The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Ariel's Crossing by Bradford Morrow
Stephen Burn

Bradford Morrow. Ariel’s Crossing. Viking, 2002. 390 pp. $25.95.

If Don DeLillo’s Underworld anatomized the end of the Cold War’s fraught dialectic, then a number of recent novels have traced the imaginative fallout of the nuclear age beyond those limits. Carter Scholz’s Radiance explores corruption within the post-Cold War nuclear industry, while Bradford Morrow’s new book, Ariel’s Crossing, explores the prolonged shadow cast by the Manhattan Project upon those who have tried to live their lives outside of it. Although an impressive novel in its own right, Ariel’s Crossing extends the stories of Brice and Kip (the sons of two researchers who worked on the bomb at Los Alamos), Jessica Rankin, and her daughter Ariel (fathered by Kip, but brought up by Brice), all of whom Morrow introduced in his 1995 novel Trinity Fields. But when we are reintroduced to Kip and Brice early in Ariel’s Crossing, the reader realizes that this is a scene being replayed from the climax of the last work, with the significant twist that in Trinity Fields the scene was mediated through Brice’s first-person viewpoint, but is here related in the third. This shift from the subjective to the objective is intriguingly appropriate because Ariel’s Crossing is partly about Ariel’s movement away from the personal claims of the man who raised her to the objective claims of her biological father, a crossing that suggests at least one possible meaning of Morrow’s title. This movement, however, is played out on multiple levels in Morrow’s clever novel. Her father, for example, has similarly been forced to give up responding to the insistent demands of the personal as he slowly comes to relinquish his lifelong character trait of running from attachments, finally answering to the dictates of biological degeneration through his gradually worsening cancer. This narrative of Ariel and Kip is skillfully interwoven with the lives of other nuclear-age New Mexico families in a looped narrative that hints at many suggestive symmetries and subtle connections. And in some ways the novel is particularly about coincidences and unexpected connections. In this sense, telephone calls are a revealingly recurrent motif in the novel. Some critical calls are made, but this is a novel filled with calls unanswered and messages left, as Morrow explores fortuitous connections alongside failed communications and information received too late. [Stephen Burn]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Ariel's Crossing by Bradford Morrow Stephen Burn Bradford Morrow. Ariel’s Crossing. Viking, 2002. 390 pp. $25.95. If Don DeLillo’s Underworld anatomized the end of the Cold War’s fraught dialectic, then a number of recent novels have traced the imaginative fallout of the nuclear age beyond those limits. Carter Scholz’s Radiance explores corruption within the post-Cold War nuclear industry, while Bradford Morrow’s new book, Ariel’s Crossing, explores the prolonged shadow cast by the Manhattan Project upon those who have tried to live their lives outside of it. Although an impressive novel in its own right, Ariel’s Crossing extends the stories of Brice and Kip (the sons of two researchers who worked on the bomb at Los Alamos), Jessica Rankin, and her daughter Ariel (fathered by Kip, but brought up by Brice), all of whom Morrow introduced in his 1995 novel Trinity Fields. But when we are reintroduced to Kip and Brice early in Ariel’s Crossing, the reader realizes that this is a scene being replayed from the climax of the last work, with the significant twist that in Trinity Fields the scene was mediated through Brice’s first-person viewpoint, but is here related in the third. This shift from the subjective to the objective is intriguingly appropriate because Ariel’s Crossing is partly about Ariel’s movement away from the personal claims of the man who raised her to the objective claims of her biological father, a crossing that suggests at least one possible meaning of Morrow’s title. This movement, however, is played out on multiple levels in Morrow’s clever novel. Her father, for example, has similarly been forced to give up responding to the insistent demands of the personal as he slowly comes to relinquish his lifelong character trait of running from attachments, finally answering to the dictates of biological degeneration through his gradually worsening cancer. This narrative of Ariel and Kip is skillfully interwoven with the lives of other nuclear-age New Mexico families in a looped narrative that hints at many suggestive symmetries and subtle connections. And in some ways the novel is particularly about coincidences and unexpected connections. In this sense, telephone calls are a revealingly recurrent motif in the novel. Some critical calls are made, but this is a novel filled with calls unanswered and messages left, as Morrow explores fortuitous connections alongside failed communications and information received too late. [Stephen Burn]

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