The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Forrest Gander, "Trinity Fields."

Untitled document

It begins like a rocket launch, with a thrust of energy, a delirious unleashed syntactical arc that fuses the whooping energy of three boys joyriding in a stolen car with the landscape, the galaxy, time itself: "We came careening across the desert toward Chimayó, dry warm wind over our faces hysterical with laughter, crazy with our sudden freedom, while over our heads an enormous sky wheeled, studded with stars, and the Milky Way shed its ghostly glow over the buttes and piñon trees and junipers."

Thus are we introduced to the first of many trinities. Here, three boys, "the most unholy trinity on the face of the earth, or else the most holy," flee the doomed utopia of Los Alamos-so new "there was no undertaker, no cemetery, there were no elderly people walking the streets, no widows"-where their fathers helped to develop the atomic bomb. They break into the chapel of Chimayó, there to eat sanctified dirt that the faithful believe can heal the sick. In their T-shirts and blue jeans, "crewcut and white as soaptree yucca petals," Kip and Brice, the young protagonists of the novel, are tainted innocents in America in the 1950s. They are America itself staggered by fresh responsibility and guilt for its recent use of atomic weapons. And although they don’t yet realize it, they are already stumbling headlong not toward redemption, but toward a fresh war in Vietnam.

Dropping down feet-first into the dark sanctuary, the boys act out a combination breech birth and communion that confirms their virtue, but nevertheless fails to protect them from the coming turmoil. In a prose that matches the restless energy of the characters, Morrow leads the reader at full throttle across three decades of American history, particularized in three characters who, despite the changes they endure, their diverging inclinations, and the damage heaped upon them, are pledged to each other for life. From a friendship "so tight that if born in the same skin, [they] would hardly have been closer," Brice and Kip leave New Mexico for New York, but then they leave each other to fill out their emblematically different fates. Kip ships to Vietnam, gets recruited into the Ravens, a group of maverick secret-op fighters, and finally "goes bamboo." Brice stays in New York, protests the war, and becomes a lawyer.

But Morrow’s novel doesn’t fork, then, neatly into two parallel narratives. Instead, reflecting the complex physics that helped engender the atomic bomb, the one story breaks into fields of overlapping narratives, trinity fields. Triangular relationships, like cones of light, penetrate and influence each other. Cursed in three languages by the caretaker of the Chimayó chapel, Brice and Kip flee this desert landscape where the first atomic bomb was exploded at Trinity Site in 1945. Forming another kind of trinity, they fall in love with the same woman. She, Jessica, becomes pregnant with Kip’s child. But it is Brice and Jessica who raise the girl, a trinity of nuclear family, nurturing their own love in Kip’s prolonged absence.

Meanwhile, Morrow shuffles the trinity of past, present, and future in rapidly juxtaposed sections that develop the novel along multiple directions. Like the sky that wheeled over the joyriders in the first sentence of the novel, the narrative wheels around the reader. But every two points along the rim of the story are connected to the center, the epicenter, Trinity Site, where America and the world were forever altered. By the close of the novel, the wheel has come full circle: we are with Brice and Kip again, where the novel began, in the chapel at Chimayó seeking forgiveness and a means to go on. We, the readers, have by now become implicated in their history, which is also our own. In a stunning orchestration of readerly empathy, Morrow lets us feel ourselves constituting the third presence, with Kip and Brice, in that holy chapel. Suspended above the book’s two open pages, the reader determines the third point composing the novel’s final trinity.

Bradford Morrow’s Trinity Fields brilliantly tracks the consecration of modern American consciousness shaped by the responsibilities consequent with the development and employment of nuclear weapons. With visionary compassion, Morrow likens Kip and other American soldiers suffering from "yellow rain," a sickness they contracted in Laos, to hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima’s "black rain." Morrow juxtaposes a scene in which the Hmong are bombed with chemical weapons with a scene in which Kip and Brice, as children, are evacuated into underground shelters as part of civil defense training in America. Through Morrow’s eyes, victims are linked together, citizens only of their suffering, and America’s war in Vietnam, as Kip says, is clearly "linked up" with World War II.

Kip tells Brice,

"I started to get it that 1945 only began to perish in 1975, it took that long. Just as you fight fire with fire, it took one kind of shame to begin to erase another, Brice. And in that way Vietnam was the best, most wonderful tragedy that could ever befall our country. One of the catchphrases you used to hear during the war was frontier sealing. We were doing some serious frontier sealing over there is what. But it was we who needed the damned frontier sealing, not them. We were in desperate need of a confidence reduction, and our failure in Vietnam was the leech Fate, like a wise physician, applied to our impudent body politic."

