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Political fiction gets my vote

Bobbie Ann Mason, author of An Atomic Romance, will be among the featured speakers at the Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29. The festival is moving this year to the USF campus in downtown St. Petersburg.

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published August 21, 2005

Politics and fiction have never been a very popular duo in America. European, Asian, African and especially Latin American fiction writers rarely ignore the wider political context of their stories and characters. U.S. authors - John Dos Passos, Barbara Kingsolver and a few others notwithstanding - have been better known for concentrating on more domestic, interpersonal concerns a la Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones than on larger issues of, say, global injustice, nuclear annihilation or genocide.

The publication of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America last year, Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart in June and Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision and Bobbie Ann Mason's An Atomic Romance this month, however, may indicate there is a sea change afoot. Like Mason, all these American authors unabashedly address political themes in their latest novels - albeit embedding them in rippin' good stories peppered with larges doses of humor.

Indecision tells the story of Dwight B. Wilmerding, a 28-year-old who suffers from abulia (an inability to make decisions) and travels to Ecuador where he finds love and a sense of purpose, fighting global injustice. The novel is not agitprop. On the contrary. Kunkel, in his debut novel, "succeeds at being both political and funny," says Amy Rosenberg in Poets & Writers Magazine. "It would be devasting to be one and not the other, really," Kunkel tells Rosenberg. "An appreciation of the political horror of our times is only intensified by an appreciation of what's actually enjoyable in life."

Millet is arguably the most blatantly political of these authors. No problem figuring out where her sympathies lie: She interrupts her narrative with nonfiction nuggets about the history of nuclear arms, including the proposal by the current administration to produce "small" tactical battlefield warheads.

But she, too, doesn't deliver pure propaganda. She serves up her antinuclear message in a clever tale of time travel. Three of the physicists responsible for the atomic bomb - Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard - are reincarnated in contemporary America to witness for themselves what their handiwork has wrought. When they discover that the Bush administration is interested in beefing up the nation's nuclear arsenal, they conclude that they've been sent to bring about global disarmament.

Mason's An Atomic Romance also carries an antinuclear message. But the Southern author of In Country, Clear Springs and Shiloh & Other Stories wraps up her political comments in a touching - and utterly convincing - love story. Worry over the effects of the nuclear age - in this case, radiation contamination at an uranium-enrichment plant in a small Midwest town - plays an important role in the plot. But equally important is the third word in Mason's title.

The romance is between Reed Futrell, a hunky engineer at the nuclear plant (as his father was before him), and Julia Jensen, a brainy biologist. Their relationship begins with flirting in an elevator, if you can call bantering about Einstein, string theory and Stephen Hawking's explanation of space-time flirting.

This is not young love. Both Reed and Julia have been married before. She has two grown daughters. He also has grown kids. Both are divorced. This is a union between two seasoned - and somewhat battered - lovers, but, with a few strokes of the pen, Mason draws us in, so you can't help rooting for them:

"Reed felt like they were young lovers - in a way that young lovers never got to be because their youth made them stupid, except in the movies," Mason writes. "She had an eye for ironies. They sat on a bench at the center of the mall and watched people. . . . They ate popcorn in the park, danced at a roadhouse across the river. They watched their money float away when they went on a gambling-boat excursion. They saw a cartoon festival at the drive-in theater. He introduced her to barbecue. She taught him to like wine. They tried wine with barbecue, which both insisted was unheard of. She made him feel more sophisticated than he really was."

So what's the conflict? Julia is troubled by the fact that Reed is seemingly so unconcerned about the news of radiation leakage at the plant, where his father was killed in an industrial accident years before. For his part, Reed has been in denial - about his mother's deteriorating health, about his status as a loner, but, above all, about his company's compliance in hiding the truth about the real dangers of the contamination.

An Atomic Romance, like many attempts to combine politics and fiction, isn't without flaws. The drama between Reed and Julia is strung out too long, like the far-flung galaxies Reed likes to contemplate, and the ending is not altogether satisfying. But then again, love is often messy - just like politics. The fact that Mason, and some of her fellow novelists, finally are trying to tackle the latter, is miracle enough for me.

[Last modified August 20, 2005, 11:16:03]