Love at the End of the World
A look at Aaron Tucker's 2018 novel Y: Oppenheimer, horseman of Los Alamos
Two of the summer’s biggest movies came out the day before my birthday. One’s a fantasy story about a doll coming into the real world, the other presumably a dark and gritty story of the guy who fathered the atomic bomb. I haven’t seen either - watching stuff on the big screen these days gives me motion sickness. But it did inspire me to go back to Aaron Tucker’s first novel Y: Oppenheimer, horseman of Los Alamos came out a few years ago via Coach House Books.
True, it has sort of faded from view. But it’s a backlist title one well worse revisiting, especially in the wake of the new movie Oppenheimer.
Told with a poetic voice that's filled with long and flowing sentences, Y shows Tucker emerging as a strong voice and one with an easy fluency in poetics. His Oppenheimer is a bright soul, a scientist with the heart of a poet. He routinely cites verses by Donne and Baudelaire, but it’s the Sanskrit epics that are closest to his heart and to which he returns. Indeed, the concepts of a wheel of history turning and actions unfolding as if preordained by fate are ones that he seems to relish.
Or at least used to ease his conscience. Because this Oppenheimer is a complex one, one who has two faces. On the one hand, he’s stoic and reserved. A man who rides his horse Chaos out into the wilderness for days at a time, who slams back tequila and spicy Mexican food with ease, who lays on his belly and watches the atom bomb explode in silence. At the same time, he’s a man who’s sensual with a series of lovers, who recites verse in his mind, and who is prone to fits of introspection while out on the range, in the lab, even at home in the small hours of the night.
“Sitting across from Kitty, he reflected on Krishna’s speech to Arjuna, that within war he necessary deaths are only mortal, and therefore neither he not Arjuna should weep for their fallen enemies, only momentarily dead; similarly he, the Director, need not grieve for the towns laid flat and twisted with extreme heat, the bodies scattered in such numbers that there were no individuals.” (pg 79)
He is someone who is grappling with the consequences of a weapon that can end everything, but also one that can end a war that has killed millions. This is not a conflict one envies.
Y not a by-the-numbers retelling of the Oppenheimer myth; for that, one should refer to the books listed as sources in Tucker’s author’s note. There is also, I suppose, Christopher Nolan’s movie. This is more of an artistic retelling of the legend, one that’s heavier on the weight Oppenheimer must have been under and more interested in his inner tensions.
Indeed, there’s a layer of triangles inside this novel. The competing relationships of Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty against Oppenheimer and his lover Jean. Both are smart women who don’t fit into mid-20th century America. There’s the conflict between Oppenheimer’s ideals and his anti-war leanings with both that of his government (who say they need the bomb to end the war in Europe) and of other governments (who try to get him to leak information). There’s the way his freedom is both unleashed in New Mexico and its wide expanse, and the way he’s not allowed to travel on airplanes or without a government triangle.
It’s a story that Tucker does a good job telling. He flits around the timeline, going back to England in the 1920s, right up through the immediate post-war period. Fittingly, it doesn’t linger on and on, into the McCarthy era and Oppenheimer’s undoing in a 1954 security hearing. Doing so would undercut the narrative arc here and the three-way love story that Tucker weaves: Jean and Kitty at two points, Oppenheimer at the centre, and Trinity sticking off at the bottom.
Earlier this year Tucker released his second novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys which has been getting good press (I’m planning on reviewing it soon). But it’s also worth going back to his first book. Not just because Oppenheimer is in theatres, but because it’s a compelling read about the desires and ambitions of a complex, flawed man, and the three loves who dominated his life. Recommended.