Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

Best friends, Kip Calder and Brice McCarthy are born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who work on the Manhattan Project, they play macabre games, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. One night, runaways, they make a crazy pilgrimage to the desert chapel of Chimayo to eat the holy dirt and atone for the legacy that haunts their families and themselves. Their two lives spiral apart after this joyous, terrifying in the sixties, as Brice becomes an antiwar activist, Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the covert war in Laos, leaving Brice to marry Jessica Rankin, the woman they both love. Then, twenty-five years later, Kip returns, a ghost soldier perhaps come to reclaim what was lost, and so threatens to shatter everything his old friend has built.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Historical Fiction

435 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, to work as a rare book dealer. In 1981 he relocated to New York City to the literary journal Conjunctions, which he founded with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and to write novels. He and his two cats divide their time between NYC and upstate New York.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Reviews

[fleegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morrow’s novel tells the story of two boys, Bryce and Kip, who grow up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, sons of scientists working on the atomic bomb during the 1940s and ‘50s. They grow up closer than brothers, and when they go off to college in the 1960s, Vietnam comes along and changes their friendship.

The book is in two parts. The first part is mostly flashbacks of Bryce and Kip growing up in New Mexico and is in Bryce’s first person point of view. The second part still has a lot of Bryce’s first person in it, but it adds to it some of Kip’s story in the third person about his tours in Vietnam and his living in Laos.

The book was great and very well-written. There are times when I thought the book was getting too verbose, but the author does two things I love:
1. The sentences are so well-written they flow in a rhythm and
2. Most of the wordy parts were when the author was describing the landscape of New Mexico. After several pages of this I realized that he was using the landscape as another character, and I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for that every time. It was amazing how at times, he could make the desert seem like a dry, arid nothing, and then come back and paint it as a paradise for the boys to run to make their escape.

The book jumps around in time quite a bit, but it was not hard to follow. The only thing I really had trouble with was figuring out the characters’ ages at different times, and I was never sure what year the present was. This could have just been me not paying attention because honestly, I was sucked into the story and kept wanting to find out what was going to happen next that I did get lazy with my note taking.

I enjoyed this book immensely, but I think I’m one generation off from really enjoying the fullness and scope of the whole novel. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you’d probably get even more out of the book than I did. My favorite part of the book was in the first part where Bryce and Kip run away to an old adobe church in the desert to try to atone for their fathers’ sins of bringing on the Atomic Age. My heart ached for those boys who grew up thinking that their fathers were heroes working on a project that would end war, and then coming to the conclusion that what they actually did was make a terrible weapon that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The boys couldn’t reconcile. And that’s a universal idea, especially in the U.S. I think, most children probably do think their parents are perfect and infallible, and then as they get older realize that no, they’re not those things, not by a long shot. And how do you deal with that? What do you do with your life to make yourself better? the world better?

In Trinity Fields Bradford Morrow does an amazing job of showing the subtleties of guilt and innocence in young and old, how close they are, and the affects of both during a lifetime.

[C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I either wanted to like this more, simply because the author was one of my professors, or hate it, simply because the author was one of my professors. As it was, it was merely good. It was not mediocre but good; however, it wasn't great. It follows two boys living around Trinity Fields in the post-WWII chaos of the nuclear arms race and into Vietnam. The characters were well done, the plot and language nicely written. I never wanted to stop reading it, but I never wanted to read any thing else by Morrow. Unfortunate, really.

[Akd200 Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested to see what others said about this book that I have around 5 pages left to read. I think my final assessment is to send it back to the author and have him work over the rough spots. Some of the book I thought was brilliant, others was will this page ever end. Some passages I finished and I thought to myself what does this add to the book, much the way a film editor would have had more at his feet.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

As advertised, this is about two childhood friends who eventually fall in love with the same woman. However, it is so much more than that. They grow up in Los Alamos, children of the men who developed the nuclear bomb, children ashamed of their background. It's about the war in Vietnam, the secret war carried out in Laos, and the abandonment of our allies. It's about the need to rebel against the evils of war that America always finds a way to wage. It's a book about blame and forgiveness.

Morrow writes beautifully of landscapes as well. As soon as I stopped whining about how slow the book seemed to be, I settled into the weave and the flow of the history that Morrow was providing to those who read this book years later.

[Sally · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tough to finish. Too much thought narrative, and not enough present, action. I got bored. Very bored.

[Tricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kip and Brice were best friends, growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project. They even loved the same woman, Jessica. Brice is a lawyer and activist against the Vietnam War, Kip joins the war as a pilot. Then Kip disappears leaving Jessica with his baby.

Brice has now married Jessica, and after 20 years he receives a letter from Kip asking to meet.

I found this story hard going at times. The last part of the book was better as you found out what happened but I found a lot of the book a hard slog.

[Georgina Hynd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, and had no trouble reading it, but didn't like any of the characters. The story focuses on the friendship of two boys brought up by scientists who were part of the group who proudly brought us the nuclear bomb. The boys raised themselves though, and that's where my dislike of the characters started. Their parents were absent, Brice's overly judgemental sister was absent, even Brice himself was absent, as was his friend Kip, but they supposedly had this deep can read each other friendship. A friendship that saw one escape to the war in Vietnam and never come back, whilst the other stole his girlfriend, who too was nothing much to write home about, who gave birth to this genius wonderful daughter, who, when she appeared, struck me as an obnoxious know it all. Obviously the author has strong views about the Vietnam War, and turned his pilot character Kip into a complete dick when conversations about the war happened between the pair. I use the term conversation loosely though, as we get a lot of overviews of the conversations from Brice's recollections and thus his opinion, rather being immersed into the conversations and given our own opportunity to draw our own conclusions. Another reviewer has said here that the book needs editing, and I couldn't agree more. There's no doubt the author can write, but I would have liked him to hold back on the quoting from other writers (yeah we get it, you're well read too), but had an "oh that explains it" moment when I read on here that he's an English professor.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

(this followed the first book of his I read, Prague Sonata which held up better than this one.) Mixed feelings about this. I enjoyed the historical aspects and the storyline. I felt a bit confused at times as he jumps around time wise. His writing style as lyrical and descriptive of place often felt distracting, tangential. However, it held my interest, though I skimmed much of the portions in Vietnam.

[DENNIS STEFANELLI · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book's premise was thought provoking, but the plot ambled almost directionless bouncing around the character's lifeline. The resolution didn't justify the time spent.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

(read up to p.19; stopped when I realized it was not a memoir, but fiction!)

[Suzan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well out of my usual comfort read. At least I did find it informative on issues I really didn't know much about....Vietnam war and protests, actual making of the atomic bomb....

[Ian McIntosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was awesome. It's 20 years since I read it and something about it comes back to me all the time. I don't know if it's the melancholy fatalism that I'm always powerless to resist, or the way he makes the lives of these two blokes as interesting and unputdownable as a page-turner thriller, but yeah Trinity Fields is up there with my all time favourites.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written by my old professor at Bard, so maybe that's why I liked it. I would actually give it 3.5 stars if I had my way. I don't even have more to say on it. Maybe only 3 stars, but still a decent book.

[Alan]

I loved this story of growing up in Los Alamos. Two friends, one stays the other goes to Viet Nam. Captures the time. Beautifully written.

[Velvetink]

29/11/2013 1 0f 20 books for $10 the lot