Kip continues, "Not that the Communists were heroic, don’t get me wrong. Because they weren’t. . . . But we had to lose, the dominoes that Eisenhower was so worried about falling in Southeast Asia . . . they had to fall, or else they’d fall the other way and our sick narcissism would carry us across the face of the world to yankify and cartoonize everyone and everything, and turn-sooner rather than later-the whole planet into an American theme park, a grotesquerie."

Like William Blake, whom Kip, shot down and wounded in Laos, finds himself quoting, Morrow manages in his art to harness the minute to the universal. The novel sprouts and ripens at manifold levels, concurrently. Like a particle in quantum theory, the central story is not locatable in any one place but in every place at once. While Morrow gives life to unforgettably passionate and tragical characters, he broadly registers the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he covers the Vietnam war (in some of the novel’s most graphically imagined, original, and haunting scenes) as well as the demonstrations against it. Just as Brice’s mother, the schoolteacher, is notably "evenhanded" in her treatment of others, Morrow is evenhanded in his construction of points of view. Evenhanded, they say in the south, as a spider. And quite literally, at one level, Morrow has written the great American novel as a parable of hands.

At the beginning of Trinity Fields, when the boy protagonists are looking for a way to break into the chapel at Chimayó, Brice is left on the ground, "arms outstretched over [his] head," reaching to join his friends on the roof. In a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s "Creation," Brice "touched their fingers" until-the talismanic "third time" he tries-"one hand caught mine, then another" and he was borne up with his friends. Inside the chapel, the boys first wash their hands with the holy dirt and then they eat it out of their hands. The next morning, when he wakes up, it is his hands that Brice notices first, "white with dried mud." They make him think of "a baby’s hands" which also "have the quality of antiquity about them, the creases and puckers in the flesh reminiscent of the timeworn." It is the hands that drive home the metaphor of the boys’ rebirth. The boys are responsible, even after this incident at the chapel, for judging the acts of their fathers, for taking into account what are later described as the "radioactive toxins fabricated by our hands." Reborn, the boys must accept their part of the responsibility for the crimes of their nation.

Just as their bond to each other was pledged when, as children, Brice and Kip "reached our small hands out to one another and shook," their friendship’s dissolution can be plotted as a series of injuries to their hands. Significantly, when the stolen car crashes, and with it, the inviolability of their friendship, it is Brice’s hand which is wounded in the accident and at which he stares with fascination and horror. When Kip returns from Vietnam, the last segment of his little finger is missing. When their relationship is most stressed, Brice dreams that Kip has no arms. Finally, in a devastating contrast in their last moments together once again at Chimayó, Kip "is looking at his hands and they are palms up with fingers opened into a symmetrical basket, as if he were holding a globe of air in them." The promise of Kip’s world has been reduced to an empty space given shape by the curvature of his hand. When they have said goodbye, Brice sits up to "look at my hands-Kip’s old tic-and see that they are still dirty with the soil from the sanctuary desert chapel." It is the hands that hold out to us the novel’s final image of hope and redemption.

Bradford Morrow investigates the way American consciousness was forged by two pivotal events in this century, the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War. In this sense Trinity Fields is a moral history of America. But as art, it is "news that stays news," for the characters are both poignant and familiar, their wounds are our own wounds, and Morrow’s language surges and sighs; it invents new channels of perception and feeling. When Brice and Kip are making discoveries, the sentences become a landscape and we climb along anfractuosities of syntax with the characters:

The cliffs projected in different directions as we reached a midpoint toward what appeared to be the first summit-we were nowhere near the peak of the mountains that rose away, horizon after horizon, toward the farthest clouds-and just when we thought we were too tired to hoist ourselves upward farther, the rock gave into a flat, and we lurched forward and lay recumbent, breathing hard in the thinner air. At the time, we never considered the peril in arriving here. If one of us had, no doubt it wouldn’t have been mentioned for fear of prompting the contempt of the other. We rode, we climbed, we lay face down for a minute to catch our breath, is all.

