Trinity Fields [Mass Market Paperback]

Bradford Morrow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002

A powerful novel about innocence and guilt, atonement and healing, friendship and betrayal, Trinity Fields maps the landscape of the American soul. Kip and Brice were best friends, born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who engineered the atom bomb, they play macabre games as children, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. As they come of age in the mid-60s, Brice is drawn into antiwar activism, while Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the secret war in Laos-leaving Brice to marry Jessica, the woman they both love. Twenty-five years later, Kip returns, a ghost soldier come, perhaps, to reclaim what was lost.

"Brilliant . . . dramatically real and poignantly felt . . . a remarkable feat." (Chicago Tribune)

"Morrow's assiduous probing of the intricacies of moral choice hits us where we live-or ought to live." (The New York Times Book Review)

"Astonishing in its breadth and vision-an intimate record of a dangerous age." (The Boston Globe)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's always a glad surprise when someone pigeonholed as a certain kind of writer makes a leap to a whole new level; and that's what Bradford Morrow, editor of the literary magazine Conjunctions and author previously of two well-reviewed but rather cloistered novels, Come Sunday and The Almanac Branch, has done here. Trinity Fields is a big, ambitious book whose characters are people as well as potent symbols, and whose tragic sense of America in war and peace is tellingly realized in writing of great resonance and beauty. Kip Calder and narrator Brice McCarthy were born within hours of each other in one of the strangest environments on earth: Los Alamos, just a year before the explosion of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the world forever. As boys, they are rebels against what their scientist fathers have created, anxious to expiate what they see as a crime against the natural world they love. Kip is the wild, impulsive loner, Brice the more clearsighted follower; both boys are drawn with care and affection as they grow into adulthood and gradually away from each other. Brice moves into antiwar activism at Columbia and eventually a life as a public-interest lawyer; Kip charges into the military, first as a flier in Vietnam, later a spook in the hidden war in Laos, who stays on after the war, trying to heal a people he comes to see have been cruelly exploited by both sides. Their relationship is further complicated by their perhaps inevitable love for the same woman; Kip fathers her baby daughter, whom Brice brings up after Kip disappears into the jungle. How these emblematic figures work out their feelings for each other and their country after Kip reappears 20 years later is the center of Morrow's book, and there is nothing remotely facile or sentimental about his resolutions. Throughout, his tone is thoughtful, elegiac; and there are many wonderful character sketches, like that of Brice's wise but religiously obsessed, gin-loving mother. The impression that lingers is of one of sorrow and love, both for a country and some of the rare people who inhabit it; it is a scale of vision displayed by few novelists today. 35,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Encompassing Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Vietnam and the bitter years thereafter, this historical novel attempts to understand the past half-century. The focal characters are Brice McCarthy and Kip Calder, sons of Los Alamos scientists born on the same day in 1944, who grow into rebellious teenagers angry at their amoral bomb-building fathers. During the Sixties, at New York's Columbia University, Brice joins the peace movement, while Kip, inexplicably at the time, joins the Reserve Officers' Training Corp and heads for Vietnam. Twenty-five years later, middle-aged Kip and Brice are reunited in New Mexico, where they grew up. Kip, who is dying from exposure to Agent Orange, has returned from two decades of self-imposed exile in Southeast Asia. He explains to Brice, now a socially conscious lawyer, that Vietnam was America's punishment for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Successfully re-creating the recent past, this ambitious, intelligent novel by the author of The Almanac Branch (LJ 5/15/92) ultimately fails to create characters who come alive in the reader's mind. For larger public libraries.
James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142002321
• ISBN-13: 978-0142002322
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bradford Morrow has lived for the past thirty years in New York City and rural upstate New York, though he grew up in Colorado and lived and worked in a variety of places in between. While in his mid-teens, he traveled through rural Honduras as a member of the Amigos de las Americas program, serving as a medical volunteer in the summer of 1967. The following year he was awarded an American Field Service scholarship to finish his last year of high school as a foreign exchange student at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. In 1973, he took time off from studying at the University of Colorado to live in Paris for a year. After doing graduate work on a Danforth Fellowship at Yale University, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as a bookseller until relocating to New York City in 1981, where he began editing the literary journal "Conjunctions" and writing novels.

