THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD, facts made into fiction to tell The Truth

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
DAVID PHILIP MULLINS
University of Nevada Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A DRC AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: When disaster occurs, sudden and unexpected and yet limited in scope, all those caught in its extent are changed. Almost all of us has had this experience. As one ages, it's a given that it's occurred more than once...and it never, ever gets easier or routinized. The emotional toll is different each time, and there are certain practical responses that kick in with habituation (eg, people always gotta eat, so bring a casserole). But the effect is always profound, transformative, and painful. (I've spoken to many people who've had happy calamities, eg childbirth, who express surprise at how much it hurts to alter one's life, habits, friend-circle.)

One fine day, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the epicenter of a small seismic event. There are seismometers that record the Richter-scale measurement (for us oldsters; younger folk will call it the moment magnitude measurement abbreviated Mw); but it takes a novelist to record the magnitude of the moments after the event. Author David Philip Mullins, associate professor of English at Omaha's Jesuit institution Creighton University, took that on and has done a fine job of showing how a deadly explosion cracks much more than land and buildings.

Andrew works for manager Simon at a chemical plant outside Las Vegas. The plant's aging; the community isn't enthusiastic about its presence at all—what was once the edge of town isn't anymore—and there are no corporate plans for moving it because, if the desert of a sparsely populated state isn't excited enough to have the jobs, what's a nicer place going to think? Heck, these ingrates are even iffy about the nearby marshmallow plant! (Who wants to live with the eternal scent of S'mores on the breeze? Yuck.) But Andrew has a wife, Juliet, and a high-school senior daughter, Maddie, to support. He goes to work; he worries about safety, sure, but groceries don't buy themselves. And his bestest bud ever, Russell, tends bar nearby, so he has a safe atmosphere to relax in before going home to his womenfolk.

Russell isn't quite there in the womenfolk department, having his One True Love, poker-dealing wife Emma to go home to but no kids. Not that she, or he, wants a kid. Russell is prey to anxiety and self-worth issues he medicates with (then still illegal) pot. He keeps himself to himself outside the bar, relying on Andrew and Emma to provide his social needs. He loves them both...he loves Maddie like a niece...he likes Juliet just fine. His life is, then, jogging along smoothly enough. And that's where Author Mullins places us in his first scene, this fine day we know is going to be all about change:

The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes.

Beautiful evocation of an unlovely reality...how perfect that Russell is the one noticing. Because Russell is a man whose world explodes in so many ways when he hears a huge explosion, sees roiling smoke rising, from the driver's seat.

Maddie is in school when the explosion cracks her world wide open. She is called to the office, and some well-meaning Charlie Brown-trumpeting adults do what they can to inform her of her life, for real not for drama, being over. It does not compute. How could it? No one is prepared for death, not really, and still less a young woman with pressing life decisions...schools, majors...to make. Her well-loved father? There every day, and now you say he's what?

A chitalpa tree shaped like a tuning fork grows from a brick-edged plot in the concrete. Fat pink flowers droop from the branches, the petals like stockings hung to dry.

What a grieving young woman, suddenly not going to be her father's daughter anymore, will notice:

It's a Chitalpa tashkentensis, a drought-hardy blooming big shrub/small tree, and its pinkness does rather look like laundry left on the line to droop in the blasting, battering sunshine. I can see it standing out enough against the general dun-colored desert landscape and Las Vegas's stunted, dun-colored ordinary buildings to make it snag the eye of a deeply shocked and still numb young person.

Someone who has experienced a sudden and unexpected loss will recognize the pattern of fixating on a trivial, familiar object, something that grounds you in the present; then Maddie does something else predictable but that will always catch others by surprise. She responds to the authority figures urging her to stay there, to stay safe in their minds, by rebelling. She knows she should stay put but she can't. She has to move, so she aims herself at the place that's changed the most. Home.

Home means Mom, Juliet, the widow. And the house. The ravaged house that they quite clearly can't live in for a while. Can they even conceive of what it will take to fix the house? Let alone their lives, their new and now forever changed lives–plural. One of the first things to go when a parent dies is the older child's existing relationship to the surviving parent. It simply evaporates. It sometimes takes a minute for the parties to realize that it's evaporated, though:

Crunching glass as she circled the living room in her heels, her mother raved about the explosions in a manner that seemed to belong to an actress from one of the old movies they always show on AMC and Showtime: Meryl Streep or Glenn Close.

Feeling old yet? Old movies with Glenn Close? Wait, what? Old movies have Bette Davis in them, not the divine Miss Close or Miss Streep! *sigh* But that's the least of the changes wrought by this day, the opening of the age gulf. Juliet, a closet smoker, offers Maddie a cigarette from her frozen-food-concealed stash.

BAD JULIET. NO NO NO! This awful misjudgment will, in the end, cause some repercussions that no one could've foreseen....

