Saturday, October 19, 2019

Trinity by Louisa Hall

Then the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains, and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.

I grabbed for somebody's arm, and I saw that the women around me had turned into X-rays, and that my own arm was an X-ray as well, our bodies having become in an instant nothing more than revelations of the bone cages we'd lived our whole lives in.

Louisa Hall's Trinity, is, at least on the dustjacket, about Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb.  It takes a wide view of Oppenheimer's life, not just focusing on the narrow period of his work at Los Alamos, like Countrymen of Bones, another great fictionalized version of Oppenheimer, but before and after: in Berkeley, where he goes to meet his mistress who will eventually die by drowning herself in a bathtub; in Princeton, later in life, as he suffers through the slings and arrows of McCarthyism and agitates for nuclear control.  Oppenheimer had a fascinating life that often bordered on tragedy, with plenty of rich details.  (Hall repeats Countrymen of Bones' account that Oppenheimer played a corpse in a Los Alamos production of Arsenic and Old Lace, which I'm not sure I realized was a true detail.)

But in practice, Oppenheimer moves through the book like a shadow, or a background character, hardly ever seen face-on.  The novel comprises seven first-hand accounts of people of varying closeness to Oppenheimer: a friend, a secretary, a Secret Service investigator, even a college student whose only experience with Oppenheimer is seeing him speak in public.  Trinity shares a strategy with John Williams' Augustus: when a figure seems too broad, too loaded with stature to look at straight on, give as many different accounts as you can.  But unlike the Emperor Augustus, Oppenheimer never really gets a chance to speak for himself.

Trinity has exceedingly little to say about who Oppenheimer really was.  In some of these accounts, he's little more than a minor character who moves in the background of the narrator's immediate life.  The thesis of the novel, actually, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to really know another human being.  The Secret Service investigator admits he has no way of knowing why people do the things they do--which seems like a weird thing for a detective to admit--and later sections extend that anxiety to their husbands, family, and friends.  Trinity is not just the name of the Los Alamos nuclear bomb test but a representation of the essential multiplicity of human character.  I absolutely knew we were going to get a paragraph like this one, which applies the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to human relations:

You never know, absolutely, what another person was feeling, just as we never know the velocity and the position of a particle at any moment, all knowledge being by nature incomplete, all studies missing an aspect at least of the object they study.

I'm not complaining.  When Trinity is at its best, it makes this anxiety seem freshly horrifying.  The novel is really kept up by three tentpole stories among the seven, each of which is narrated by a young woman in Oppenheimer's orbit.  The first is a Woman's Army Corps worker at Los Alamos who has recently been abandoned by her lover, a married scientist in Oppenheimer's orbit; the second is a secretary of Oppenheimer's whose eating disorder comes to symbolize, I think, the escalating rot in the 20th century social order; the third is a magazine writer who sees the offer to interview
Oppenheimer as an opportunity to pin down a great wrongdoer in the way she was never able to do for her cheating husband.  These woman are all victims of broken marriages, of husbands and men who pay too little attention to them.  Like Oppenheimer, who makes his secretary run back to get his copy of the Bhagavad Gita so he can get the quote just right, they use myth and literature to help them understand their own situations.  The first imagines herself as the murdered woman in Crime and Punishment, the second as Persephone in the summer.  How can they know other people?  They barely understand themselves.

The best of these may be the final section with the interviewer, because of all the stories in Trinity it does the most to really grapple with Oppenheimer's legacy, and to do more than throw up its hands at the impossibility of knowing anyone else.  Its attempts to bring the various threads of the novel together are fairly timid, but the narrator's brash inquisitiveness is an effective way to end the novel.  "Shouldn't we live all our lives," she says, "knowing it's our responsibility to account for ourselves with precision?"  If Oppenheimer can't give a reasonable accounting of a life that resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and more permanently mutilated, why should we bother with them?

The other four narratives range from entertaining to seemingly irrelevant.   I don't know what we're supposed to get out of the college student, for instance, whose insight into Oppenheimer is mostly watching him walk under a row of trees outside the lecture hall.  It can seem a little like padding, but I guess that's okay, because what it pads is so precious, and dangerously fragile.

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