Before the Fall

By Laurence I. Barrett

PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY: A NOVEL by Thomas McMahon. 246 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

From the somber afternoon of the nuclear age, two physicists, father and son, look back at its dawn. The elder had helped to build the Bomb. The younger has been blighted by it. The situation seems prefabricated for apologia or remorse from the father, denunciation or at least contempt from the son. One of the rewarding things about

Thomas McMahon's first novel, though, is the total absence of any predictable generation-gap bitterness. The loss of innocence and joy he mourns is both too profound and too vulnerably human for partisanship.

The chemistry in Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel is not of science, but of flesh and blood. McMahon chooses as his narrator Timmy MacLaurin, a teen-ager who accompanies his father, Harold, first to Oak Ridge and then to Los Alamos. (The similarity of names can hardly be coincidental; though the author was an infant during World War II, his father later participated in development of the hydrogen bomb.) For the scientists in McMahon's New Mexico, the creation of the Bomb involves a minimum of moral anguish and soul searching. There is the war. There is the threat of a Nazi Abomb. There is intoxication with the new vistas of accomplishment to be born of the energy they are both creating and taming. Overriding all is the challenge to their talent and the catalyst of such an assemblage of genius supported by resources made available in unprecedented quantity.

Desert Dance. As scientists, they are propelled into a euphoria of creativity. As men, they are overwhelmed. Harold's wife has left quickly to be replaced by Maryann, a sweet, yielding office worker who becomes the mistress-mother that father and son need. She is the link to humanity and joy, a sprite who dances solo on the desert floor in tights and shucks her M.I.T. sweatshirt for sunbathing in mixed company.

But the link is fragile. It breaks under the project's pressure as Harold MacLaurin becomes so totally absorbed by his work that he is useless as lover and father. Timmy weakly explores adolescence without a satisfactory guide. After learning that another scientist had thrust her at Harold in order to provide the peace of mind necessary to assure his productivity, Maryann despairingly takes on all comers in a military-police barracks and disappears.

Timmy tells the story 15 years later in the form of episodic memoirs and unsent messages to Maryann. By now, he is a physicist himself, but a nonfunctioning one, unable to reconcile the remembered excitement, the sense of possibility at Los Alamos with the meanness of technology in the cold war.

Fetishist. McMahon's novel suffers from problems of technique and plotting. Timmy reads minds and recounts the distant intimate activities of others to an extent that damages credibility. Melodrama intervenes at too strategic moments: a convenient suicide wraps up one subplot, a scientist loses his wallet and laundry with cosmic consequences, an offstage Russian turns out to be a sex fetishist rather than a spy.

Yet the voices come through. "The real truth," says the father, "was that we were having a ball." Laments the son: "The Los Alamos days are really over. Scientific work only threatens us now. It never accepts our love, the way it did then." Beyond lost innocence the book is about a problem that troubles the age -- a sense of having pursued wrong priorities too hotly, an awareness of the neglect of life and love that results. What is left for Timmy is only the melancholy realization that, after all, his father, and his father's generation, meant him no harm.

qedLaurence I. Barrett

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