Customer Reviews

Yellowcake

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I flat-out love this novel. The review in the Washington Post, which described the "marvels of insight and sympathy" in Ann Cummins's perceptions and character depiction, seems to get at what makes it so great -- that the book should have such a gripping set of intertwined plots, all beautifully balanced, along with wonderful writing, urgent human questions, and believable characters.

It's a wonder to have so many vivid people in this novel, all completely distinct and all seen with a mixture of clarity and compassion. Ann Cummins seems to understand people of all different ages, genders, backgrounds, celebrating their quirks and strengths without excusing any of their faults.

This is a novel that you experience as if you were living it rather than reading it. The book provides an education in how it feels to inhabit different lives. How are people caught in their circumstances, what kinds of choices do they have to make, and what do their choices cost them and the people around them? What are the specific human results of bottom-line decisions? At what point does peace of mind or duty to the family feel more important then doing the "right" thing? What is the right thing, and how do we know?

As a reader, I have a weakness for literary page turners, writers like Iris Murdoch or Toni Morrison who can keep you up all night with great plots and beautiful language, writers who can create characters you seem to know better than most of the people in your life. Yellowcake is that kind of literary page turner. It is a pleasure to read, and at the same time it makes demands: its intelligence asks for intelligence on the part of its readers. It leaves you bigger afterward, if you're able to face the questions it raises.

Having lived for many years in New Mexico and being an enthusiastic consumer of fiction set in the area, I grabbed Ann Cummins' novel off the shelf as soon as it was published.

I expected a muck-raking story of oppression and exploitation in the notorious open-pit uranium mines. But what I found instead was a complex interweaving of several distinct stories, all centering on the difficult choices--and compromises-- we all must make in life. The characters were well developed and richly diverse, especially the half Navajo hero who holds the story together. I finished the book in a single evening, staying up far later than I should have on a work night. I was wiped out the next morning. It was well worth it.

I've read a lot of other "southwestern" novelists---Udall, LaFarge, Anaya, Hillerman, and even Willa Cather. Ann Cummins is right up there with them.

Knowing nothing about the southwest, Navaho culture, uranium mining, or the illnesses that come from it, I entered a whole new world when I read Yellowcake. But not entirely new: Families seem to be the same everywhere, and the author has been able to capture the rich functions and dysfuctions of daily life in families and extended families when everything is going on: wedding preparations, terminal illness, new relationships blossoming, old relationships exploding. The inter- and intracultural, inter- and intragenerational relationships bring light to the external circumstances in the novel, just as the external circumstances push and pull the characters to their best and worst behavior. I've learned some about the southwest, Navaho culture, uranium mining, and Yellowcake, but mostly, I've entered a world of some very real people, and watched them as they've made difficult decisions under difficult circumstances. I loved the book, and didn't want my relationship with these people to end.

"His first good cough of the day, the ball of it rising from his stomach, hurtling through the rusted pipes, whipping metal bits against his throat; he doubles over, groping his stomach. Dear God, he prays, a torrent of hard nothing whiplashing through, and behind it the something that never comes--oh, he wants it out, the thing that never comes."

Such is the plight of Ryland Mahoney in 1991, an aging former uranium mill supervisor in the Four Corners area, who is coping not only with his own failing lungs (he calls his ever-present oxygen cart his roommate) but also his conflicting feelings about the role he played in exposing himself and his crew to the dangers of uranium during the mill's heyday years before.

Is he responsible for the illness and death he is surrounded by? Should he feel guilty that the hungry Navajo and Anglo workers who eagerly took on the dangerous job are now sick and dying, their bodies riddled with cancers, the land scarred, the water possibly tainted?

"Yellowcake" starts out with an earnest team of lawyers and community organizers who are hoping to expand on the compensation acts recently passed to include not only the sick miners but their families and the rest of the community who has been exposed to the toxic dust and waste from the mine's tailings.

