The first time I heard of this book was in a review in EW magazine, I read the review in which the journalist used the following quote from the book. I was so moved by it that for the first and only time in my life, I put that magazine down and rushed right out to the store and bought the book.
"Even if there were dangers, even if the rivers and seas and the fish that swam them were flowing with mercury, forests were being felled and deserts turned into strip mines, there was nothing to do but to trust. If she had been given a choice before she was conceived , say to exist in chaos or not to exist at all: Chaos, she would have said. She would have said, not without sadness of course, still: let me come. Let me watch as all things fall apart."
The story is a fascinating look at today's American Society through the eyes of the mysteriously alive again fathers of the Atom Bomb. The research alone that must have gone into this book is staggering to think about. Covering such fascinating subjects as WWII, nuclear development, history, chemical engineering, psychology, botany, counter culture, government politicking, resurrection, military hit squads, corporate security forces for rent, the search for truth, atonement, love, hatred, fear and of course the Christian Coalition.
But it is not the subject matter that spoke to me the most... it was the beauty of the language. Rarely have I read a book so many times and still felt my breath catch at the cadence and the prose, at times, it feels almost like the most beautiful poetry I have ever read.
Let the observations and snippets of non-essential dialogue from the book speak for themselves... What? You know I said it was highlighted for a reason... you knew this was coming...
" Also they know that many of the customs and rituals with which we fill out time are just that. So many routine acts seem invented to use up the day."
"What astounds me is the blindness of you people now. A civilization that is blind to itself. I mean BLIND. In my day there was ignorance too: ignorance is timeless. But at least we were ashamed of it."
"Reality shows, which he claimed reminded him of the circus freak shows of yesteryear. They took place of the Siamese twins and deformed fetuses in pickle jars that had long been outlawed."
"The government talks in words that make horror trivial. But the people talk in words that make the trivial horrible."
"Joy, maybe when you don't have it yourself, when you don't have the grace, you look for it to shine out of someone nearby... We're so many, we're so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished... We want to be dear to the leaves and the sky. I know what it is to long, we say across the air of time, I know what feeling is. We want to think we will be there, always with the others that were and will be. We want to glow in the dark."
"In the end, saying that happiness is superior to pleasure is an insult to the body. Also, it assumes the mind and body are separate."
"The tendency of the culture to pathologize is so compulsive and so chronic that it might itself be described as a pathology. In other words, the culture is pathologically prone to pathologize, that is, as it were, pathologically pathological."
"Was there a difference between waiting for enlightenment and waiting to be entertained?"
"Instead of reason anymore there was only movement. It was the movement of crowds, to whom faith substitutes for education, to whom facts were only a competing myth and the subject of mockery. It was the movement of those who believed."
" Choice could be taken away, and then you became an object: but far from being dangerous that moment when choice disappeared was when danger also vanished, and there was nothing you could do but submit... For after all it was not ego or a conviction of your own importance that made life worth living but whether you could see how perfect the world had always been without you. It was not to despair at this though, not to run, not to fear, not to fight; it was if, instead of running or fighting, out of the overwhelming nearness of the world, your could finally make something that could be glimpsed from afar."
The particulars of the story are so absurd that they make perfect sense. Scientists at the height of the A-bomb testing are transported to New Mexico 2004. After reading about the rest of their lives that they hadn't yet lived, they all began to understand where the world had taken their work. And so they embark on a global nuclear disarmament journey that takes them from the site of the Trinity test in New Mexico to Okinawa to Washington DC and many fascinating and utterly horrifying places in between.
The culmination of the book is so fantastical and sublime that I can barely summon the words to describe how it made me feel... It was magical and inexplicable and so completing, that when I picked the book up for the second time, I could barely remember anything about the end, other than it was undefinable, unanswering and right. When I reached the end again, I was moved for entirely new reasons. And again, it was perfect.
The book is written with as much fact as fiction. Thrown together they create a clash between what could be and what is, between what it means to have faith and what it means to have logic. The whole idea that any person that comes back to life is, without a doubt, the messiah, and the utter unwillingness of the most holy to lose control of the faithful. With such creatively directed social commentary, factual historical information, and the most fascinating grasp of the English language of any contemporary writer I've read, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet is without question, the best book written so far this century. Read it.
