Glenn S. reviewed on 4/24/2024 + 15 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Much as I like Philip Wylie's books-- particularly "When Worlds Collide" and "After Worlds Collide," there is a reason he never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His aim is not to create art, but to express his views on the social, sexual, and political issues of his time. The narrative is simply a framework on which to hang his ideas. Not a lot of narrative craftsmanship is devoted to that framework, with results that are often clunky and creaky. In this book, written in the midst of 1950s angst about the Communist menace and atomic weapons, his aim is to argue that nuclear war is survivable, but only if proper civil defense measures are put in place. The story takes place in two Midwestern cities located in two states sitting across a river from each other. One city takes civil defense seriously, the other considers it a waste of time, believing that nuclear war is not survivable. Then both cities suffer a nuclear attack, allowing Wylie to show how each fares. What is strange is that the first four-fifths of the novel is a soap opera about the lives of several families in each of the towns, including Wylie's usual fascination with sexual, emotional and psychological tension that results from a love triangle. Only in the final section of the novel does the nuclear attack occur. This buildup up is long and often boring, making the apocalyptic conclusion seem rushed and perfunctory. Overall, the book is a long, boring slog. Wylie has done better, including "Triumph" the post-nuclear-apocalypse novel he published nine years later.

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