But the legal maneuverings take a distinct back seat to the far more compelling tale of two extended families--one Anglo, one Navajo--who attempt to take their circumstances in stride years after the mill closed.

In "Yellowcake," author Ann Cummins has crafted a fine novel of pain and perseverance, in which the characters balance personal responsibility with doing the best one can in any number of situations. Some have succeeded, wisely investing their pensions in rapidly appreciating real estate and getting on with their lives; others failed miserably, unable to find work when the mill closes, spiraling into depression and dysfunction.

And then there are the deaths. "Of the eighteen men who moved down from Colorado to New Mexico with him in 1964 to operate the mill on the Navajo reservation, he supposes some have died. He doesn't know, doesn't keep track. Rosy keeps track. She reads him Christmas letters written by wives, wives who don't seem to die. It's always old Mr. So-and-So died, never Mrs., which seems a little like a conspiracy to Ryland, how the women just live on and on to write their Christmas obituary letters."

Ryland Mahoney and his wife, Rosy, whose function as caretaker to Ryland is only relieved by the incessant planning she is spearheading for her daughter's wedding, hold the center of "Yellowcake." But while Rosy also makes time to attend the community meetings with the lawyers, Ryland prefers to sit in a Xanax daze, focusing his meager energy on the wedding plans or playing with his son's young daughters.

Not for him the search for a responsible party to take over the mess of a community's problems. Instead, Ryland gives in to the inevitability of age, letting himself wear out and run down without returning the doctor's calls.

It is Becky Atcitty, the adult daughter of one of his most dependable employees, Woody Atcitty, a Navajo man still in his 40s and now dying of lung cancer, who needles Ryland about his responsibility. But Becky, like the rest of the characters in "Yellowcake," seems unable to follow through, caught as she is in a balancing act of her own.

She has never learned her father's language and often feels an outsider among her own people; left out of traditions and rituals by her own disinterest, she is tentative and uncertain, even when pressed. Much as she would like to blame Mahoney and the mill for her father's inevitable death, she wavers when she is asked to consult with a company planning on starting up a new mining operation, thinking the money they offer her would help pay for his medical bills.

"Yellowcake" (published in hardcover in 2007; the trade paperback was released in April 2008) is Ann Cummins' first novel, following her critically acclaimed short story collection "Red Ant House." Cummins was born in Durango; when she was nine, her father--a uranium mill worker--moved the family to Shiprock, where she stayed through high school. She currently teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Her intimate knowledge of the arena she writes about--not only the hardworking people of a toxic mill town but also the uneasy relationship between the Anglo and Navajo families and their interactions and interweavings and uncertainties--lend an air of authenticity to the novel.

And much to Cummins' credit, the emotional lives of the Mahoney and Atcitty families remain center stage in this deeply affecting tale. While the tragedies of the uranium boom are fully exposed, fortunately for the reader, it is through the author's graceful prose that we are touched, and touched more powerfully than any heavy handed polemic could have done.

Actually, this book is better than OK...up to a point. I won't spoil the details, but the ending of this otherwise entertaining book about engaging characters in interesting circumstances just trails off into nothing. Cummins has a nice story to tell and writes it well, but it's a shame she couldn't come up with an ending worth the rest of the book.

At least it's a quick read. Maybe her short stories are wrapped up better. This book is a tale in search of conclusion. True, the questions posed in the different narratives can't all be answered, once and for all, in a work of fiction, but there could have been at least an effort to synthesize something out of all the loose ends. It's better to wish a book wouldn't end than to be irritated by the way it actually doesn't. Better luck next time, Ann!

I found the writing style reminiscent of Ken Kesey... multi threaded plot with lots of characters. The author is obviously a talented storyteller but she has not put together a novel, but rather a collection of entertaining and well crafted vignettes. However, there are way too many loose ends when the last page comes. It just does not work as a novel. It could have been so much better and the plot had so many possibilities. I felt as if the author may have just said... "I need to turn this in tomorrow.. what the heck". Of course she may have actually intended to leave so many issues unresolved... a sequel maybe?

