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    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
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    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
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    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
    Ebook672 pages10 hours

    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

    By Lydia Millet

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Transported to the 21st century, Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi grapple with the legacy of the atom bomb in this “shattering and beautiful” time travel novel (Entertainment Weekly).

    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart     plucks the three scientists who were key to the invention of the atom bomb—Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi—as they watch history’s first mushroom cloud rise over the desert on July 16th, 1945 . . . and places them down in modern-day Santa Fe.

    One by one, the scientists are spotted by a shy librarian who becomes convinced of their authenticity. Entranced, bewildered, overwhelmed by their significance as historical markers on the one hand, and their peculiar personalities on the other, she, to the dismay of her husband, devotes herself to them. Soon the scientists acquire a sugar daddy—a young pothead millionaire from Tokyo who bankrolls them. Heroes to some, lunatics or con artists to others, the scientists finally become messianic religious figureheads to fanatics, who believe Oppenheimer to be the Second Coming.

    As the ever-growing convoy traverses the country in a fleet of RV’s on a pilgrimage to the UN, the scientists wrestle with the legacy of their invention and their growing celebrity, while Ann and her husband struggle with the strain on their marriage, a personal journey married to a history of thermonuclear weapons.

    “Possesses the nervy irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller . . . Can only be described as, well, genius.” —Vanity Fair

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSoft Skull
    Release dateJun 1, 2005
    ISBN9781593763138

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    Reviews for Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

    3.5/5

    70 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      novels this ambitious (nuclear science military-industrial complex American religion), fascinating, imaginative (Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard come back from the dead!), and funny (great satire of the sun belt rich) don't come along all that often. They should be read when they do.

      But, as everyone who has read this book has pointed out, OPRH could have been cut by a quarter without really losing much of anything. The problem is: which quarter do you cut?

      * Some readers could do with a great deal less of Ann and Ben's relationship. Their argument is generally not that Ann and Ben could be eliminated--they play an important narrative role, at least--but that there is far too much of them given how uninteresting they are.

      * Some readers could do without the history of the USA's nuclear program. Their argument, in short, is "I hate learning. Keep facts out of my novels."

      * I don't think anyone would want less of the final quarter: the story of Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard coming back from the dead. All three are wonderful characters; their actions dramatize perfectly the problems of scientific knowledge, social ignorance, political activism, and religious belief. That said, some would probably prefer a more convincing ending. Millet could have left it open, but this is a roman a these, and I understand why she ends as she does.

      * Some readers could do without the philosophizing that the characters get up to, particularly Anne, who is given to thinking things like "If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other.... it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy. If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself," (271). Is this satire? Ann/Millet must know that bodies don't know themselves, right? That bodies react to external stimuli without mediation? So if a country were more like a body, not only would it not know itself, it would probably start a war every time someone brought one too many bottles of wine back from the Rhine? (= geopolitical version of a mosquito bite). Later we get even more immortal thought along the bad-Rilke lines of wouldn't it be great to be an object so then you couldn't choose things and then you'd be content, why don't people just accept this objecthood and embrace it??? Because, Ann, then we'd all be dead.
      Ben is guilty, too: "It is the world with its animals... tides and seasons, he thought: it is the world that gives us such a soul as we have. It gives us life and we all it our own," (274). If this seems a little less silly than Ann, don't worry, Ben will get absolutely moronic twenty pages later (293): "If the world gave us our souls, why were the souls so impoverished?" Because, you know, the world is so naturally full and perfect. "We have obscured the world, he said to himself... we have forgotten what the world is. We believe we are it. We can't see past ourselves to the world, he thought." Right, that's it! The world is perfect, it gives us our soul, but we've done something wrong with those souls, though I suppose the souls should have caused us to act as we did and... the naturalist's rather theological dilemma: if everything is natural, what causes evil?
      Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard also get into a bit of the old cod-philosophizing, but at least with them it's often just a reaction to how much the world has changed since their last memories of it in the mid-century.

      Now, you might think I've tipped my hand fairly heavily here, as to what I'd like to see less of. Yes, I like the very short bits on the history of nuclear weapons.

      Obviously, you think, I object to the philosophizing. But not so, my friend! If I were to cut, Ann and Ben would get the axe. It's important to have some kind of domestic arrangement here, it holds the book together, but we only need connective tissue. Millet just doesn't make the very mild ups and downs of their relationship matter--in fact, the only time I was at all interested was when I realized Ann's obsession with the scientists could be read meta-narratively, as Millet's obsession with the scientists. That fits well with the most intelligent aspect of the novel: how to make the impossible choice between complete domestic happiness, and social activism. But it's a bad sign for the romance angle when it functions best as commentary on another part of your book.

