The Atomic Weight of Love

The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J. Church (1st Novel)Single Sentence Summary: The remarkable life story of a brilliant woman who falls victim to the expectations of the times she lives in, while still searching for her role in the world as it changes.Primary Characters: Meridian Wallace – a woman of science from the time she was a child. Meridian is both ahead of her time and trapped inside of it. Alden Whetstone – the very accomplished physics professor that Meridian marries. He is 20 years older than she is. Clay – a much younger man and a Vietnam veteran who Meridian meets in her forties.Synopsis: Growing up in a small Pennsylvania town, Meridian Wallace was ten when she was given her first book about birds. At eleven it was Darwin’s Origin of the Species. She was a woman who reveled in science, and especially ornithology. At 17, in 1941, Meridian set off for the University of Chicago where she was a gifted student, always challenging herself to learn more. While there she met and fell in love with her physics professor, Alden Whetstone. His mind never failed to draw Meridian in.When the call of WWII and developing the nuclear bomb drew Alden to Los Alamos, he and Meridian quickly married. She temporarily gave up her plans for a graduate degree in ornithology to follow Alden to Los Alamos. One year became two, and two became three, until Meridian realized the dreams of her own advanced degree had ceded to Alden’s greater calling. Through the years Meridian kept up her “science” by researching crows. She met people who influenced her life and understood the doubts she had about compromising her dreams to Alden’s. One of those people was Clay, a Vietnam veteran, who opened up Meridian to many new possibilities. Throughout the 60’s, 70’s and beyond, Meridian was challenged to change with the world or be left behind.Review: I really loved this debut novel by Elizabeth Church. It was a little slow in the first few chapters, but then it took off and soared! The whole time I was reading The Atomic Weight of Love, I was thinking of my own mother and my grandmother. Meridian would fall roughly between their ages, and so much of what she experienced, the women in my family must also have experienced. Today, a woman as brilliant as Meridian would go off and get as much education as possible. She’d be out in the world using all she had learned to discover new things, write books, educate others.In the 40’s and 50’s, it was the expectation that a woman would follow her husband and his career path even if it meant giving up her own. Most of the women at Los Alamos had abandoned careers and dreams for their husbands’ “greater” contributions. When talking with a friend about the “assumed compliance” of the wives living in Los Alamos Meridian comments,“What I mean is that the entire culture assumed, right along with our husbands. It was understood. And while they might well respect us, sometimes even be a tad less intelligent than us, by marrying them we tacitly agreed to a contract in which we would sublimate. They did not have to subjugate – we did that for them.”Meridian struggled with her lost career her entire life, but for most of it she couldn’t see her way clear to do things any differently. Like my grandmother, and to a lesser extent my mother, Meridian’s destiny was rooted in her husband’s choices.I loved the changes in Meridian as she began to evolve with changing times. Clay, a much younger man, challenged Meridian to put herself first and look at what she wanted and needed most in her life. Church did a brilliant job of developing the female characters in The Atomic Weight of Love, even the lesser ones. You knew them well and understood the choices they made and the demands the times placed on each. The men seemed a little bit one-dimensional, but it was really Meridian’s story so that can be forgiven.The author titled every chapter after a species of bird, telling what that species is called as a group and relating a small detail about each species. I grew to look forward to that little tidbit at the start of each chapter. Well done! Grade: A

