She sees art in science

Marianne Wiggins has always been a writer who sees connections, who incorporates a wide range of subjects and settings into her fiction, and draws influence from both the natural and aesthetic worlds. For her, there are commonalities between music and literature, art and science, and she explores them in novels that are open-ended and complex.

Her most famous work, 1989’s “John Dollar,” has been called a feminist reworking of “Lord of the Flies” -- it involves eight schoolgirls shipwrecked on an island -- but it also traffics in ideas as diverse as seismicity and colonialism, and finds grisly resolution in the chaos that emerges when the strictures of society dissolve.

Her “Almost Heaven,” on the other hand, takes at least some inspiration from J.D. Salinger (its protagonist is named Holden Garfield), while using tornadoes and other extreme weather as a metaphor for millennial America, a landscape marked primarily by dissolution and loss. It’s a view of fiction that operates out of a middle ground between myth and history, truth and imagination, what we wish for and what we believe.

“The form is so symphonic,” says Wiggins, whose seventh and latest novel, “Evidence of Things Unseen” (Simon & Schuster), encompasses such diverse elements as the Wright brothers, the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the development of the atomic bomb. “You can go on for 28 pages about the mechanics of building a Quonset hut. Or not. But for me, you’ve always got to have the human in the landscape. Whether it’s Ahab on the deck of the Pequod, or “The Last of the Mohicans,” a human being is writing it and a human being is reading it, and we need to connect ourselves through that.”

“Evidence of Things Unseen” is very much a novel of connection, on both the theoretical and the human scale. Revolving around a photographer and amateur scientist named Fos, his wife, Opal, and his best friend and partner, Flash, it takes place in Tennessee between the world wars, and re-creates a world in which science and technology are on the verge of changing everything, albeit in ways its characters cannot predict.

At the heart of the book is the notion that perception influences experience, that what we call reality is mostly a matter of what we are prepared to observe. “The eye will seldom see what the mind does not anticipate,” Wiggins writes late in the novel, describing a sign at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility where Fos is hired to document work on the bomb. “Above [that],” she continues, “one of the physicists had written, ‘Isn’t this The 1st Principle of Magic?’ Fos thought it was.”

This may sound contradictory, the correlation between science and magic, but for Wiggins, they aren’t antithetical in the least. “I didn’t take science in high school,” she says. “but when I went back as an adult, I went to Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Both are gorgeous writers. And so smart. But both, with their huge hat sizes, came to the conclusion late in life that there is wonder in all of this. In other words, they didn’t take science as an antiseptic road to a logical definition of life. They got on that road and said, ‘This is a miracle. This is fantastic.’ So if they were finding art at the end of their research, that gave me license to employ it in a similar way.”

Wiggins smiles when she invokes Feynman and Einstein, her eyes crinkling in the midafternoon sun. Yet it’s less an ironic smile than one of affection, as if she were discussing two old friends. In conversation, she’s like that -- casual, enthusiastic, comfortable in white cotton pants and a sleeveless blouse. In her late 50s, she’s been living in Los Angeles for nearly three years, drawn by her daughter, a photographer and her desire, after 16 years in London, to reconnect with her American roots.

This repatriation, Wiggins acknowledges, has been a double-edged process; although during her time in England, she never felt like anything but an American, the United States is a very different place than when she left. This was underscored from the moment she arrived in California, on Nov. 8, 2000, election night. “I got off in L.A.,” she recalls, “and I said to the customs man, ‘Who’s the president?’ And he said, ‘Lady, I wish I knew.’ This is an extremely exciting time for someone who wants to write about politics.”

Politics and writing

At first glance, the idea of Wiggins as a political writer seems incongruous; “Evidence of Things Unseen” may explore a singular historical epoch, but this is more a matter of context, a setting against which the human drama can unfold. Wiggins, though, has seen her share of political trauma, beginning with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to whom she was married at the time. While she’s never plans to write about this -- “I chafed against it because I’m not a nonfiction writer, and I would never make a work of fiction out of that” -- it lingers as an example of how politics can infuse the very act of writing, as well as a warning sign of things to come.

