Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millett (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.25

  This work is set in July 16, 1945. The world's first atomic mushroom cloud rises above the New Mexico desert. Physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi are there to watch the detonation of their brainchild. The bomb's third 'godfather', Leo Szilard, is in Chicago. As the bomb detonates, all three suddenly find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings having, somehow, arrived in the year 2003. When the three scientists appear in Santa Fe, Ann, a librarian, and her doting gardener husband, Ben, take them in, only to be swept up in a quixotic quest that takes them from Hiroshima to the United Nations on a ramshackle pilgrimage for nuclear disarmament. As the scientists cross the United States, they attract a growing convoy of groupies, activists and religious fanatics who believe that Oppenheimer is the Messiah. Meanwhile Ann and Ben fight to save their marriage, threatened by her obsessive devotion to the men of the Manhattan project. In this heroically mischievous tour de force, Lydia Millet tells an apocalyptic fable that evokes both the beauty and the tragedy of the nuclear sublime.