His first five novels--"Come Sunday" (1988), "The Almanac Branch" (1992, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), "Trinity Fields" (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, 1995), "Giovanni's Gift" (1997) and "Ariel's Crossing" (2002)--are all available as e-books from Open Road Media from January 25, 2011.

In collaboration with eighteen artists, Morrow is the author of "A Bestiary," as well as a book for children, "Didn't Didn't Do It," illustrated by the legendary Gahan Wilson. Morrow has also edited and written a number of other books, including "Posthumes" (poetry), "The New Gothic" (with Patrick McGrath) and "The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" (with Sam Hamill) and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. As founding editor of "Conjunctions," he has edited over 55 volumes of the journal from 1981 to the present. An anthology on death, "The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death," co-edited with David Shields, will be published by W.W. Norton in February 2011.

His new novel, "The Diviner's Tale," is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and in England with Corvus (Atlantic), as well as an audiobook with Blackstone. His first collection of short stories, "Lush," will be published in Fall 2011 by Pegasus Books. He is completing work on his seventh novel, "The Prague Sonata," as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, "Meditations on a Shadow."

Morrow's many awards include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities and for the past twenty years has been a Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College.

Visit his website at www.bradfordmorrow.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is brad morrow's big book, not Giovanni's Gift, January 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Trinity Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

Trinity Fields is without question, Brad Morrow's best book. Disturbingly beautiful, grounded in the moral ambiguity and searing heat of the project to build the atomic bomb, the unfolding of this love triangle is expertly done against the backdrop of post-Vietnam America. Without question THIS is Morrow book to read.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare literary treat., September 24, 2002

By 

Peter Strauss (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trinity Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

Over the last year I have visited Western New Mexico on numerous occasions, including many of the settings of Trinity Fields and its sequel, Ariel's Crossing. Morrow's description of the New Mexican countryside and its people is exquisite, allowing me to see that beautiful State with a fresh appreciation of its natural, historical, and spiritual beauty.

Morrow's treatise on the human affinity for and in the end the banality of war-particularly Vietnam-is worthy of another Pulitzer. The metaphorical power of the friendship of Kip and Brice is best understood as complementary alter egos, forces and instincts that exist side by side within many of us.

I read Ariel's Crossing prior to reading Trinity Fields. While I also loved the sequel, I recommend reading Trinity first, since Ariel builds on the characterizaions so carefully wrought in Trinity. Read them both for a great literary experience.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A dual review of 1968 and Trinity Fields, February 17, 2007

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trinity Fields (Mass Market Paperback)

1968, by Joe Haldeman, and Trinity Fields, by Bradford Morrow

1968 will surprise readers who think of Joe Haldeman exclusively as a science fiction writer. Its stunning realism and cynical outlook are harrowing. Haldeman's main character is Spider, a soldier in Vietnam. Haldeman never compromises his grim vision of this pivotal year in American history--just when you think it can't get worse for poor Spider, it does. The writing is razor sharp--I was especially enamored of the sections relating Spider's evolving description of his wounding and near death in an ambush. The story changes with time and with Spider's experiences and mental state. At story's end, Haldeman turns the tables and tells the story from another participant's point of view. In doing so, he manages to give the entire book an ironic spin.

The focus in Trinity Fields is on Brice McCarthy, who's sedate existence is interrupted by a letter from a friend he thought long dead. The letter causes Brice to reflect on his life, and, more importantly, on the influence that his boyhood friend, Kip Calder, has had on him. As sons of scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the duo literally grew up in the shadow of the atomic bomb. As children, the two were inseparable, but as they grew older their paths diverged. Their deteriorating friendship finally collapses over their philosophical differences regarding the Vietnam War and their love for the same woman. Ultimately, Brice joins the radical Left and Kip flies secret missions over Laos. Morrow's description of their meeting some twenty five years later, and the poignant favor Kip asks of Brice provide an emotional and satisfying climax.

Taken together, 1968 and Trinity Fields provide plenty of food for thought. Morrow's book, cerebral and reflective, is the perfect complement to the more visceral and gruelling 1968. In both, the horror stems from the Vietnam war, and the physical and mental damage it inflicted. Individually, either book is worthy of your attention, but I recommend that you read them together for greater impact.