Our next book club selection. I got it and read it early with the expectation that the hostess will be more prompt in arranging our next meeting than I was. She did not care for my selection, so I did know to expect something quite different from the (I thought) classy murder mystery that I gave them. It forced me to remind myself of the reason that I joined the book club in the first place - and I was one of the original members. And that was longer ago than I can figure at this moment. At any rate, I decided that it would be good for me to be dragged out of my reading rut every once in a while. The motivations of the others may be very different, I'm sure that many of them are. There are a couple like me who have our reading ruts, but read voraciously in those genres. There is one who reads not only voraciously, but eclectically - far more so than I do. And there are a number who just like the people and think it is nice to get together with the group. Some of them seldom actually read the book - one made a point of coming to "my" meeting to very sweetly tell me that she didn't think the book was very nice - seriously, I'm not meowing, she is a very genuine person and concerned for the spiritual well-being of people she likes. Oh, well.
All the above to lead to the statement that this book was not at all like my book. I had no real idea what to expect from the title and the overview given by the next hostess - except perhaps that the book was "nice." The title on its own would have led me to expect one of those rather risque numbers like Army Wives or Desperate Housewives or almost anything with the word "wives" in the title. It wasn't. And it was "nice" under the meaning implied by the ladies mentioned above. And a quick read.
It did lack two major items which I expect in a novel: characters and a plot. Lacking those, I was left rather stumbling around searching for a category or genre for it. It wasn't a history; it was clearly fiction, although there were many real people embedded in it, a couple of whom I actually have been personally acquainted with. But without characters or plot, it certainly wasn't a novel. The setting was a real place with real events, but since this was about the wives not the scientists, the real events were included only obliquely.
Which leaves only the style for comment. The entire thing is written in first person plural. Yes, go back and read that sentence again - first person plural. "We came from ..." "We had been ..." "Our husbands ..." "Our children ..." "We were pregnant ... (try THAT one on for size)" "We named our babies ..." It made me think of the Stepford Wives. There was never any indication of which of them was married to which of the scientists. Well, maybe - I think she did once refer to Kitty Oppenheimer by name. She couldn't help naming some names occasionally, but almost exclusively by first name. Were "Bob" and "Jane" the Wilsons? Who knows? She didn't even give "the Director" and "The General" names - and goodness knows, those are public record now.
The saddest thing is that Nesbit undertook to write about the unrecognized people who were part of a truly unique time and setting which produced work which fundamentally changed the world, and she marshmallowed it into a generic nonstory. I was left seeing it as no different from the experiences of any group of military wives - moved willy-nilly from pillar to post and forming communities of women in places and situations even more foreign that the highlands of New Mexico with restrictions as severe as those imposed on the Los Alamos community and as unaware of the actual work of their husbands as those women.
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