supposed to give you a feel for the lives of the women of Los Alamos as a whole, instead of just picking or making up one or two to flesh out more fully and stand in for the rest. It's meant to capture a wider range of experiences. Is it successful? I didn't really think so. Some of the women are so obviously outsiders that they're clearly not contained within the "we," and that means that their experiences are completely left out of the book.
Each chapter has a theme, such as "Children" or "Foreigners," and the snippets that compose each chapter--because each chapter is composed of a series of one-paragraph snippets, instead of a more traditional narrative--adhere to that theme. It's a sort of experimental style, and while some people loved it, I didn't. I didn't hate it. I did hate it to begin with, but as with most writing, I got used to it after a while, and it didn't grate on my nerves so much. But I never really liked it, and was left feeling like Nesbit could have offered a much richer picture of Los Alamos if she had just been fuller in her telling. I guess that's just my preference; I like books with real characters and central narratives, even if those narratives don't move quickly and are more character-driven than anything else. An amorphous, ever-changing central figure who isn't even one figure but a conglomerate of many left me feeling like I was reading about a hive mind, which is kind of demeaning to a group of women who no doubt went through a lot of hardships to support their husbands.
By choosing the narrative style she did, Nesbit avoided a great deal of detail. This probably saves her from being savaged by people who are sticklers for historical accuracy, but I felt it distanced me more than intrigued me, and I felt left out more than anything else. A novel needs to draw readers in and connect them with the characters, and I felt that wasn't accomplished here; looking at other reviews, some people clearly disagree, but hey, that's the nature of personal preferences, and I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. To me, this was an okay book, with a really good premise--I feel like these women haven't had a lot of historical fiction written about them, and they are truly fascinating subjects--but it just fell flat because of its strange delivery. Experimental styles, I feel, are sometimes better left to subjects that have already been widely explored in more traditional mediums, as then the new style brings a new light to the subject. I'm not sure this particular subject, these women and this place and time, were quite ready for being experimented with before we were better acquainted.
2 stars out of 5.
sk888888's review
1.0
Really hated the POV on this one. I will look for another, non-fiction book about Los Alamos.
ropalimpia's review
4.75
So I'm not a historical fiction kind of person, but I really enjoyed this. I love Nesbit's style in general. She has a softness and grace to the way she writes while still being direct and powerful with her words. Upon seeing the reviews of this book that complained about her usage of "us" and "we" and "or," I was a bit worried that it would get tedious, but after the first few pages, I completely forgot that this style wasn't one that's usually employed and got through it without even noticing the unorthodox pov. I loved the "or"s especially, actually. I think it created a realm of possibility that I would have found myself asking about if she hadn't covered it. I was never left wanting.
The most accurate way I can describe this book is that it's a painting. It doesn't paint, but rather, it's the actual painting itself. It feels like visiting an art museum and fixating on that one painting with many tiny figures going about their lives in different ways, but all responding to the same circumstances. It tells the story of a community through naive but apprehensive eyes, and there's a comfortable emotional distance that makes it feel slightly scientific, but then the gossip and wariness gave it the humanity necessary to keep me wanting to continue to read.
I wholeheartedly enjoyed this book, and I'm glad I found it.
The most accurate way I can describe this book is that it's a painting. It doesn't paint, but rather, it's the actual painting itself. It feels like visiting an art museum and fixating on that one painting with many tiny figures going about their lives in different ways, but all responding to the same circumstances. It tells the story of a community through naive but apprehensive eyes, and there's a comfortable emotional distance that makes it feel slightly scientific, but then the gossip and wariness gave it the humanity necessary to keep me wanting to continue to read.
I wholeheartedly enjoyed this book, and I'm glad I found it.