      Now, that said, the philosophy expounded here is *horrific*. I'm fine with books that philosophize, at great length. I object, however, to books that

      i) stick words and thoughts in the characters' mouths, when those words and thoughts are fairly obviously those of the author. This is what a narrator is for: to say things the author thinks. Millet is too far into close third person for that to work. This is a technical issue that can't be overcome.

      ii) go on at great length with *bad* philosophy. This is my third Millet book, and I'm fairly sure she's setting herself up as the Tolstoy of deep ecology. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to make the case, for goodness sake, at least make it well. There's no reason to become a positivist ("what is is the world, and the world is right"). You can stop just short of that, at nature mystic; at least then you're not claiming that there's any rational basis behind the feelings outlined so clearly by Freud in his work on religion.

      iii) expound a philosophy that directly contradicts the book's form, as here. You can't be a positivist, and write close third person. There is no close perspective in positivism, only bodies being pushed around.

      That's an awful lot of criticism, so let me repeat: novels this ambitious, fascinating, imaginative, and funny don't come along all that often, and they should be read when they do. And, of course, I might be wrong: Millet might be presenting the deep flaws in ecological thought, and not affirming that thought itself. In any case, Millet forces you to think in ways that the average novelist can only dream of. As I said: Tolstoy of deep ecology.
    • 5/5
      Hard to get into at first, but as the mysteries start unfolding, it becomes mesmerizing. Very unique plot and storytelling style.
    • 4/5
      J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard are transported to Santa Fe in 2000 immediately after the Trinity testing at Los Alamos. With Ann, a librarian, her husband Ben, a gardener, and Larry, a very rich countercultural layabout and his colorful friends, they set off in a trailer on a quest to convince the world of the evils of nuclear weapons.
      The story culminates at the Washington National Monument, where Oppie, Fermi and Szilard are carried off by cranes (the ones made by the girl in Hiroshima?). It's a farce full of librarian jokes, and big swabs at the fundamentalist Christian right. She does, however, treat the scientists with respect,
      honoring their legacies both good and evil. Ann is prone to philosophical ponderings—solitude, responsibility, existential questions. She ends up in a smaller town than Santa Fe, cataloging images for the Very Large Array. The author's outrage at how the bomb has shifted the whole moral tone is strongly and effectively conveyed. She interrupts the text in places with statistics on bomb tests, degradations to the environment. However, perhaps it is a little overwritten--it's 500 pages and could easily lose 100 of them.
    • 2/5
      The premise of the book -- that which got me interested in the first place -- is that Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, and Leo Szilard had their post-test Manhattan Project selves suddenly reincarnated in the early 21st century. Millet seems to parlay the theme as a vehicle to spout her own views on what really happened at the end of WW2 (and the theory is certainly plausible) as well as a desire to curb current and future nuclear proliferation. A noble concept to be sure, but the execution wasn't all that compelling.

      In a bizarre turn of events, the three scientists become godheads for a hippy-like cult of...right wing nutjobs! Millet never seems to know what to do once she establishes this sudden time shift bringing long-dead scientists into the hear and now. The government sort of would like to have them back, but they have issues with acknowledging them. The nutjobs embrace them, but the lunatic fringe is never a vehicle for change. Millet doesn't seem to know how to end this mess she created...so she brings in the Whooping Cranes. Okay...

      If you like flowery prose and are interested in some facts regarding our atomic history, you might find enough here to keep you interested. To me, the story was aimless, the climax absurd, and the story-telling on the droll side.
    • 3/5
      On the day of the Trinity nuclear bomb, July 16, 1945, test Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi go to sleep only to wake in the year 2003. They have dropped not only into a strange and unsettling future, but also into the troubled emotional life of Ann, a reserved and unassuming young librarian. This complex and haunting book is in itself rather unsettling as it jumps from various points of view, drops devastating tidbits of information regarding nuclear testing and its consequences and generally makes the reader think. It is provocative in the way it examines relationships, loyalty, responsibility, adoration and obsession. As the news of the return of the three scientists, who are now fully engaged in a campaign to stop nuclear proliferation and work to not only prove they actually exist (re-exist?) but to persuade the United Nations to encourage world peace, they begin to attract a huge and often suspect following. The ending where a huge flock of (thought to be almost extinct) cranes carries off the two remaining scientists after Szilard had been assassinated, is both beautiful and total absurd. This is not an easy book, but it will probably stick in my memory as very unusual.