Mason's mix of nuclear power and love is cold fusion
An Atomic Romance
By Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House, 266 pp. $24.95
For decades now, the fictional voice of the New South -- its car parks and Wal-Marts and same old problems -- has been associated with Bobbie Ann Mason's finely wrought Kentucky rue. Her debut collection, ''Shiloh and Other Stories," helped mark the revival of the modern short story in the early 1980s. She made a similar imprint with ''In Country," her 1985 novel, which captured the Vietnam experience for American vets with a compassion and insight that few writers had thus conveyed. If her work in subsequent years has been a mixed achievement, the one quality she has unwaveringly possessed, in fiction and nonfiction alike, has been an affable integrity -- heartfelt authenticity mixed with corner-store wisdom.
To its misfortune and ours, ''An Atomic Romance" has plenty of good intentions but not enough technical or aesthetic achievement to sustain it. It's a mash note to romance and good-old-boy struggles of conscience, set within the eerie glow of a nuclear fuel enrichment plant -- sort of a post-atomic love story played out to the tunes of the Bee Gees. Not that Mason makes light of her subject: She has mastered the technical specifics of nuclear energy and fuel processing with commendable depth and accuracy. But her story -- a high-stakes drama of scientific progress, corporate greed, and confused human loyalties -- too often veers between its painstakingly dry technical descriptions and its central character's foibles of the heart. The result is an uneven, or rather unintegrated, novel with two stories running on parallel tracks: the frightening tale of an antiquated, Cold War nuclear fuel production plant and its legacies of contamination, and the comic emotional pratfalls and longings of a man who's given his life to his hometown's major industry.
Reed Futrell is the semisweet fellow in question, a divorced, 40-ish guy who loves his dog, rides his motorcycle out west when he gets the blues, and thinks life ought to be easier than it is. He's a cell rat at the local fuel enrichment plant, which means that he suits up in a substandard haz-mat suit each day, then crawls inside 100-plus-degree tunnels to repair antiquated machinery, usually with a blowtorch. He graduated college with a degree in chemistry, so he knows what the plant does and why. Still, he's proud of the work he does, even though an accident at the place killed his dad when Reed was 6. This dangerous but simple life has become more complicated by Reed's falling in love with a colleague named Julia who works in the cytopathology lab. She's fiercely afraid of the dangers of the plant, committed to exposing them for the public good, and worries that Reed -- a cavalier guy who tries not to think about the number of times he's been exposed to high radiation levels -- is blindly putting himself at risk.
''An Atomic Romance" is set somewhere in the heartland of America: south of Chicago, east of Colorado, near the rivers and prairies of mid-country, where people don't spend a lot of time questioning their food source. That means the locals in Reed's town don't worry too much about beryllium exposure or toxic leakage or contaminated scrap heaps -- or didn't, until a bunch of reporters, including some from CNN, start hanging out at the gates of the plant. The rumors of beryllium give way to more and worse: to plutonium scares, to Department of Energy secret agendas, to corporate coverups posing as national security. Now the cafeteria conversation is shifting from banter to questions, and Reed is rethinking the strip-down decontaminations he endured when his radiation levels showed up hot. His conscious mind, in other words, is starting to absorb what his body has been handling for decades, and this realization, as gradual as it is scary, will challenge most of what he holds dear.
Reed is loyal not so much to his employer as he is to the way of life the plant has provided for the past half-century, and in this way his ambivalence mirrors one of the bittersweet truths about the species: Resilient creatures all, we are hardwired to adapt to the prison that contains us. Mason's compassion as a writer has long allowed her to understand this irony, and she delivers it here with sweet precision. Even Reed's beloved wildlife refuge, where he heads for relief, is a place transformed within the range of memory's gaze: The ''No Fishing" signs went up years ago, he now recalls, and then all the fish in the ponds were killed after the local paper published a photo of a deformed frog. These days, the ditches are surrounded with orange tape; the place he's cherished is starting to resemble nothing so much as ''a malignant jungle."
Mason's efforts to master the technical details of nuclear fuel and post-atomic theory are commendable, but details do not a story make. One of the problems with ''An Atomic Romance" is the mixed-up tone of the novel, implied by its title. It waffles between Karen Silkwood horrors and cornball romantic parries -- does a guy really go on a secluded picnic with his girl, then ''[cavort] half-naked, shouting, 'It can't get any better than this!' "? The novel has far too much of this kind of writing -- nervous puns and bad atomic metaphors -- and too much strained attempt to make a romantic comedy within the scary confines of a Three Mile Island world. As Julia would be the first to tell you, you just can't go cute on tragedy. Mason has tried to drape a deadly serious subject in a political novel with an old-fashioned love story, no doubt to make it more palatable, but the problem is not unlike Reed's attempt to dress up the dangers of the plant: Lace curtains just don't look right on a nuclear warhead.
The best part of ''An Atomic Romance" is Mason's tender assessment of what has been lost -- of the deer of Reed's youth, the tender innocence he carried into adulthood, the beauty of the land before it was ruined. When she stops putting hokey dialogue into her characters' mouths and writes about the skies or the people who gave up their lives for the plant, she finds the stunning sorrow at the heart of this story. ''An Atomic Romance" would have been far more powerful if she had rendered it unadorned.
