Changing Light (Vintage) [Paperback]

Nora Gallagher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2008 | Series: Vintage

Nora Gallagher’s elegant debut novel is a love story set in Los Alamos in 1945, in the shadow of the creation of the first atomic bomb.During the last summer of World War II, in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico, a young painter, Eleanor Garrigue, discovers a delirious man lying by the river. She takes him in and cares for him, not knowing that he is Leo Kavan, a physicist who has fled Los Alamos after a deadly radiation accident. Eleanor herself has left New York to escape a stifling marriage and to renew her painting in the pure desert light. As the two reveal themselves to each other, their pasts and the present unfold in tandem, taking us from the heady New York art world to Einstein’s Berlin, from English bomb labs to the hidden city of Los Alamos. As their enemies close in, they find temporary solace together, connected and changed in unexpected ways by the brutal radiance of the war and their fierce love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A painter takes a Czechoslovakian scientist into her home and then into her in Gallagher's sober and lyrical first work of fiction. (Her nonfiction includes Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection.) Successful New York painter Eleanor Garrigue flees to the New Mexico desert to arouse her muse and escape from her cold marriage to her mentor. Leo Kavan, a Jewish physicist who escaped Europe in the nick of time, lands a spot as a researcher on the Manhattan Project. But after witnessing a colleague's death from radiation poisoning, a deeply distraught Leo goes AWOL from Los Alamos and turns up, delirious and fevered, near Eleanor's house. Eleanor, whose brother is a prisoner of war, finds Leo and nurses him back to health. As Leo recovers, the two find in one another reprieve from the war and their tormented pasts. Eleanor and Leo are marvelous characters-damaged but not prone to melodrama-and through them Gallagher touches on themes of loss, independence and intractable morality. Despite a sluggish start and some weak storytelling moments-Gallagher tends to pile on description, and some science-heavy passages could be better massaged-Gallagher's first foray into fiction distinguishes itself as an intriguing and spiritual tale.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

“Gallagher has chosen a playing field where art, science, and faith intersect. . . . An ambitious, moving and insightful novel.” —Los Angeles Times“Evocative. . . . Gallagher effortlessly conjures the real and the imagined in language as clear as the Southwestern landscape.” —The New York Times Book Review “Gracefully written, intelligent. . . . A beautifully crafted story, thoughtfully conceived, written with unusual emotional precision and moral clarity.” —The Boston Globe

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307277550
• ISBN-13: 978-0307277558
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #461,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nora Gallagher's novel Changing Light has received outstanding reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. It is one of three novels chosen by Borders for its March-April Original Voices program. Her memoir Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith received outstanding reviews from the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times among many others and was a bestseller. Annie Dillard called it ' a wonderful book' and said, 'Nora Gallagher...describes church life and spiritual life with absolute accuracy." Her second memoir, Practicing Resurrection, received outstanding reviews and was a finalist for Beliefnet Book of the Year.

She was born in New Mexico, and spent her childhood in its high deserts. After college she worked as a free-lance magazine journalist in the United States, Nicaragua, and Czechoslovakia. Ms. Gallagher is particularly interested in what happens to ordinary people in the shadow of larger events.

Her essays, book reviews, op-eds and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and The Los Angeles Times.

Ms. Gallagher has received fellowships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, Blue Mountain Center,the MacDowell Colony; and Mesa Refuge.

A sermon is collected in Sermons that Work (Morehouse Publishing March 2003) and a poem in the anthology, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.


She is licensed to preach by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, is preacher-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara and serves on the advisory board of the Yale Divinity School. She lives in California and New York City with her husband, the novelist and poet, Vincent Stanley. They are the godparents of five children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A splendid novel, July 16, 2007

By 

Margaret Bullitt-Jonas (Northampton, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Changing Light: A Novel (Paperback)

Nora Gallagher's debut novel was a great pleasure to read. Written with the precision of poetry, but with a novel's heft, momentum, and narrative complexity, Changing Light drew me into its vivid New Mexico landscape and launched me on a journey that I found intellectually and emotionally absorbing every step of the way. What sets this book apart from so many other contemporary novels is both its witness to beauty (of nature, of art, of well-chosen words) and its depth of moral imagination. The novel's pages are lit up by an authorial intelligence that is both compassionate and unflinchingly clear. A wonderful love story and a luminous, nuanced portrayal of moral decision-making.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Changing Light, March 2, 2007

By 

Philip Koplin (Santa Barbara) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Changing Light: A Novel (Paperback)

The theme that runs through Changing Light is responsibilty--our ever-widening circle of obligations to be truthful and respectful to ourselves, those we love, the wider net of people we reach, and the world at large. Although centered in Los Alamos during the making of the atomic bomb, the story is deftly woven of movements back and forth through time and place. The main characters--an artist, a scientist working on and then fleeing the Manhattan project, a priest (a woman and two men, respectively) attempt to grasp the nature of their commitments to self and others through the personal and social roles they're being called to play. The author's delicate touch leads us to understand that there are no pat answers or guidebooks to living a truly human--that is to say, moral and connected--life. This is delicate territory both in real life and for a novelist to negotiate. Through their honest and difficult struggle, the characters at last achieve a sense of gentle illumination and balance that reaches the reader as well.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotionally satisfying--Intellectually stimulating, July 15, 2007

By 

B. Case "InquiringMind" (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Changing Light: A Novel (Paperback)

"Changing Light" by Nora Gallagher was a delightfully surprising debut novel--a richly satisfying story, artfully and lyrically told, with profound emotional and intellectual overtones. Tangentially, this is a love story. But more directly, it tells the tales of different life-changing moral dilemmas that three characters must resolve as their lives intertwine during the spring and summer of 1945 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

At the center are two polar opposites: Eleanor Garrigue and Leo Kavan--an artist and a nuclear physicist. Off to the side and pulling each of the other two main characters into a curious triangle is Bill Taylor, the local priest. Eleanor is a woman who has temporarily fled an over-bearing husband and promising art career in New York City to find personal freedom and artistic inspiration living in the solitude and grandeur of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just over the hill from Los Alamos. Leo Kavan is a world-renowned Czechoslovakian physicist who is brought to Los Alamos by the United States government to work as a top scientist on the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb. As the local Episcopal priest, Bill Taylor is duty-bound to be Eleanor's spiritual confessor and advisor, but he is also strongly attracted to her as a woman.

This is a short novel. Gallagher does not waste time developing each main character completely as an author would have to do if this were nothing more than a love story. She gives us just enough information so that the reader feels comfortable filling in the rest. Gallagher expects intelligent readers--readers who are happy to participate in the storytelling by creating their own plausible back-stories and plot resolutions from tidbits of information thrown in to the text to spark the imagination. Don't we all do exactly this in real life whenever we meet someone new? This technique helps focus the reader's attention away from the love story, toward the true purpose of the work. But don't get me wrong--the love story here is completely believable, satisfying, mature, and enchanting--it is just not the focus of this book.

The "changing light" at the core of this novel is more than merely the beautiful artistic light that saturates the Los Alamos countryside, providing Eleanor with inspiration for her paintings. Gallagher wants us to focus on the far subtler inner light--the guiding moral compass--at the core of each character's being that changes during the course of the novel. Thus the title is apt and points toward the message of the work as a whole.

I look forward to reading more novels by this talented author.