cover image The Last Night on Bikini

The Last Night on Bikini

Patricia MacInnes. William Morrow & Company, $20 (171pp) ISBN 978-0-688-08001-3

MacInnes's first novel crackles with character and humor, nimbly relating a troubled military family's offbeat stagger through the Cold Car. The story, told by teenaged LeeAnn, spans several years in the 1950s, during the height of nuclear testing. The family has been posted to Kwajalein, one of the Marshall Islands, 175 miles from ground zero on Bikini Island and well within the physical and psychological reaches of the fallout. The finely rendered setting sparks several outstanding segments: LeeAnn's ornery father, Jack, diving drunk for relics from a German destroyer; her mother, Matty, sewing uniforms for pigs fated to roast for science in the glow of a mushroom cloud; father Jack and Joe Beebe, LeeAnn's lover, resolving an argument with a Geiger counter. In the end, however, MacInnes stumbles. Leaping forward two and then three decades, she fails to resolve the crises mounted deftly earlier in the novel, lifting the well-wrought spell of her storytelling by handing the reader memory instead of climax. (Feb.)