The Wives of Los Alamos

Summary (from the publisher): Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure -- or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret -- including what their husbands were doing at the lab.

Review: This novel chronicles the lives of the wives of scientists working in Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb that would ultimately help end the Second World War. In an interesting approach, the novel is written in third person plural and attempts to give a collective voice to all the women who sacrificed for years and kept secrets from their family and friends in order to keep their husbands' work secret. The hardships and reality of live in a remote military town is fully conveyed in this work of historical fiction.

The most unique aspect of this book - the third person plural narration - was my least liked feature. This approach did give all of the women a voice and helped underscore how similar their lives were during the time they lived in New Mexico and how overshadowed by secrets and hardships they all were. However, it also made the focus of the book remote. Not a single character was able to stand alone as an individual or to help provide a bridge of connection between the reader and the text. Additionally, because all the women were all individuals with distinct stories, the text was constantly having to allow for individual differences with long varied descriptions such as "Our husbands came from small towns, from large cities, from fields, from concrete. We met them on boardwalks in Atlantic City, on football fields in Iowa, at cafes in Berlin, at scientific meetings in Moscow" (35-36). In some ways, it felt as if the author wanted to write a collective non-fiction history of these women's experience but then decided to write a group narrative instead.

All that being said, I was able to learn a lot about what life might have been like for families living in New Mexico as part of this project during World War II. The feeling of deprivation and isolation is fully conveyed as women squabble over whose house has a bathtub and feel stricken at how to respond to their families' questions about their lives, all of which must remain a secret. In the end, the collective narration conveys the reality that the work accomplished was very much a group effort that took everyone's participation to achieve: "We were more than I, we were Us. We were Us despite our desire for singularity" (128).

Stars: 3