Love and other issues

In her first new novel in more than a decade, the much-beloved Bobbie Ann Mason (author of “In Country,” “Feather Crowns” and other prize-winning works of fiction and memoir) grapples with some of the Big Issues and Questions of our age.

Radiating, so to speak, from the central mystery of nuclear energy -- its discovery, its history, its uses for good or evil, its awful unintended consequences -- are takes on topics including astronomy, molecular biology, Einsteinian relativity and its postmodern spinoffs such as superstrings and p-branes, cloning, anthrax, Ebola and other bio-horrors, and -- not least -- the intractable problems of caring for our old people. In fact, on a brief first skim, Mason’s new novel might be mistaken for a collection of quirky, poetically charged essays with a bend toward metaphysics.

But what makes “An Atomic Romance” real fiction is the life of its beleaguered protagonist, Reed Futrell, from whose hyperactive mind all the riffs and meditations flow. Fortyish, divorced-without-the-kids, he is a regular guy with dog and a Harley, albeit cooler and sexier than average: “normally a confident guy, given to bursts of pleasure and celebratory blasts of energy. He wasn’t afraid of much ... he could deal with almost anything.” What anchors this stargazing novel to the good, if now ailing, Earth is Reed’s place in time, in a present-day small Kentucky town, and his job as a highly skilled and well-paid maintenance man for the town’s only significant employer, a uranium enrichment plant.

As a so-called “cell rat,” Reed spends his shifts wearing a “yellow astronaut suit” crawling “inside dark, dusty enclosures to repair machinery that yelled in his ears.” He gets his regular tests for radioactivity and, except for a few past “incidents,” the numbers look good. He wants to write a song about working, to express how a man’s work gives him “identity, meaning, structure, a ... raison d’etre!”

Romance, for Reed the self-styled “Atomic Man,” arrives in the form of Julia, a lovely and sophisticated cytotechnologist. Also a divorced parent of two, she’s now working to make up for lost decades by going back to school to study biology. Julia is “crazy about diseases,” while Reed is crazy about the elusive Julia.

“An Atomic Romance” hews to the classic boy-meets-girl, bumbling-boy-loses-girl, can-shaken-up-boy-win-her-back formula. Off on a wilderness trip to nurse his bruised heart, Reed lies awake “trying to create a Top Ten list of sex dates with her.... He missed her vowels. He missed her lip gloss.” The story, which runs simply and linearly through one hot summer, is thickened by the introduction of Reed’s two additional tribulations: first, a heart attack that lands his spunky mother in the hospital, and second, some snoopy reporters’ discoveries of nasty stuff in and around the enrichment plant -- flickering blue underground fires, exotic, carcinogenic metals in the air and ground. Even plutonium traces in a dead deer.

Mortality has a way of throwing romance into sharp relief. Reed is haunted by the untimely deaths, both linked to the plant, of his father and grandfather. At the book’s start, Reed suffers a long, portentous dream about a woman blowing her brains out. (This unexplained element troubles the reader’s mind beyond the novel’s end, like a Chekhovian gun left unfired.)

While the hospital threatens to transfer his mother to a nursing home-of-horrors, Reed’s co-workers take refuge in irony: “ ‘Radiation is good for you -- right?’ ” Hardly surprising, in this working-class world perpetually menaced by government and big money, that with Julia, Reed seems “to forget the block of pain he usually carried inside him”; without her, he turns for comfort to “the idea that the present moment did not exist in some star a million light-years off.”

If Reed’s dreamboat character sometimes strains plausibility (a party is a “bacchanalia,” his favorite poem is “Kubla Khan”), Julia’s undermotivated disappearances create a more serious obstacle. Going down to the wire, one wonders how Mason can still weave together the parallel threads of her novel -- or will she? Not entirely. In the end, in a metafictional moment, Reed catches himself thinking that “something about the scene was like the unreality of a movie ending

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Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”