Bombshell

Liza Wieland is an incredible writing talent. She is also a creative writing teacher in a California college and no one need apply the old adage to her about "those who can't do, teach." In fact, I'm really sad that she can't devote 100% of her time to writing. She only has one other novel out, which I promptly ordered. She has some short story collections too. She only has this one novel carried by my public library, which is unusual, as it carries just about everything. All I can say is, thank God for university presses or I guess this wouldn't have seen the light of day. Why was it deemed so non-commercial? Well, it is intelligent and I guess in most media and the arts that puts you in the hole. If you don't want to think, don't want to marvel over certain passages and reread them to fully appreciate them, this may not be for you, especially if you don't like gorgeous, beautiful, virtually poetic prose. If all you like is steamroller straight ahead plot driven fiction, she is not solely concerned with satisfying that reader need. What she does do is create one heck of a story and a cast of characters out of her imagination using one fact from the real world. That fact is that she pretends that the father in the story, who is living like a hermit in the mountains outside of Santa Fe, is the unabomber and that his family members, just like the real life unabomber, are going to be the ones who have to bring him to account. In real life, his brother turned him in to the law. In this account, his daughter is brought into the dilemma by her stepbrother, who is convinced her father is the unabomber and wants her help bringing him in. Jane, the daughter, is a gorgeous young woman, also brilliant like her father, who alternates between being a stripper in Las Vegas and a dance teacher for children, first in California and then in New Mexico. Her stepbrother is a teacher and her father was a math professor at the University of California but has lived as a hermit for years. The story is told from shifting points of view and the most chilling narrative is the father's as you are inside his mind and able to see the brilliance and madness in there first hand. This is a very moving, very touching book, which takes bends in the road in fiction that are wholly unpredictible and an utter delight. The father's relationship with his late twin brother, killed in the Vietnam War, is just one other nuance to the father's story that incredibly richens it. There is a romantic element for Jane's part of the story, an extremely ironic but satisfying one.

In light of the recent tragedies we have endured, Liza Wieland's novel Bombshell takes on even greater weight and significance as she takes the horrific events of the Uni-Bomber and puts a name and a face to those involved. Like a master painter who unveils more with each stroke, Wieland builds a tremendously suspenseful story which evokes anger, outrage, sympathy and understanding. Told through the eyes of three characters, Bombshell allows us to experience the terrible toll that these events take on individuals as well as society at large. The three different views from the professor, his stripper/wanderer daughter and her step-brother add a personal dimension allowing the reader to linger in the pain and horror of the realization of who is responsible while slowly letting up the shade that allows us, at first, a glimpse and then a full-throttled revelation into the minds of the characters. Is this a story about the abject evil of people who perpetrate such acts or is it a love story in which the professor is performing penance and showing his love in the only way his his skewed perception of reality will allow?