August 19, 2024
Robbins (In Lieu of Flowers) explores ambition, love, and nuclear destruction in her introspective latest. Alice Katz, a young Jewish woman, jumps at the chance to work on the Manhattan Project and defies the wishes of her wealthy San Francisco family to travel to Los Alamos, N.Mex., in 1944. She’s engaged, but her fiancé is fighting in Belgium, and she’s excited to meet fellow recruit Caleb Blum, who was working on his doctorate at Berkeley when he took the job at Los Alamos to help his poor Orthodox Jewish parents avoid foreclosure. Despite their disparate socioeconomic backgrounds, Caleb and Alice act on their mutual attraction, and she gets pregnant. Their relationship is complicated by Caleb’s fear that Alice will regret marrying someone as poor as him and by the unknown outcome of their efforts to create such a destructive bomb. Interspersed with the narrative of the fast-paced work at Los Alamos are the recollections of Hiroshima survivor Haruki Sato in 1966, who recounts the bomb’s devastation. Robbins successfully instills her characters with conflicting emotions about creating a war-ending weapon and its cost on human lives. Readers will be riveted.