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Summary
Summary
"Brilliantly imagined in its harrowing account of the Chernobyl disaster and exhilarating in its sweep, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a debut to rattle all the windows and open up the ventricles of the heart. . . . The book is daring, exhilarating, generous and beautifully written." -- Colum McCann
A brilliant and gripping novel set against the tragedy of Chernobyl and the way in which the lives of its survivors were forever changed in its wake. Part historical epic, part love story, it recalls The English Patient in its mix of emotional intimacy and sweeping landscape.
Russia, 1986. On a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old prodigy plays his piano silently for fear of disturbing the neighbors. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, hiding her dissident past. In a nearby hospital, a surgeon immerses himself in his work, avoiding his failed marriage.
And in a village in Belarus, a teenage boy wakes to a sky of the deepest crimson. Outside, the ears of his neighbor's cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened. Now their lives will change forever.
An end-of-empire novel charting the collapse of the Soviet Union, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a riveting and epic love story by a major new talent.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1986 Moscow, as first-time novelist McKeon presents it, few expect the Soviet government to change: strikes fail, newspapers are corrupt, and many men and woman can only find work in factories. Even Grigory, a successful surgeon, mourns his relentless routine: "The life that had silently formed around him seemed such a solid thing now." McKeon conveys the U.S.S.R.'s rigidity through the miseries of his characters: Grigory's wife Maria, a savvy journalist, loses her career, reputation, and marriage in one fell swoop when her anti-Soviet sympathies are discovered. But while hope for personal betterment is relentlessly checked, the horrific nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl proves that massive-scale change is possible. McKeon offers four clear fictional perspectives on Soviet history, and not once do the private affairs of his characters (Grigory and Maria's love for one another; the tension between a nine-year-old piano prodigy and his mother, who has too much riding on her son's success; a boy's efforts to grapple with his father's sudden death) bump up awkwardly against the historical account. Instead, McKeon's fiction serves up, without cliche, what so many futuristic dystopian novels aspire to: a reminder that human beings can bring about their own demise. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Set amidst the Chernobyl disaster, McKeon's debut novel loosely weaves the stories of a handful of characters whose lives are altered, both directly and indirectly, by effects of the 1986 catastrophe. Grigory, a chief surgeon struggling after his failed marriage, is called to the nuclear plant to provide aid in the wake of the accident. When he raises concerns about the ill effects of radiation and the government's lack of response, his authority is stripped. Meanwhile, teenage Artyom and his family evacuate their rural village for Minsk. Amid harrowing conditions at a resettlement camp, they desperately search for their missing father. Beyond the experiences of first responders and evacuees, McKeon portrays other characters coping with everyday life in Soviet Russia. Young Yevgeni, a piano prodigy relentlessly bullied by his classmates, lives with his mother and aunt in a tiny Moscow apartment. While he begins to test the bounds of parental authority, his aunt, Maria, begins to question her own circumstances. McKeon's graceful writing gives depth to his characters as they navigate indelibly changed landscapes and search for connection within chaos.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE NUCLEUS OF "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," Darragh McKeon's whirling first novel, is the Chernobyl nuclear accident, a catastrophe that embodies the political, economic and moral bankruptcy of the waning Soviet Union. McKeon makes it the center of a much larger, interconnected story, as the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman did with the Battle of Stalingrad in "Life and Fate." Artyom, a boy in a village not far from Chernobyl, wakes to find the sky replaced with crimson. "It looks as if the earth's crust has been turned inside out, as if molten lava hangs weightless over the land." Enough time in 20th-century Eastern Europe has inured his father to the unbelievable, and he is less easily impressed: "It's the same sky we've always lived under. It's just in a different mood." Meanwhile, firefighters who have never heard of radioactivity arrive to Chernobyl in shirt sleeves. They begin to vomit, but without "panicked crowds to confirm their private fears" they push misgivings aside. A technician finds the power plant's first-aid room barren because to prepare for such a colossal disaster would be to suggest that it could occur, and to make such a suggestion is politically unthinkable. The flight from the towns and countryside surrounding Chernobyl is the most harrowing description of displacement I've read since the Dunkirk evacuation in Ian McEwan's "Atonement." Pages of the strange, surreal and horrific pass with the authenticity of raw news footage. Only one box of iodine pills is available for a city of 60,000, and so the elderly pass around contaminated milk, believing it will fortify them against radiation. The military responds to the humanitarian crisis by sending in fighter jets and robots designed for Mars exploration. Dogs are shot in front of their owners by soldiers who see themselves as war heroes. A woman fills a jar with dirt from her parents' grave, only to be told the earth beneath her feet has been polluted. A book billed as an "end-of-empire novel" might easily lose both reader and character in the high-altitude, low-oxygen air of abstraction, especially when the empire in question is the