But families come in flavors, the biological and the logical. Russell, let us not forget, is grieving his all-but-brother Andrew. He and Emma go to eat after the spiffy obsequies of Andrew's bodyless memorial, as Juliet has neither house to host, nor inclination to feed, the attendees of Andrew's service. Andrew was the one responsible for Emma noticing Russell in the first place! He was so central to Russell's happiness with his low-friction life. He asked Emma for her number at Andrew's behest...he and Emma included Andrew in their bar-centered socializing, far less often Juliet...are y'all's alarm bells ringing yet? Mine were...and here's Emma speaking to Russell about Andrew's death over their post-service meal:

"How can a person go away forever? Here and then not here—it doesn't compute."
"I know," Russell says.
"None of it makes any sense."
"None of it does."
"I just wish..."
"What," he says.
"It's like he vanished. It defies...I don't know. Logic. No warning, no nothing. It's so crazy to me."

Tearful bewilderment over your husband's bestie's death? C'mon! Everybody knows what time it is now! Except poor Russell. He's miffed she's hogging the spotlight that rightfully is his over his (he thinks) greater loss. Oh Russell...

And there's also the pink Victoria's Secret slip Russell once came across while looking in her closet for a spare hangar—he's never seen her wear it. She's rarely in the mood for sex anyway, and when she is, or pretends to be, she puts forth a bored, lazy effort that fills him with shame and makes the whole thing reek of an obligation.

DUDE!! There is as of that instant NO excuse for not being sure that you're not her main squeeze, just her husband. And c'mon, you have to know who is. It's too painful to admit to yourself? Good gawd, man, what's worse: Knowing but not saying, or saying and ending things? The crisis is reached and Russell, happily hazy superannuated bartender Russell, has to jump. Which way?

But strangest of all is the case of Manager Simon. His secret is revealed early in the book. It explains, but doesn't excuse, a lot of the truly skeevy shit he pulls...but I ain't a-tellin'. His life is farther along its trajectory than the other characters' lives are.

Simon thinks with sadness of {his two college-student children's} recent entry into adulthood, youth fluttering behind them like a shirt taken off on a windy beach.

An image that captivates me. And a very sad thing to experience as a parent; also exhilarating, liberating, terrifying on so many levels. (One thing no one tells you about adulthood is that you never, ever have an unmixed emotion after it really kicks in.) His managerhood, his whole career, is sloughing off like skin from a nasty burn. He feels so awful about his character as it's been revealed to him. He makes a concerted effort to Do Something positive, helpful, kind. Juliet's house is a disaster! Her yardwork needs doing...I'll go do it. And while I'm at it, I'll just...improve...the landscaping....

It is, I'm sad to say, a misfire.

He doesn't peep in her windows at night—nothing like that. He doesn't own any binoculars, and he's never taken a photo of her. Simon gets no sexual pleasure from spying on Juliet. He isn't a criminal or a pervert.
–followed by–
"Stay," Juliet says, looking at him now. "Please."

Okay...I get that she's wildly flailing for solid ground after her entire existence is savaged by disaster. But she's just poured richly merited contumely on his head while *sitting*down*to*coffee* with him...we're already stretching my credulity a bit too far...but then she asks him to stay when he's prepared to do the right thing at last and leave her alone?!?

So. There it is...alone. Is that enough to explain this lunatic, irresponsible behavior?

This is a seriously squicky moment, and I was losing my sense of trust in Author Mullins. Another troubling, though seriously less so, event comes as Russell essentially carries off his minor not-really-niece for an impromptu camping trip a good way away from Vegas. (I'm shouting at the screen at this point, "CALL YOUR MOTHER YOU SIMPLETON! EVEN IF YOUR IDIOT FAKE-UNCLE'S TOO HIGH TO DO IT!" Luckily, Russell isn't that stupid and leaves Juliet a message or I'd've chucked this book at the wall.) At least nothing heinous can happen while they're together.

Juliet has such a rough road in this story, trouble from every angle. Dead husband, adolescent daughter going through some serious problems, family issues with Russell (the cops? really?), and for goodness sake this whole Simon thing! But here's the problem, Juliet: You're your own worst enemy. Like everyone else in the world, right? And what Juliet gets herself up to is the most gigantically reactive response to death a person can have. It's *almost* too much, but I know from experience how very real it is.

Author Mullins is a debut novelist, though no stranger to writing. His first book, Greetings from Below, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books in the US, Salt Publishing in the Commonwealth countries after winning the 2010 International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories. His stories, then, have attracted attention and praise; stories operate on a different emotional logic than do novels. It is that sense of mismatched logic that is the source of my missing half-star rating. The novel I've reviewed is unquestionably a novel and the writing is high quality. I'm still left, however, with some lingering longings, some unmet needs for novel characters to develop. This isn't a family saga, so I wasn't hoping for the history of the participants. This isn't a Bildungsroman, so I wasn't expecting a central PoV character to Develop and Change. But as a novel of relationships and their mutability under pressure, I wanted the people to make their choices and cause their changes.

Even in the aftermath of a catastrophe, choices and changes can be occasions for characters to take control, exercise agency, and the people we follow around Las Vegas and environs are curiously acted upon and not acting. This is completely understandable in the first half of the book, as the ripples of the disaster propagate. It is increasingly troublesome for me as the novel progresses.

The point of going on this trip is to see sights you haven't before so I will leave the ending to your private reading. I've given you samples of the phrases I was particularly fond of. The vague wanting I experienced for more directed action is not remotely enough to have me encourage you skip the read! In fact, I encourage you to do the deed, buy the book, and ride the shockwave of this explosion. It is a rewarding experience.