What he intended to do was not even a plan; it was more like a storm of thoughts that encircled him, so that every step he took was soft and far off the ground, as if his ideas had sprung from the sky. [p.49]
Natalie, a social worker, lives in her aunt Minnie's boarding house in the small Long Island town of Fisher's Cove. Natalie is in Fisher's Cove because her boyfriend Carter is a fervent anti-nuclear protestor, currently protesting the new nuclear power plant being built at Angel Landing, out by the harbour. Then there's an explosion at the plant -- and a few days later, Natalie has a new client, Michael Finn, who claims to have been responsible for the blast. Carter is happy to support Finn, whom he regards as a figurehead for the anti-nuclear movement: but Finn is no hero, and his actions are inextricably (and, to Finn, inexplicably) tangled with his relationship with his father.
The story is split between Natalie's first-person narrative and a third-person review of Finn's life. I did not like Natalie at all: I found her selfish and self-obsessed, and irredeemably shallow. Her first thought on acquiring Finn as a client is 'he might very well soon be quite famous. If he were to be my client I might be interviewed during the course of his trial; the New York Times would contact me, Newsweek would telephone, the Fishers Cove Herald might ask for a daily psychology column.' (p. 32). It's only late in the novel that she understands Carter's genuine commitment to his cause, his passionate love of the natural world and his dread of nuclear accidents. Natalie doesn't seem to like anyone, though she is drawn to Finn for reasons she doesn't explore.
Finn's relationship with his father, which has a more traditional arc, is sad and brutal and, finally, resolved. Finn's story, and the histories of his father and grandfather, are about powerlessness and power, turning away from one's dreams and accepting 'life keeps on going the way it was going'. Is his pivotal act, the mis-fitting of the valve, motivated by destruction or by the need to assume some control over his own life? The novel would have been uneven if it'd focussed solely on the Finns: but Natalie's part of the story did not have the emotional weight to balance Finn's.
Some splendid writing, but also some typos due, I think, to poorly-proofread OCR. There are echoes of the Three Mile Island incident here, though it's never mentioned by name: assuming that reference, this is set in the late 1970s. I think it's one of Hoffman's earliest novels: it really didn't feel up to the standard of her later work.
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