States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism, and United States Fiction and Prose (review)

In this latest contribution to the growing body of literature on United States culture during the cold war, literary scholar Daniel Cordle argues that from 1945 on, Americans lived in an anxious "state of suspense" about nuclear war and the future of human life. Nuclear anxiety is evident not only in the "nuclear texts" of the era, such as John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) or Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), but also novels that less overtly address the implications of nuclear weapons and war, such as Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things (1987), Don DiLillo'sWhite Noise (1984), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977). A variety of motifs run through these texts, including species death or the end of civilization, threatened cities, threats to the home and family life (particularly the detached middle-class home), the potential for the world instantaneously to be transformed, a desire to dig in and seek cover (and, inversely, claustrophobia), a truncated sense of the future, and, most centrally to Cordle's argument, lives lived in suspension. By suspension Cordle means that people had to cope somehow with "the possibility that they were living in the period preceding a world-ending nuclear war" (p. 35).

Cordle provides fresh readings of conventional nuclear texts, as well as other cultural artifacts, that will surely interest historians of cold war culture. States of Suspense is aimed primarily at scholars of literature, however, and the central task of the book is to make the case for nuclear readings of novels not conventionally thought of as having significant nuclear themes. Cordle suggests that postmodern novels, in particular, convey the psychological condition of the nuclear age in both form and content. For example, "postmodern narratives frequently eschew conventional forms of closure," which Cordle argues is in keeping with the suspenseful mindset of the cold war (p. 38). He provocatively suggests that what defines postmodernism is not just what it succeeds (modernism, Enlightenment, grand narratives) but also what it precedes (potentially, a "post-nuclear nothingness") (p. 36).

The book is presented in three parts. Part 1 conveys the mindset of nuclear anxiety and other cultural effects of the cold war strategy of containment, building on the insights of historians Elaine Tyler May and Alan Nadel, as well as psychologist Robert Jay Lifton. In part 2, the central three chapters of the book, Cordle draws on secondary sources and analyzes primary material—such as a 1954 public information film encouraging homeowners to keep tidy yards as a protection against nuclear devastation—to characterize three contexts in which human life is assaulted by nuclear war: cities, domestic spaces, and the planet. Each of the three chapters discusses these contexts as presented in well-known nuclear texts and is followed by analysis of similar themes in postmodern texts, where nuclear issues are less central or ostensibly absent.

The arguments made in each of these chapters about nuclear anxiety in particular contexts are convincing, but—given that Cordle's most original contribution is to show that postmodern novels are particularly revealing of the state of nuclear suspense—curiously few pages are devoted to those selections. A much more detailed treatment is found in the first chapter of part 3, devoted almost entirely to the analysis of The Nuclear Age (1979) by Tim O'Brien. Cordle contrasts the complex, ambiguous politics of suspense presented in O'Brien's book to the "clunky," "banal," and "deeply conservative" politics of novels like On the Beach, where closure, in the form of nuclear disaster, has already been reached. In the final chapter, Cordle reminds us that while the cold war is over, we still live in a nuclear world, leaving an ongoing role for nuclear criticism of the sort undertaken in this book.

Most of Cordle's observations about the anxiety of the nuclear age are unlikely to surprise...