largest state in recent history. After all, how to portray the final era of an empire spanning 11 time zones if not broadly? But it's moments like these that make "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" such a startling achievement. Even as McKeon cuts a wide swath, his scenes, characters and story lines build as the gradual accumulation of the particular. In one such episode, Artyom's father tries to bring an unhinged door onto a bus crowded with evacuees. The soldiers are initially as nonplused as the reader, until they see a series of numbers carved into the wood and realize the door records the various heights of his children. The door has also held the bodies of his parents at their wakes. He shows the soldiers "the notches, the names, the tribal markings denoting the history of the thing, the only object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead body will rest, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man's nose." It's a small moment, but one indicative of McKeon's narrative stance as a whole. By investing objects and settings with a history of individual triumphs and disappointments, he wrings surprising emotional depth from the mundane. And by proving that stories too intimate to ever make their way into the history books are nonetheless worth telling, the novel makes a powerful argument that no one is unremarkable. Grigory, a surgeon whose story later dovetails with Artyom's, leaves the relative sanity of his Moscow-area hospital to assist in the evacuation. There he becomes a splinter of decency lodged within the cruel and incompetent government response. At the operations center, the K.G.B. has blocked outbound calls, fearing the public relations disaster more than the environmental one. Grigory breaks into a nearby apartment and calls individual families at random from a phone book to warn of the dispersing radiation cloud. There's up to 150 names on each page of the phone book, and he reaches only 60 before he's cut off. Small acts of defiance, however futile, provide these characters a sense of identity separate from the political system they serve, even if it's only the awareness that decency will be their downfall. Post-Chernobyl, the narrative shifts between a resettlement camp ("what a city would look like if you took away all the walls and furniture") and Moscow, where Grigory's estranged wife, Maria, atones for personal and political transgressions. She is perhaps the most complicated of the many characters populating these pages. Both her journalism career and her marriage end when her editor links her to subversive samizdat, and later coerces her into an affair under the threat of ruining Grigory. When we first encounter Maria, she's been relegated to a factory floor where she soon risks the future of her nephew, a piano prodigy, in a misguided act of resistance. It forces both her and us to re-evaluate our understanding of ethical choice when principles and pragmatism diverge. MARIA'S STORY HIGHLIGHTS one of the few shortcomings of this richly envisioned and thoroughly researched novel. All the central characters are victimized by the state, but they are rarely complicit in its crimes. Who isn't going to sympathize wholeheartedly with a surgeon saving those the government has discarded? Or a bullied 9-year-old whose shorts fall off during a gym class rope climb? But the corrupted conscience of a state can replicate itself within the conscience of even the most well-intentioned individual. Greater attention paid to the corrosive politics of the private sphere, where the government's betrayals are carried out by friends, neighbors and family, might have complicated the question at the heart of the novel: How should we act when personal and societal moralities conflict? This seems particularly noticeable in the second half of the novel, when the momentum McKeon has carefully built divides and dissipates among multiple sub-plots. But it's hard to find fault in a novel so fearless. If McKeon's imaginative reach at times exceeds his structural grasp, this feels less like the avoidable missteps of a rookie than the inevitable fissures of a seasoned novelist pushing against the boundaries of his form. A coda set in 2011 shows that while the lives of these characters may have transformed, the new Russian state looks much like its predecessor. What began with a meltdown ends with music, and in a surprising turn, we come to understand that time is a solvent that can convert even failure into states of grace. McKeon's characters may already have receded into history, but by imprinting their triumphs and tragedies onto the imagination with such visceral empathy, he has given them a deserving afterlife in this powerful novel. McKeon's hero is a splinter of decency among the cruel and incompetent authorities. ANTHONY MARRA is the author of "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena."
Library Journal Review
Top surgeon Grigory finds refuge from his failed marriage in his work at a Moscow hospital. His ex-wife, Maria, makes car parts at a factory, the numbing repetition crushing her rebellious spirit. Maria's nephew, a nine-year-old piano prodigy, practices noiselessly to avoid disturbing the neighbors at their dilapidated apartment building. And in a Ukrainian village, residents awaken to a crimson sky while in a nearby field the ears of cattle are dripping blood. An unthinkable tragedy has happened at the Chernobyl Power Plant ten miles away, and nothing will ever be the same. This startling debut novel is a love story set against the harrowing tale of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. As the government attempts to downplay and even cover up the catastrophe, people are dying, some quickly, others slowly over years, black sores appearing on their tongue and skin; out in the woods, "Mother nature is bleeding." VERDICT McKeon's thrilling writing is matter-of-fact but emotionally powerful, and his convincing characters precisely depict the perseverance of the human spirit in the darkest of times. A promising debut; highly recommended.-Lisa Block, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.