A great title, and an even greater cover, with full-color pictures of birds arranged in the numbered squares of a slightly off-kilter periodic table. How could I not buy it? But looking at it again now, I see the color as illusory and the squares as skewed boxes, confining the birds, which seldom get to fly.I am sure that this is entirely intentional. For this is the story of a high-flying young woman, Meridian Wallace, who makes an unwise decision in her late teens, and finds herself grounded for life. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, she falls in love with her physics professor, Alden Whetstone, and marries him. Not only is Alden twenty years her senior, but this is in the middle of WW2, he is involved in the Manhattan Project, and is whisked off to a secret destination in New Mexico, seeing his bride only on fleeting visits and writing censored letters that say very little. The war ends, of course, and she joins Alden in Los Alamos -- an isolated company town of science where the husbands cannot talk and the wives list each other in the minutes of the women's club by the subjects of their PhDs, utterly humiliating Meridian, who did not even get to start her Master's. But while the wives with doctorates waste their intellect on perfecting high-altitude Bundt cake recipes, Meri at least continues her work as an ornithologist, observing a colony of crows in a nearby canyon, and keeping a meticulous journal that she hopes will be the foundation of her eventual thesis. The sections of field observation, when Meri is free herself to fly, are the most attractive in the novel; unfortunately, they are few and far between.The author, Elizabeth J. Church, was born in Los Alamos and lives there now, so she clearly understands its special atmosphere. And she seems to know how limited were the roles available to women at that time, especially if they chose to get married. She stacks the deck, of course, by making such a large age-gap between Meridian and her husband. [This was the one thing about the novel that touched me at all on a personal level; I am slightly less than two decades older than my wife, and our daughter married a man even older still. Fortunately, we are all happy, but very conscious of the balancing act that such marriages entail.] But you have to buy into the relationship for the rest to work. I can certainly understand a 19-year-old undergraduate having a crush on a professor who treats her with respect. But I find it hard to imagine that an atomic scientist in the Manhattan Project would be giving freshman lectures on the physics of flight, let alone have time for frequent coffee breaks and dinner dates with one of his students. Yet Church writes about it in her slightly naive style as though simply describing something is the same as making you feel it:-- I approached him after that first lecture and accepted an invitation back to his office. After nearly an hour, we left his office to continue talking over coffee. We spoke about what we believed in, what was happening in the world, and what the world might become. It was as though we'd both been starving for that kind of easy conversation and comradeship. When I was with Alden -- discussing, listening, leaning across tables and fully animated -- life was painted in more vibrant colors; birdsong was more elaborate, rococo.That rococo birdsong will be hard to find in Los Alamos, and Alden will change after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Meridian will look for other outlets for her spirit. To discuss the novel fully, I need to take this just one step further, SO STOP READING HERE if you prefer to find out for yourself.=== SPOILER ALERT ===Later in the novel, Church will take the age-gap theme even further, by making Meridian fall for a man twenty years younger than she is. Fair enough, if she could make me believe in their relationship. I can certainly understand a woman in her later forties falling for a much younger man; it would be less common to have the attraction reciprocated. Not impossible, no, but it needs more detail in the texture to make me say YES! rather than just maybe -- and that detail needs to be more than a description of the sexual techniques he teaches her for the first time. Once more, it comes down to language. To enter the inner life of a protagonist whose wings are clipped, the words need to soar; Church's writing, unfortunately, is earthbound. Here, for example, is their first moment of physical contact:-- "Darwin started out as a field geologist," I said. "He used geology to get to his theory of evolution, working off his observations and the theories of Charles Lyell -- mostly about the true age of the earth."-- "I remember reading something about that. Wow," he said. "I love it that you know that, Meridian." He squeezed my knee and I flinched, surprised by the intimacy. He withdrew his hand and placed it next to his hip on the boulder."Church then overcompensates for the matter-of-factness of that encounter by trying too hard for poetry when he leaves:-- I listened to the crows bidding him good-bye, until their voices turned to soft murmurings, until I could hear the susurrant breeze as it sifted through the tops of the pines.-- His eyes were blue, a light blue captured in a ring of darker, almost navy blue. He smelled of Irish Spring soap, the hair on his forearms shone gold in the sun, and I knew that if I pressed my lips to his chest I would taste salt."

Superb multilayered book. Found it hard to put down and missed it after I had finished. A beautiful story told around a situation I knew little about. Excellent thought provoking and indeed empowering book!

A wonderful expression of the intricacies of relationships of people and birdsAn inspiration to the independence of women but not to be confused as feminism

An intelligent and gripping read. I really feel for the characters involved and loved the intimacy with which this book let's us see and feel their respective lives

Well written enjoyable read

This novel is profound, and profoundly moving. It’s a long time since I’ve cried so much when reading a book. It follows the life of Meridian Wallace from a childhood marred by the death of her father (of a heart attack at the young age of forty three), to college in Chicago in 1941, to old age in Los Alamos, New Mexico.Meridian is very bright. She studies biology and plans to become an ornithologist studying crows. But dazzled by the intellect of the much older Alden Whetstone, she finds herself married young. Alden is a physicist who gets a job at Los Alamos working on the atomic bombs that ended WW II. The inevitable happens: Meri moves out to join him and ends up yielding her place at Cornell and her chance of a master’s degree. In the 1950’s this was so much more inevitable than it is today, but the masculine assumption that it will be so still hurts. Alden often displays the kind of classic male superiority complete with derogatory put downs that featured in Fay Weldon’s early work. The kind of thing that would have you throwing the book across the room and saying to yourself “Yes. That’s exactly how they do it.” Meri is no shrinking violet, but it’s a case of one woman against the patriarchy, so guess who wins?Salvation of a sort comes when she meets Clay, a young geologist and Vietnam vet. They fall deeply in love, despite the age difference, and Meri has her own sexual revolution. She is set to follow him to Berkeley and resume her studies when Alden becomes very ill. It’s terminal, and Meri can’t in good conscience abandon him. Author Elizabeth Church makes us see that life is complicated. Meri sees that Alden loved her as best he could. So: men are just as much victims of patriarchy.In her eighties, Meridian sets up an organisation called Wingspan, which helps young women broaden their horizons. And every birthday she receives thoughtful gifts from the now-married Clay. She boxes up her crow journals; the ones she kept during the earlier years of her marriage, and sends them to him.This is a story that will resonate with many women, particularly those of us old enough to have been faced with these kinds of choices. It’s a beautifully written book, complex and deft. These are issues our societies still need to sort out.