In this richly layered
novel, author Bradford Morrow peels back the geography of New
Mexico to reveal its unforgiving core of rock and scree. The Land
of Enchantment is also a landscape haunted by nuclear testing
during the 1950s, and it is within this rough physical and
emotional terrain that Morrow sets his tale about the search for
family and reconciliation.
In Ariel’s
Crossing, Ariel Rankin embarks on a search for her
biological father, Kip Calder, after she learns that the man she
calls dad is actually her stepfather. A former military man, Kip
resurfaces in his home state of New Mexico, elderly and in failing
health, after a life of running. Ariel’s journey from New York City
to northern New Mexico becomes a homecoming to her grandmother and
aunt, and to the Southwest itself.
Morrow’s
writing sparkles as he describes the seductive effect the mystical
landscape has on Ariel. “Sandy flats stretched between blackgreen
globes of pinon and juniper billeted along arroyos and over the
jagged flats in all directions. … Masses of clouds heaped
themselves with mythic luxuriance on the mountains. … She rolled
down the windows and her hair swarmed her head. Home for her could
surely be here as much as back there.”
Father
and daughter finally find each other in an unlikely setting: a
ranch confiscated 40 years ago, when the government expanded its
atomic bomb testing site at White Sands Missile
Range.
The West’s infamous nuclear past is an
important backdrop to Morrow’s plot. The author of four previous
novels, including The Almanac Branch and Trinity Fields, Morrow
reminds us of the price we paid for Cold War security, in cancer
clusters and displaced locals. In Morrow’s masterful, poignant
novel, the term “nuclear family” has more than one meaning.
Ariel’s Crossing by Bradford Morrow. Viking,
Hardcover: $25.95. 389 pages.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The fission of a New Mexican nuclear family.
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