Book Tour Begins

I start tomorrow on my book tour, and I'm at once grateful and horrified that somehow I've agreed to something like 15 cities and counting. Today, good reviews in LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Writing about Los Alamos, an idea I had in the mid-nineties, having grown up in New Mexico, has been an amazing ride. I have been thinking lately of the relationship between fiction and the theological idea of the "scandal of the human particular.

As some of you know, I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have “characters,” you must have a “plot.” I learned the arc of a three- part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.

I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author’s life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not “about” whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy’s great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That’s the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.

I found another similarity between memoir and fiction: This wonderful phrase: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that “hung the stars” and created “that great leviathan just for the sport of it” would care about one of us. The idea that the God of Creation–Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source– would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’

And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn’t it? That God would care about one singular, particular life. Where would we be, how would we understand our human story, without it? “The first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman,” writes Rabbi Richard Friedman. “The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” One family: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.

When I worked as a journalist, I was drawn to the stories of individuals in the shadow of history-making moments. After the Berlin Wall came down, I went to Prague and interviewed families about what their lives had been like under the regime. I wrote about daily life in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. This may be the same impulse that makes me religious: that is, here we are working out our own lives, making mistakes, trying to discern one path from another, while waves of history ebb and flow, causing everything to change. I am interested in the waves–who isn’t– but it’s the human particular that captures me.


I never meant to write fiction. Fiction, novels, were in a category saved for the great masters: George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford. I was a journalist. But one day, I was visited by an idea.

I grew up in New Mexico, a short distance from Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team built the atomic bomb. Guard towers were still in place, and the city had an aura of secrecy, isolation and guilt. From my college dining room, St. John’s in Santa Fe, I could see the lights of Los Alamos suspended in the sky.

One day some years ago, I was walking on a piece of land I owned near the Rio Grande not far from Santa Fe. I looked across the river, and the steep mesa that rose up on the other side, and realized that just on the west side of that mesa was the city of Los Alamos. And all at once I wondered what would have happened had one of the physicists working on the “gadget,” decided to jump ship. What if he had left the secret city under cover of night, and swum across the river. Who might have found him and what would have been their story?

So, the idea for the novel came to me all at once as if dropped from the sky. I did what many of us do with gifts: I put it away in a drawer. I wasn’t ready. Fiction was for the big boys and girls.

But it kept calling out to me from the depths of the desk. A little voice, and finally, several years ago, I pulled it out. It lay on my desk, breathing.

I started researching the time, filling in the things I didn’t know. I found out all these surprising and wonderful things about Los Alamos-particulars: the scientists who were asked to work on this secret project in the New Mexico mountains often did not know where they were going. Some of them were handed train tickets and only read of their destination as they walked toward the train. Others did know more or less: At one university, a librarian noticed that suddenly lots of professors of physics were checking out books on New Mexico. When Los Alamos ran out of water one hot summer, they brushed their teeth with Coco-Cola. Oppenheimer made punch with 200-proof lab alcohol. He named the place in southern New Mexico where the first experimental bomb was tested, in July of 1945, Trinity site. Where the heat from the blast was so extreme that it melted the sand to green glass. “Those men who built the bomb,” said a girl from Hiroshima, “what did they think would happen if they dropped it ?”