The Wives of Los Alamos - TaraShea Nesbit

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing: USA, 2014.

As I make my way through the Alphabet Soup Challenge from my local library, I sometimes find myself in the library skimming various books to find something that looks interesting (and hopefully is not too unpleasant in content). 'N' was not one of the biggest sections on display (though I was pleased to see a few 'Nicholls'... maybe someday I'll join them), and so I skimmed a few books that seemed a little more random than I usually would. When I skimmed this one, something in the way it was written jumped out at me, and made me curious enough to commit to the whole book...

The Wives of Los Alamos is told in a first-person-plural voice. That is to say, the narrator's voice throughout the book is "we", and at no point is the voice identified as belonging to any one character. Rather, the book is being told simultaneously from the perspective of all the wives of Los Alamos. This is a fascinating choice of structure. A strength is that the weight of similarities between the wives' experiences is highlighted with the amount of overlap that occurs (individual experiences also appear on occasion, but never tied explicitly to an individual character). A weakness of the structure is that, even while portraying stories that have some heaviness, the reader feels kept a little at arms length, as there is no one character to relate to.

The story of the novel is that of the titular wives of Los Alamos, which during World War 2 was the 'secret city' in New Mexico at which scientists (the husbands of the story) were developing the atomic bomb. Without knowing exactly what their husbands were doing, these wives (and their children) relocated to Los Alamos and had to contend with the hostile desert environment, inefficient water supply, military oversight of their day-to-day activities, and the fact that none of their family were allowed to know exactly where they were or what they were doing. Chapters are short and thematic, broken into episodic paragraphs that outline both the general and specific experiences of the wives. While time passes (the book is divided into one section per year of the project) and some subplots recur over time (one wife in particular is suspected of playing 'Musical beds') there is very little in the way of an overarching plot.

It was an interesting read, and an interesting voice experiment, but not one I feel the need to revisit.

Completed 31 January 2022.



(Alphabet Soup Books)

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