Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Starred review from May 16, 2005
What if Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, the primary physicists from the Manhattan Project, returned to contemporary America to survey their atomic legacy? That question forms the heart of Millet's excellent fourth novel, in which the souls of the three take earthly form in the present-day Southwest. Ann, a New Mexico librarian, spots the reincarnated Oppenheimer and Fermi at a restaurant near her home; Szilard soon joins them; Ann persuades her garden-designer husband, Ben, to take them all in. Subsequent trips to Los Alamos and (with the help of a rich UFOlogist) Japan to view the monuments at Hiroshima persuade the three to work for disarmament. Army surveillance ensues; at one rally, shots are fired; and Christian Fundamentalists try to take things in a more rapturous direction. It takes considerable talent to pull off a conceit like this, and for the most part Millet makes it look easy, drawing full-blown, dead-on portraits of the three scientists that don't diminish their characters or their work. Her threads on weapons buildup, the topsy-turvy mosaic of contemporary American political culture and the difficulties of marriage feel realistically motivated and nicely argued. Millet gives a whimsical conceit real depth, and the result, if a bit pious in spots, is a superb, memorable novel.

Starred review from April 1, 2005
Millet, whose three previous novels include the PEN-USA Award winner " My Happy Life" (2002), boldly fuses lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-outness to achieve a unique energy and perspicacity, the ideal approach to the most confounding reality of our era: the atomic bomb. This trippy yet revelatory epic begins in present-day Santa Fe, where librarian Ann and her gardener-husband Ben end up giving sanctuary to three renowned atomic physicists bewildered at finding themselves in the twenty-first century when the last thing they remember is the Trinity test in July 1945. There's elegant and chain-smoking Robert Oppenheimer; depressed Enrico Fermi; and Leo Szilard, who, when he isn't stuffing his face, is busy launching a global disarmament movement. Ann and Ben take this unholy trinity of unwitting time travelers on a pilgrimage to Hiroshima, after which a megawealthy Tokyo pothead offers to bankroll Szilard's mission. Things soon take on an End Times intensity as the physicists travel cross-country in an ever-growing caravan (picture Grateful Dead followers), which is soon hijacked by a militaristic Christian group who worships Oppenheimer as the Second Coming. As nonfiction books about the nuclear threat proliferate, Millet's brilliant, madcap, poetic, fact-spiked, and penetrating novel (think Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo) illuminates the personal dimension of our most daunting dilemma.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)