Book Review: Readings

An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Random House, 288 pp., $24.95

Reed Futrell is a man's man. He works a blue-collar job at the local power plant despite an education that promised something more, and his best friends are his dog and an alcoholic named Burl. Middle-aged, divorced, with his children grown, Reed's stepping into what should rightly be called the Bobbie Ann Mason years. Mason has said that she feels her characters are on "the threshold of possibility." Like Reed, they often have a lot of life already behind them, and, also like him, their stories tend to begin after one life phase but before another.

In An Atomic Romance, that turns out to be an awful lot of in-between for an entire novel; here you can easily feel you're perpetually waiting for something to happen. But Mason is talented at representing change as it happens in real life – barely perceptible in any given moment, but seismic in hindsight – and as scenes slowly unfold, it's possible to see that Reed's journey is one long, quiet epiphany. Spurred by brainy-scientist girlfriend Julia, Reed is just beginning to come to terms with the choices he's made in life, especially regarding his job at the plant where his father died in a chemical accident when Reed was a child. As news reports grow increasingly dire about the plant's wayward chemicals showing up where they shouldn't, both his financial future and that of the town seem uncertain, not to mention the implications for his health, which worry Julia and strain their relationship. In fact, she stops answering her phone altogether, and Reed spends much of the book checking his answering machine and calling, or not calling, Julia.

The romance in Romance is surprisingly the least interesting interplay of the book, offset by the colorful and touching relationships Reed has with childhood friend Burl and with his ailing mother, who are wonderfully complex and familiar characters. The allure of their world is in Mason's vision of modern working-class America, where online dating, prayer warriors, string theory, and potlucks coexist, where the classic macho man finds his match in a woman who wears a lab coat and a mother whose mind is slipping away. With An Atomic Romance – her first novel in 10 years – Mason once again illustrates on a deeply personal level how the changes that sweep a nation will creep into our lives, slowly altering them forever.