Barbara

The elegant latest from Murphy (Talking Animals) traces the melancholy life of a movie star whose father worked on the Manhattan Project. The story begins in 1975 when the 40-year-old unnamed narrator is filming a western. The nonlinear narrative then jumps back to her teen years in Colorado, where her mother died by suicide when the narrator was 13. Unmoored by her mother’s death, the narrator makes her way to New York City, where she studies acting before joining a summer stock company in Connecticut. Eventually, she meets the man she will marry, Lev Samaras, a director who filmed concentration camps as part of the Army Signal Corps. Samsaras casts the narrator in Saint Barbara, a movie about a Rapunzel-like character whose industrialist father collaborated with fascists during WWII. The narrator intertwines her personal history with reflections on her unnamed father, an engineer who worked on the atomic bomb (“The scientists had to do it all because it could be done,” she says of her father’s “ethical framework”). The novel, like its main character, drifts from scene to scene without much forward momentum, but the prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work. Agent: Allison Devereux, Trellis Literary. (Mar.)