It is the reader’s breath that catches. Robert Olen Butler succinctly said that Trinity Fields is "Magnificent, a masterpiece." All I mean to say, finally, is that there’s no case for argument.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Forrest Gander, "Trinity Fields." Untitled document It begins like a rocket launch, with a thrust of energy, a delirious unleashed syntactical arc that fuses the whooping energy of three boys joyriding in a stolen car with the landscape, the galaxy, time itself: "We came careening across the desert toward Chimayó, dry warm wind over our faces hysterical with laughter, crazy with our sudden freedom, while over our heads an enormous sky wheeled, studded with stars, and the Milky Way shed its ghostly glow over the buttes and piñon trees and junipers." Thus are we introduced to the first of many trinities. Here, three boys, "the most unholy trinity on the face of the earth, or else the most holy," flee the doomed utopia of Los Alamos-so new "there was no undertaker, no cemetery, there were no elderly people walking the streets, no widows"-where their fathers helped to develop the atomic bomb. They break into the chapel of Chimayó, there to eat sanctified dirt that the faithful believe can heal the sick. In their T-shirts and blue jeans, "crewcut and white as soaptree yucca petals," Kip and Brice, the young protagonists of the novel, are tainted innocents in America in the 1950s. They are America itself staggered by fresh responsibility and guilt for its recent use of atomic weapons. And although they don’t yet realize it, they are already stumbling headlong not toward redemption, but toward a fresh war in Vietnam. Dropping down feet-first into the dark sanctuary, the boys act out a combination breech birth and communion that confirms their virtue, but nevertheless fails to protect them from the coming turmoil. In a prose that matches the restless energy of the characters, Morrow leads the reader at full throttle across three decades of American history, particularized in three characters who, despite the changes they endure, their diverging inclinations, and the damage heaped upon them, are pledged to each other for life. From a friendship "so tight that if born in the same skin, [they] would hardly have been closer," Brice and Kip leave New Mexico for New York, but then they leave each other to fill out their emblematically different fates. Kip ships to Vietnam, gets recruited into the Ravens, a group of maverick secret-op fighters, and finally "goes bamboo." Brice stays in New York, protests the war, and becomes a lawyer. But Morrow’s novel doesn’t fork, then, neatly into two parallel narratives. Instead, reflecting the complex physics that helped engender the atomic bomb, the one story breaks into fields of overlapping narratives, trinity fields. Triangular relationships, like cones of light, penetrate and influence each other. Cursed in three languages by the caretaker of the Chimayó chapel, Brice and Kip flee this desert landscape where the first atomic bomb was exploded at Trinity Site in 1945. Forming another kind of trinity, they fall in love with the same woman. She, Jessica, becomes pregnant with Kip’s child. But it is Brice and Jessica who raise the girl, a trinity of nuclear family, nurturing their own love in Kip’s prolonged absence. Meanwhile, Morrow shuffles the trinity of past, present, and future in rapidly juxtaposed sections that develop the novel along multiple directions. Like the sky that wheeled over the joyriders in the first sentence of the novel, the narrative wheels around the reader. But every two points along the rim of the story are connected to the center, the epicenter, Trinity Site, where America and the world were forever altered. By the close of the novel, the wheel has come full circle: we are with Brice and Kip again, where the novel began, in the chapel at Chimayó seeking forgiveness and a means to go on. We, the readers, have by now become implicated in their history, which is also our own. In a stunning orchestration of readerly empathy, Morrow lets us feel ourselves constituting the third presence, with Kip and Brice, in that holy chapel. Suspended above the book’s two open pages, the reader determines the third point composing the novel’s final trinity. Bradford Morrow’s Trinity Fields brilliantly tracks the consecration of modern American consciousness shaped by the responsibilities consequent with the development and employment of nuclear weapons. With visionary compassion, Morrow likens Kip and other American soldiers suffering from "yellow rain," a sickness they contracted in Laos, to hibakusha, the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima’s "black rain." Morrow juxtaposes a scene in which the Hmong are bombed with chemical weapons with a scene in which Kip and Brice, as children, are evacuated into underground shelters as part of civil defense training in America. Through Morrow’s eyes, victims are linked together, citizens only of their suffering, and America’s war in Vietnam, as Kip says, is clearly "linked up" with World War II. Kip tells Brice, "I started to get it that 1945 only began to perish in 1975, it took that long. Just as you fight fire with fire, it took one kind of shame to begin to erase another, Brice. And in that way Vietnam was the best, most wonderful tragedy that could ever befall our country. One of the catchphrases you used to hear during the war was frontier sealing. We were doing some serious