In brief italicized passages separating seven major sections, an unspecified, interestingly reticent narrator offers glimpses of Oppenheimer just before the test. How long does he inspect “the device”? This narrator, who pretends to know only the kind of evidence available to a biographer, won’t say. “I can’t find any record. I know, however, from photographs, that he’s wearing his porkpie hat.” The hours tick by; it rains, and then stops — glimpse, glimpse, glimpse. By the last of these passages, he and his companions “lie facedown in a trench, to protect their eyes from the bomb flash,” unaware that, a few hundred yards from the tower, antelope are crossing the desert.

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There’s a lot Oppenheimer doesn’t see, and a lot we don’t see. Except for these passages, everything we’ll learn about him arrives obliquely and in fragments, stories told to that invisible narrator by seven invented characters. Ranging from an Army intelligence officer tailing Oppenheimer in 1943, to a journalist assigned to write a last profile of the dying physicist in 1966, these characters are insinuated into the world of Oppenheimer’s real-life friends, family and colleagues, playing roles (secretary, old friend, curious neighbor) similar to their historical analogues. This is not in itself an unusual strategy: Think of all the historical fiction involving the great man’s butler, the queen’s housekeeper, the overlooked minor bystander speaking at last. But these figures seem designed, in a way I haven’t seen before, to mirror the ambiguous tensions of Oppenheimer’s personality.

They lie, as Oppenheimer famously did during the many investigations preceding his horrifying 1954 security hearing. They have secrets, as Oppenheimer did, and are deeply conflicted about the necessity of keeping them. Betrayed by others, they betray in turn, forever tunneling back through the past, seeking the meaning of their acts. Their visions are limited, their understanding skewed by desire and fear.

When Grace Goodman — that WAC member at Los Alamos, in 1945 — reports on the Trinity test, it’s a minor part of her anguished narrative, secondary to the end of her love affair with a married scientist. Her view of the explosion comes not from a trench, but from “our little Shangri-la on the mesa,” more than 200 miles away, where she waits with other workers kept in the dark. She remembers falling in love, losing her lover, being coerced into an abortion. A light fills the sky; the mountains seem to tilt. Or do they? Just a few weeks later, “all I could really imagine were the mountains shifting two feet to the left.” One foot, or two feet? Right, or left?

Grace, in common with many of these speakers, can’t get her story straight. She can’t escape her earlier choices, or her need to re-examine them. Each character’s section offers a partial view that builds by the repetition of a handful of images — Oppenheimer’s porkpie hat and his silver lighter; dogs and turtles, photographs and eyes; a John Donne poem — and crucial remarks about three real-life characters whose relationships with Oppenheimer were used to implicate him in 1954.