The Longest Night by Andria Williams
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book is one of those quiet surprises that spring up every now and again. i wouldn’t ordinarily see that cover, or the historical fiction/american marriage angle and think, “this is my jam!” but it turns out i like all kinds of jam!
the only nuclear reactor accident on u.s. soil to ever result in fatalities was in idaho falls in 1961. this book takes place in the very same idaho falls in the middle of 1959 and leads up to the events of january 3, 1961, when history was made in a terrible way. it opens with a sort of prologue where the reader is thrown into the confusion and turmoil of that night; all sirens and barricades and a husband and father’s fear and regret before it eases back and the story-proper opens on a gentler scene in the summer of 1959 where a young family: nat and paul and their two young daughters, are just moving east to idaho falls where army nuclear specialist paul has landed a job working as an operator on a small training reactor in the desert, CR-1.
and you could almost forget that opening chapter, for a while, as events far more mundane unfold – paul goes to work, nat stays home with the girls, paul butts heads with his supervisor mitch, nat is elegantly and politely bullied by mitch’s perfect domestic army wife jeannie, the days go on and minor glitches begin affecting both CR-1 and paul and nat’s marriage as the narrative tension ever so slowly builds in these parallel crises.
in a lot of ways this reminded me of Revolutionary Road, with more sympathetic characters. you want this couple to work out their problems, but the situation is fraught with obstacles – the stress of paul’s job and the cover-ups and power plays and the lies he tells to protect his wife and his frustrating silences butt up against nat’s isolation and her own adjustment to their new life, where suddenly all the things paul had loved about her during their courtship; her wildness and spontaneity, embarrass him here in rigid suburbia. it’s all secrets and tiptoeing on both sides of the marriage, and nat’s struggle to navigate all the unwritten laws of army wife-and-motherhood, the shrieking boredom of her days confining her california free spirit to dinner parties and gossip was perfectly written.
and then temptation wanders into the novel in the form of a cowboy named esrom and everything starts simmering with gossip-ripples and jealousy bubbles as the problems on CR-1 increase and none of the centres can hold.
it’s a remarkably tight debut. there is so much attention to details both physical and social, as williams builds her main and secondary characters’ lives up piece by piece, making you care about them, even as you know the inexorable fate that awaits some of them, living unaware on the path of what is to come.
and jeannie richards, the wanna-be lady macbeth to a hapless husband, oh do i love her… the perfect manipulating evil queen of the neighborhood, but you can’t help but feel a little tenderness in your heart for her all the same. unless i’m just getting soft.
at any rate – a very impressive novel from one of those “writers to watch,” so watch her.
