A man, angry and worn, speeding down a dark road, meets an ambulance, the police, and two fire trucks. He knows they are on their way to the nuclear testing station. He knows what has happened: his worst fear. He turns his car around and drives toward what he is certain is a nuclear meltdown.
Andria Williams’ debut novel, The Longest Night, opens with this suspenseful scene. The novel portrays a military community and is inspired by a real event: a nuclear reactor explosion in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on January 3, 1961, which resulted in three deaths. It is an event that has been largely forgotten in American cultural memory. As Andria Williams writes in her author’s note, events such as Three Mile Island in 1979 have inscribed a more prominent space in our consciousness. Perhaps this is because, though no one died, Three Mile Island occurred in the context of what Williams suggests is “a more skeptical society.”
With impressive prowess, Williams takes on the reimagining of an event that has been muted in historical memory, seamlessly integrating details about the day-to-day workings at an early reactor, and doing so without heavy-handed pauses or the clunky maneuvering of research.
The protagonists are Nat and Paul Collier, a married couple with a dynamic Williams carefully develops. The Colliers moved from San Diego to Idaho Falls with their two young daughters so that Paul could work at the reactor. In the character of Nat, Williams draws a portrait of a free-spirited woman feeling trapped by her circumstances, pushing social boundaries and uncertain about her choices. Nat is lonely and bored until she places herself in a situation with another man that has profound consequences. Paul, her husband, is a taciturn man with a passionate moral compass; he wants his wife to be pleased but doesn’t understand what he perceives as her inclination toward instability. In creating these characters, Williams runs the risk of writing a cliché piece about the cloistered 1950s woman, itching for freedom, with a well-meaning husband who simply cannot understand what she could want that he hasn’t already provided. However, the relationship between Nat and Paul is surprisingly intricate.
Another character in The Longest Night is Mitch Richards, Paul’s supervisor, whose willful neglect of the problems with the control rods at the reactor as well as his alcoholism are, in part, responsible for the meltdown. A classic sexist and philanderer, Richards tampers with data from the reactor logbooks so that he is not implicated in the disaster he seems to foresee. He is married to Jeannie Richards. She, too, is a character with unflattering motives and actions, though she seeks redemption as the novel begins to come to a close.
When Paul is temporarily sent to a camp in Greenland, Nat, who is pregnant, befriends a young man named Esrom. Nat and Esrom are constantly on the edge of an affair—a tension exacerbated by the assumptions of their community.
Even though Esrom is a predictable love interest, Williams reverses our expectations about how the story will play out. She does not allow readers to dwell too long on Esrom’s role in this sub-plot; instead, what is most important is what bubbles to the surface between Nat and Paul. In this way, The Longest Night is largely a meditation on the complexities of sustaining a marriage. As the novel progresses, Williams slowly cracks open Nat and Paul’s relationship.
The Longest Night is also about the gaps in our knowledge about others as well as what remains unspoken even in the face of the obvious. It is about the things we do not see and the things we willfully do not face. Williams’ characters are challenged to navigate an expanse of silence and chatter, of cover-ups and direct hits, from everyday encounters to tragic events. And the novel extends beyond a period piece, reflecting the denial and ambivalence that characterize much of American culture.
At the same time, American readers will experience the requisite “I-know-better” feeling of modern hindsight. For instance, when Paul worries about Nat’s exposure to radiation, she protests by stating that she gets her feet X-rayed all the time at the shoe store. These moments are expertly folded into the story so that they resonate less as bald irony than as integral details depicting the lives and culture of the characters. Of course Nat would talk about it in this way; it is believable because Williams cares about her characters. While some contemporary, and historical, fiction has been about the wink-wink of knowing better, Williams’ work allows us to both know better and become invested in the world she draws.
The Longest Night deftly speaks to uncertainty—scientific, emotional, and psychological—as great and terrible power is manipulated, harnessed, lost, and exposed. This complicated wrestling with uncertainty is a large part of what makes this novel both historical and contemporary. The novel questions how and why we trust each other and nameless others who keep the world going under the pretense of security and safety. These are humans, after all, as Williams so deftly demonstrates. A large part of the novel’s success lies in how Williams weaves this uncertainty through the stories of the characters. The book leaves the reader thinking about all the ways we fail in communities—socially, politically, and in our everyday interactions with the people we love most—and how we move forward anyway.
Williams’ background, as the spouse of an active-duty naval officer and mother of three children, will enhance credibility for those readers connected with the military. Williams offers for civilian readers the textured uniqueness of military communities and lives, as well as a glimpse into the stories and harrowing incidents that remain untold. The Longest Night is not simply a historical piece borne from extensive research and imagined perspectives, but a resonating reflection of the nuance and threats of nuclear and military power as well as the everyday lives of those closest to this power and the uncertainties it can yield.
