The Nuclear Age

Going After Cacciato (winner of the National Book Award in 1979) was widely acclaimed as one of the most powerful and emotionally vivid novels about Vietnam. Now, writing with the same sharp, richly expressive language, the same edgy dark humor and complete honesty, and the same rawness of nerve and energy, Tim O'Brien gives us an equally powerful novel about growing up as a child of anxiety-the big anxiety, the one that's been with us since the fifties, when we finally realized that Einstein's theories translated into Russian.
It's 1995 and William Cowling is digging a hole in his backyard. He is forty-nine, and after years and years of pent-up terror he has finally found the courage of a fighting man. And so a hole. A hold that he hopes will one day be large enough to swallow up his almost fifty years' worth of fear. A hole that causes his twelve-year-old daughter to call him a "nutto, " and his wife to stop speaking to him.
A hole that William will not stop digging and out of which rise scenes of his past to play themselves out in his memory. The scenes take him back to his quietly peculiar adolescence (No. 2 pencils had a surprising significance), to his college days, down into the underground, and up through several stabs at "normal" adulthood .