FISSION

Schover’s historical novel chronicles the domestic life of a young Manhattan Project wife as she seeks her purpose during tumultuous times.

Doris Friedman is a college student and new wife in a small Jewish community in Chicago. Told she can never bear children, she and her husband, Rob, decide to forgo birth control; they are rewarded with a surprise pregnancy that derails all of Doris’ plans. Reluctantly, Doris decides to put school on hold to raise the child. Rob, a brilliant machine enthusiast, is recruited to work as a machine expert on a top-secret government project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee: the Manhattan Project. The young family settles into their new life with Rob working long hours and Doris taking care of their baby, Barbara, studying accounting, and giving piano lessons on the side. Doris soon becomes bored with domestic life (“it’s not enough for me, Rob. I want to make some kind of dent in the world”), and the marriage begins to suffer. Rob is exposed to radiation and ends up in the hospital, where Doris is flung into the path of Dave Sokol, a flirtatious safety officer at the lab. Doris and Dave enter a will-they-won’t-they relationship, culminating in a momentary lapse of judgment and the revelation that Dave may harbor a secret agenda. Doris must decide between turning Dave in and risking her marriage or staying silent and endangering the war effort. Schover’s story provides a quiet, domestic perspective on the Manhattan Project, keeping most of the drama and romance subdued until Doris’ final mistake with Dave. Some readers may struggle with the narrative’s lack of energy, but the softer approach works for this story, highlighting the workaday realities of life at Oak Ridge and the tensions of the time period. The characters all follow believable trajectories, and Doris, with her dogged determination not to sit still for the rest of her life, is a uniquely powerful depiction of a 1940s housewife.

An engrossing, albeit quiet, World War II story about love, loyalty, and the atomic bomb.