How Marianne Wiggins Learned to Keep Worrying and Hate the Bomb

July 16, 2003

The Atomic age spawned more than nationwide paranoia, anti-Soviet propaganda, and "Little Boy," the code name for the four-ton bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was a spate of filmmakers and writers who responded to the possibility of nuclear Armageddon with a legion of classics: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Manhattan Project, and Fail Safe, among them. Marianne Wiggins, author of John Dollar and most recently Evidence of Things Unseen (Simon & Schuster), counts herself among that generation of artists who could not not write about the bomb. "I'm a bomb baby," said Wiggins. "I felt I didn't have a choice."

In a recent telephone interview with BTW from her home in Southern California, Wiggins said, "I think most writers of my generation, one way or another, are always coming back to writing about physics and writing about nuclear fission. It's just the subject we're drawn to. It's ours." And she was drawn to write about "how patently and calmly the government lied to us."

The extraordinary Evidence of Things Unseen is 56-year-old Wiggins' seventh novel. She published her first, Babe, at the age of 28 and "never had an enormous failure that would stop me in my tracks." Though perhaps she's not widely known, Wiggins has won a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize. Evidence of Things Unseen garnered a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, which predicted that the book would do very well if Wiggins received the publicity she deserves. Evidence of Things Unseen is a July/August 2003 Book Sense 76 pick, and in Sarah Carr's (McIntyre's Fine Books, Pittsboro, North Carolina) recommendation, she called it "one of the best books I have ever read."

Beginning right after WWI and culminating a decade after the dropping of "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, events in Evidence of Things Unseen coalesce around the bomb. Most of the book's nearly 400 pages follow the lives of Ray "Fos" Foster and Opal, who marry early in the story. Fos is a self-taught "phenomenologist," a man obsessed with the parlor tricks of the natural world, the type of science that he can show off at country fairs -- Roman candles, fireworks, a homemade X-ray machine. But mostly he is in love with light, particularly things that are self-luminescent, or glow of their own accord, like fireflies and certain jellyfish. Opal has her own talents and eccentricities: her father, a glassblower, tells Fos, "She starts things … speshly she starts automobiles." Together in their quirky likableness, they exude a chemistry similar to Quoyle's and Wavey's in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

It is Fos' pursuit of revealing things unseen that drives his character: glow-in-the-dark ink created by crushed fish hearts, the luminescent and explosive properties of phosphorous. His lyrical and in-depth explanations of science are perhaps Wiggins answer to a famous lament of one of her heroes, world-renowned scientist Richard Feynman: "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

In Evidence of Things Unseen, Wiggins creates poetry with the details of science. This might seem to reflect the work of an author with a Ph.D. in chemistry or physics, but when asked about her background in science, Wiggins laughingly said, "I have some DNA. That's about it."

Wiggins, like Fos, is an autodidact. She got married out of high school, never attended college, and so had no formal scientific training. In fact, in high school she loaded up on the humanities, taking two languages (French and Russian) to avoid chemistry and physics. Her interest in science grew later.

"I hit my forties and thought, Oh, wait! There's a physical world out there," said Wiggins. "I'm very much like Fos in terms of my own knowledge. I've taught myself, and I'm sure I've got it all backwards. That's why I had to make Fos kind of like me because I was afraid that my science was so wrong."

Wiggins needn't have worried. She sent a galley of Evidence of Things Unseen to Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which Wiggins used as her bible for Evidence. He wrote Wiggins to tell her that she had "a great scientific mind" and called her novel "an astonishing and passionate book."

Her good science was the result of extensive research. "I was still researching up until I finished the book, and it took me five years to write. Research is what I love best," Wiggins confessed. "Research offers the excuse of the appearance of writing when I'm not. Every time there was something to write about that I had to research and [it] gave me the excuse to put down the pen and go to the library, boy, I was in the car."

Another benefit of her research was the traveling. Wiggins explained, "I seem to write books as a way of taking trips in my own mind. I write books about places I've never actually been myself because it reveals the world."

Her research apparently revealed Fos' and Opal's world very clearly -- her characters dwell in a fully imagined landscape of pre-WWII Tennessee. Their travails are rich in historically accurate details: they forfeit their farm near the Clinch River to the Tennessee Valley Authority; they find work at Oak Ridge laboratory, where scientists worked on developing the A-bomb. The layering and intricacy of these details sometimes causes Evidence to read like historical fiction.

But Wiggins doesn't see her work that way. She said, "I don't know what historical fiction means. I'm surprised when any dress older than five years old is called vintage, which pretty much describes my closet, by the way. So I don't know at what point something becomes historical.

"World War II seems very new to me. I saw that as news. At some point there is that artificial timeline that says no this is not news anymore, this is an historical event. So I guess I write about history, but it still seems like news to me."

Wiggins also sees her work as a timely response to issues involving "weapons of mass destruction" then and now. And she looks to tell the story of government deception as a perpetually relevant cautionary tale.

"I'm very worried," said Wiggins. "Once something becomes historical it is immutable. We're not allowed to change it, and so I want to keep focus on the news that happened in my lifetime to make sure that the record is straight before I go into silence."
-- Karen Schechner

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