“The Rushdie affair in the United States,” Wiggins says, “was one of freedom of expression. In the U.K., it was about racism. The Muslims were saying, ‘We find this work blasphemous.’ Blasphemy was a law on the books over there. So they took ‘The Satanic Verses’ to Parliament and asked that it be deemed blasphemous and removed from sale. Parliament said, ‘Yes, we have a blasphemy law in this country, but it only refers to the Christian God.’ These were enfranchised citizens, British Muslims, who were being told, ‘Your God ain’t our white God.’ ”

For Wiggins, the experience offered a profound insight into a clash of cultures that would later be brought home to America in such a horrendous way. “Really, very few events occur from nothing. There are links to previous events. I’m not saying that one anticipated it, or that it wasn’t horrific. But I was not surprised.”

Wiggins keeps returning to the idea of all these connections, all these hidden links and layers, not just in terms of science or politics, but in regard to everything. “I may be sentimental,” Wiggins says, “but I think there’s something in the way humans are made, that regardless of the pursuit -- be it art, be it spiritual or be it scientific -- there is a longing for a unified theory. We want some big thing to explain how all of this connects.”

For her, the notion of a unified theory is especially important when it comes to aesthetics; ask about her inspirations, and she’ll cite everything from opera to Impressionism. “I’m influenced by all artists,” she declares. “Music influences me enormously, like the tricks you learn from Puccini bringing on leitmotifs for Mimi and Butterfly. I learned to do that, to foreshadow a character. And you learn things looking at a Cezanne, the way he lays an orange up against a fuchsia. You think, how can I do that verbally? How can I make that shock, that line? What forces do I need to bring into play?”

Then, there’s the influence of other writers, who function as a further layer of connection, extending down into the very marrow of her work. “Evidence of Things Unseen” is dedicated, in part, to Herman Melville, and “Moby-Dick” acts as a leitmotif throughout the novel.

Partly, Wiggins says, that’s because “of all the great books in literature, ‘Moby-Dick’ wins hands down for me because of its gross variety, its enormous mount of muscular achievement.”

But equally important is her sense of the atom bomb as its own kind of white whale, with Robert Oppenheimer filling the role of Ahab, and workers like Fos and Opal the unwitting members of his crew.

“The morning they tested at Trinity,” Wiggins explains, “Oppenheimer did not know if the sky wasn’t going to be set on fire. He honestly did not know what was going to happen when he started that chain reaction. He didn’t know how contained it was going to be, how powerful; they had no way of measuring it. And yet he was willing to take that risk. And that’s Ahab committing the entire crew of the Pequod to go after this white whale, that sort of human obsession with the unknown, the unseen, I’ve got to have this prize. And all of our hubris in that.”

In Wiggins’ work, ideas are as important as characters and what we see on the surface becomes a jumping-off point for the issues underneath. That, in turn, makes “Evidence of Things Unseen” a dense and complicated piece of fiction, one that requires its readers to work.

That’s OK, though, for what she’s saying with this novel is that literature is worth it, that it is a sustaining force in our lives. Late in the book, Flash calls it “an ongoing exploration of the human tragedy -- man’s condition ... an ongoing conversation with the future, with the past.”

“The fact that Melville is all over this book,” she says, “is my way of having a conversation with him. I mean, wouldn’t it be fun if Herman were here with us? I’d like to ask him a lot of things. I’d want to bring him into the conversation, bring him up to date on the atom bomb.” She pauses, smiles, eyes crinkling again as if she finds the idea amusing, before continuing in a more urgent tone.

“I’ve always felt that my license to do what I do for a living came from reading.... I feel at home here. That’s what I mean about the past. I didn’t invent the novel. I’m working in a form that stretches back 200 years. And it’s a miracle to me.”