frontier sealing over there is what. But it was we who needed the damned frontier sealing, not them. We were in desperate need of a confidence reduction, and our failure in Vietnam was the leech Fate, like a wise physician, applied to our impudent body politic." Kip continues, "Not that the Communists were heroic, don’t get me wrong. Because they weren’t. . . . But we had to lose, the dominoes that Eisenhower was so worried about falling in Southeast Asia . . . they had to fall, or else they’d fall the other way and our sick narcissism would carry us across the face of the world to yankify and cartoonize everyone and everything, and turn-sooner rather than later-the whole planet into an American theme park, a grotesquerie." Like William Blake, whom Kip, shot down and wounded in Laos, finds himself quoting, Morrow manages in his art to harness the minute to the universal. The novel sprouts and ripens at manifold levels, concurrently. Like a particle in quantum theory, the central story is not locatable in any one place but in every place at once. While Morrow gives life to unforgettably passionate and tragical characters, he broadly registers the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he covers the Vietnam war (in some of the novel’s most graphically imagined, original, and haunting scenes) as well as the demonstrations against it. Just as Brice’s mother, the schoolteacher, is notably "evenhanded" in her treatment of others, Morrow is evenhanded in his construction of points of view. Evenhanded, they say in the south, as a spider. And quite literally, at one level, Morrow has written the great American novel as a parable of hands. At the beginning of Trinity Fields, when the boy protagonists are looking for a way to break into the chapel at Chimayó, Brice is left on the ground, "arms outstretched over [his] head," reaching to join his friends on the roof. In a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s "Creation," Brice "touched their fingers" until-the talismanic "third time" he tries-"one hand caught mine, then another" and he was borne up with his friends. Inside the chapel, the boys first wash their hands with the holy dirt and then they eat it out of their hands. The next morning, when he wakes up, it is his hands that Brice notices first, "white with dried mud." They make him think of "a baby’s hands" which also "have the quality of antiquity about them, the creases and puckers in the flesh reminiscent of the timeworn." It is the hands that drive home the metaphor of the boys’ rebirth. The boys are responsible, even after this incident at the chapel, for judging the acts of their fathers, for taking into account what are later described as the "radioactive toxins fabricated by our hands." Reborn, the boys must accept their part of the responsibility for the crimes of their nation. Just as their bond to each other was pledged when, as children, Brice and Kip "reached our small hands out to one another and shook," their friendship’s dissolution can be plotted as a series of injuries to their hands. Significantly, when the stolen car crashes, and with it, the inviolability of their friendship, it is Brice’s hand which is wounded in the accident and at which he stares with fascination and horror. When Kip returns from Vietnam, the last segment of his little finger is missing. When their relationship is most stressed, Brice dreams that Kip has no arms. Finally, in a devastating contrast in their last moments together once again at Chimayó, Kip "is looking at his hands and they are palms up with fingers opened into a symmetrical basket, as if he were holding a globe of air in them." The promise of Kip’s world has been reduced to an empty space given shape by the curvature of his hand. When they have said goodbye, Brice sits up to "look at my hands-Kip’s old tic-and see that they are still dirty with the soil from the sanctuary desert chapel." It is the hands that hold out to us the novel’s final image of hope and redemption. Bradford Morrow investigates the way American consciousness was forged by two pivotal events in this century, the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War. In this sense Trinity Fields is a moral history of America. But as art, it is "news that stays news," for the characters are both poignant and familiar, their wounds are our own wounds, and Morrow’s language surges and sighs; it invents new channels of perception and feeling. When Brice and Kip are making discoveries, the sentences become a landscape and we climb along anfractuosities of syntax with the characters: The cliffs projected in different directions as we reached a midpoint toward what appeared to be the first summit-we were nowhere near the peak of the mountains that rose away, horizon after horizon, toward the farthest clouds-and just when we thought we were too tired to hoist ourselves upward farther, the rock gave into a flat, and we lurched forward and lay recumbent, breathing hard in the thinner air. At the time, we never considered the peril in arriving here. If one of us had, no doubt it wouldn’t have been mentioned for fear of prompting the contempt of the other. We rode, we climbed, we lay face down for a minute to catch our breath, is all. It is the reader’s breath that catches. Robert Olen Butler succinctly said that Trinity Fields is "Magnificent, a masterpiece." All I mean to say, finally, is that there’s no case for argument.

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