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The Nuclear Age

tim o/brien

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The Nuclear Age is about one man's slightly insane attempt to come to terms with a dilemma that confronts us all—a little thing called The Bomb.

The year is 1995, and William Cowling has finally found the courage to meet his fears head-on. Cowling's courage takes the form of a hole that he begins digging in his backyard in an effort to "bury" all thoughts of the apocalypse. Cowling's wife, however, is ready to leave him; his daughter has taken to calling him "nutto"; and Cowling's own checkered past seems to be rising out of the crater taking shape on his lawn, besieging him with flashbacks and memories of a life that's had more than its share of turmoil.

Brilliantly interweaving his masterful storytelling powers with dark, surreal humor and empathy for characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Tim O'Brien brings us his most entertaining novel to date. At once wildly comic and sneakily profound, The Nuclear Age is also utterly unforgettable.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1985

This edition

Format
320 pages, Paperback
Published
December 1, 1996 by Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN
9780140259100
ASIN
0140259104
Language
English

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tim o/brien

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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 79 votes)
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79 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Aradeid
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I dislike this novel as much as much as I liked Mr. O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Unfortunately, I cannot find a single thing to commend this title. I did not find it entertaining or humorous (as the cover copy directed); the protagonist is completely unlikable, and the narrative ends as feebly as it begins.

The story is full of plot holes and as a result much of what happens means little. And none of the characters evolve in any way.

With so many other books available it's a waste of time to read this one.
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elementaryschool
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I think this book is about how some people come to develop a fear that never leaves them, and how crippling such a fear can be in terms of the choices they make and how that fear clouds their minds. And it's also about love and the seemingly strange things we'll do to find it and the seeming randomness in how we come to feel love...or not come to feel love.

I read this after reading O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato," which seemed almost entirely a fantasy, and now I'm starting to wonder how much of this is supposed to take place in the narrator's mind, as well. The premise is so strange and so are some of the characters' behaviors. One character, the therapist, may be fabricated (maybe? I'm not sure) and yet he keeps popping up in the book.

Really, though, we are meant to wonder how much of the events actually take place because we have an unreliable narrator who must tell himself throughout the book that he's not crazy. And the book is a little crazy in the sense that the timeline is all over the place, with I bet over half of it taking place as flashbacks. And the author expertly weaves them together, even suggesting life itself is not a linear function regarding time:
I have a theory. As you get older, as the years pile up, time takes on a curious Doppler effect, an alteration in the relative velocity of human events and human consciousness. The frequencies tighten up. The wavelengths shorten--sound and light and history--it’s all compressed. At the age of twelve, when you crouch under a Ping-Pong table, a single hour seems to unwind toward infinity, dense and slow; at twenty-five, or thirty-five or forty, approaching half-life, the divisions of remaining time are fractionally reduced, like Zeno’s arrow, and the world comes rushing at you, and away from you, faster and faster. It confounds computation. You lose your life as you live it, accelerating.


I found this to be a sad book full of sad characters who intend to do sad things. But the ending is kind of hopeful and beautiful.

**spoiler upcoming, turn away now if you haven't read this and wish to**

**CAUTION: spoiler, TURN AWAY NOW...**

This quote below is almost at the very end of the book, not at its climax because the book essentially has no climax. I find it to be a statement not just on the narrator choosing not to commit the awful crime but also a statement on humanity itself, which is full of risks and dangers that could turn people away from wanting to experience humanity at all, but we're human so we try to see past those risks and dangers:
I know the ending. One day it will happen. One day we will see flashes, all of us. One day my daughter will die. One day, I know, my wife will leave me. It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color, and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket, and the world will surely end. I know this, but I believe otherwise. Because there is also this day, which will be hot and bright.


So as Covid-19 promises to try and end humanity as we have come to know it here in the U.S. and promises to try and kill 70 million people worldwide, we believe otherwise because there is also this day, and it looks like a damn fine one at the moment.
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goszka
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Really enjoyed O'Brien's writing style, which unfortunately is the only thing that kept me going through the plodding backflash sections which took up most of the book. At times the dialogue was a bit unbelievable, a tad too witty and rapid-fire. I found the protagonist's choices about the women in his life confusing and at times his decisions and motivations made him hard to care about.
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reyschien
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Going After Cacciato (winner of the National Book Award in 1979) was widely acclaimed as one of the most powerful and emotionally vivid novels about Vietnam. Now, writing with the same sharp, richly expressive language, the same edgy dark humor and complete honesty, and the same rawness of nerve and energy, Tim O’Brien gives us an equally powerful novel about growing up as a child of anxiety—the big anxiety, the one that’s been with us since the fifties, when we finally realized that Einstein’s theories translated into Russian.It’s 1995 and William Cowling is digging a hole in his backyard. He is forty-nine, and after years and years of pent-up terror he has finally found the courage of a fighting man. And so a hole. A hold that he hopes will one day be large enough to swallow up his almost fifty years’ worth of fear. A hole that causes his twelve-year-old daughter to call him a “nutto,” and his wife to stop speaking to him. A hole that William will not stop digging and out of which rise scenes of his past to play themselves out in his memory.The scenes take him back to his quietly peculiar adolescence (No. 2 pencils had a surprising significance), to his college days, down into the underground, and up through several stabs at “normal” adulthood . . . they take him from Montana to Florida, from Cuba to California, from Kansas to New York to Germany and back to Montana as he makes him way through an often mystifying—but just as often hilarious —labyrinth of fears and desires, obsessions and obligations, blessed madness and less-than-blessed sobriety . . . they take him into the lives of a shrink who’s a whiz a role reversal and of a dizzying eccentric cheerleader; of radical misfits and misfit radicals; of an ethereal stewardess (the traveling man’s dream); and two guerilla commandos who mix shtick and nightmare in their tactical brew. And each scene is a reminder of the unbargained-for-terror that has guided him to the bottom of his hole. For this digging is his final act of “prudence and sanity”—he’s taking control, getting there first, robbing his fears of their power to destroy . . . or so he believes. But is this act really sane? Is his daughter’s estimation of his emotional well-being (“pretty buggo, too”) the only truly sane statement being made? Is sanity even the issue? In the dazzling final scenes, William turns from the hole—from his past and from his future 0 to himself, digging deeper and deeper to find his answers.The Nuclear Age is pyrotechnically funny and moving, courageous and irreverent. It takes on our supreme unacknowledged terror (whose reality we both refuse to accept and all too easily accommodate ourselves to), finds it lunatic core, and shapes it into a story that speaks of, and to, an entire age: our own, our nuclear age. It is an extraordinary novel.
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_Mataga_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I liked it. The writing is beautiful, the description fantastic and truly places me into the horrors and life of the protagonist, and it's challenging. But it was hard to follow, jumping from event to event, the thoughts and focus so random. It may have been an attempt to introduce the schizophrenic mind.
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dazynl8
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Not my favorite of the Tim O'Brien books. Does give good insight to the inner workings of a man that is dealing with the possibility that, at any moment, the U.S. could be attacked with a nuclear weapon, and the impetus behind building bomb shelters.
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