Trinity Fields - Softcover

Bradford Morrow is a Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.

Everyone working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos understood that creating the most fearful form of destruction ever to stun the earth had profound moral and spiritual implications. Recognition of this endlessly repercussive reality is the impetus behind Morrow's powerfully lyrical and philosophical novel about two boys who grew up in that secluded, hell-bent community. Kip and Brice are soul twins, born on the same day and bound in a friendship that is both sustaining and painful. As teenagers, they share feelings of guilt and despair over the bomb and make a wild pilgrimage in a stolen car to the desert chapel Chimay{¢}o in an effort to atone for their fathers' sins. As Morrow follows his young heroes into manhood, he is as finely attuned to the spiritual legacy of the desert--from the kivas of Pueblo Indians, to the shrines of the Penitentes, to the fallout from the Trinity tests--as he is to the malignancy of secrets kept too long, lies, and omissions. While one war brought Kip and Brice together, another, the war in Vietnam, drives them apart. Brice becomes an antiwar activist while Kip joins the air force. And that's not all: they also fall in love with the same woman. As these private conflicts echo the calamities of war, Morrow equates hope and redemption with telling the truth. Donna Seaman