All Intensive Purposes

Thomas McMahon was the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics and professor of biology at Harvard University; he also wrote some wonderful, quirky novels. His first was Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel, written when McMahon was a graduate student and published in the early 1970s. The University of Chicago Press has McMahon's novels in print, and good for them. (I particularly recommend Loving Little Egypt, about the grandparents of today's hackers.)

One might say that Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry is the story of a childhood and a troubled marriage set in the Manhattan Project, in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. But it's more fitting to say that the novel is about the thrill and dislocation of the Manhattan Project, of the odd community of scientists that was formed and the dislocations in their personal life that accompanied and fueled the creation of the atomic bomb. The relationship between McMahon's narrator and his scientist father is not fleshed out at all, but we watch as his mother stays in Boston rather than move to Tennessee or New Mexico, and as his father takes up with Maryann, an Oak Ridge secretary. We also see a host of other famous scientists, whose faux names are no disguise. I spotted Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Lawrence, and others. None are fully developed, but through them we glimpse the Manhattan Project -- once the new new thing, but now receding into history.