"Yellowcake" called to me from the library shelf because of the Native American theme. Perhaps I didn't read closely enough, but I didn't realize I was a reading a book with a main element of cancer death. Ann Cummins does an interesting job of focusing on a group of characters all affected by radioactivity in the uranium mines. The term "yellowcake" apparently comes from the radioactive residue that coated machinery and was frequently handled by Native American workers. However, all that is background for the story.

It is in the narrative that the novel bogs down. There are so many characters that it becomes hard to keep them separate. After reading, I'm still a bit confused as to who belongs to whom. In a novel where there are several races as well as mixed blood, I was frequently confused about each character's heritage. It seemed to be an important issue; so it needed to be made more clear.

For a substantial portion of the book, we follow Ryland Mahoney who is in failing in health and walks with an oxygen tank. The story goes into Ryland's dream life punctuated by consciousness. Ryland was the foreman at the mine. Others blame him for the deaths of their loved ones. One of the most effective chapters is where Ryland takes a bath and falls asleep in the tub, becoming unable to move due to hypothermia. This leads into a series of chapters about a funeral. For quite a while, I thought the funeral was for Ryland. Instead, Cummins clumsily makes the funeral about a very minor character named Woody that appeared for about three pages. There doesn't seem to be any intentional misleading. We're supposed to recall the huge cast of characters and determine who has died by the family members involved. This was one of the most ineffective parts of the book.

Cummins also seems to explore many relationships in the book, leaving them open-ended. We have the reappearance of Sam who apparently is still married. Delmar is Sam's half-Native American, half-White son. Sam's wife Lily has failed to file divorce papers for something like 17 years (can't recall exactly) because she apparently still loves Sam. However, she then gets very frightened after giving Sam $5,000 and then claiming that he stole the money. No one addresses the fact that she's lying. Meanwhile she becomes totally paranoid about Sam attacking her and deteriorates mentally. Sam goes swimming in a stream and that's the last we hear of him. Cummins takes a major plot line and then drops it like a hot cake at the church pancake social.

Other love relationships are also unclear. Cummins spends less time developing the characters Becky and Harrison. Political issues about the reopening of the mine come into play, but the relationship is left hanging and unresolved. All of this leads to the experience of having dropped in on the life of these characters. Unfortunately, we exit the book not sure of what has happened. "Yellowcake" seems muddy and unresolved. The book's pacing bogs down as Cummins spends huge amounts of verbiage describing things that add no particular value to the unfocused plot.

In the end, this book was depressing. Segments were well written. But it was a story that I waded through to be able to joyfully exclaim as I turned the last page, "Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I'm free at last!" Maybe the best way to be free of this book is to not start it. Taxi!

The author's first novel (after a highly-praised book of short stories) bogs down in too much detail, and too little dialogue and action. The reviews told me this book was worth reading, so I was hopeful. It opened with a good scene, then fell flat. Little tension. Slow pace. I kept trying to move forward, but the narrator kept holding me back. Long sections, page after page, of big block paragraphs where the author is telling more than showing. Heavy-handed authorial (narrator) intrusion makes the reader feel too distanced from the characters to care enough about them.

Feels like pieced together vignettes. Or a short story stretched too thin and then overly padded into a novel. Where's the plot? There is a story in there somewhere. But the narrator keeps interrupting with details that overwhelm and frustrate the reader. I felt like every time I started to get close or warm up to the characters, the author/narrator pulled me aside to tell me about them.

The author needs to get out of the way and let the reader interact directly with the characters. Cummins may be trying too hard to prove her worthiness as a novelist. She needs to see from the reader's perspective. Less is more. And this felt more like a docu-drama than a novel. It's a worthy subject, and a valid effort at character study, but as a story it grows tedious. Obviously a capable writer who needs to smooth out the lumps and mix her ingredients better.