JAMES REICH: BOMB-BLASTING THROUGH THE AGE OF NUCLEAR FOLLY: Interview by Frank Browning
February 5th, 2014
Valerie Solanas plainly made a deep impact on the English novelist as he was constructing his blindingly brilliant and horrifyingly comic novel, Bombshell, a road story framed around a fictive lover and devotee of Solanas who has committed herself to cutting up and destroying America’s nuclear power industry. Not everyone of course may find it comic. Its comedy rests in the bloody details of the duel between men’s greed and the Gods’ folly as his self-trained anti-nuke feminist terrorist Cash, born in Chernobyl during the 1986 meltdown, hops in one stolen car or another from New Mexico through Texas, the Deep South, Washington and finally Manhattan in pursuit of the nation’s most powerful nuclear oligarch. Along the way Reich’s Faulknerian prose rides us through an encyclopedic history of nuclear testing folly from Los Alamos where the story starts through the unguarded French blasts in the Sahara to Cash’s own ghastly birth town.