[Below, Paley offers a mixed review of The Nuclear Age, faulting O'Brien's characterizations but praising his choice of "disparate and essential themes."]

What subjects! The probable end of the world, survival, madness. Whose madness? One-person madness or world-madness. Fear. When Tim O'Brien's new novel, The Nuclear Age, begins, the year is 1995 and a man is digging a deep hole in his backyard. Why? Because the world hasn't changed too much and neither has he. The world is still accumulating its thousands of nuclear death heads. And he, although he now owns the blonde wife and clever child any American male assumes is his due, is still the boy we meet in flashbacks. About 40 years earlier, William Cowling was a child suffering such extreme clear-sightedness that he was unable to put on the soft cloth of faith threaded with reason and common sense with which most children begin to dress their terror as soon as they hear the bad news we grownups have to tell them.

In books, in real life, we say to them, "Well it's true what you learned in the street the other day, there are these thousands of bombs. There is the possibility that people could get awfully angry and push some button somewhere. Yes, it has happened before, but no one's that crazy and anyway (we may add if we happened to have signed a couple of antinuke petitions) we won't let it happen." Since children have to thicken their little bones, get meatier and absorb tremendous amounts of difficult knowledge, they're happy to think, of course no one is that crazy and besides my body doesn't have time for so much fear.

Still, the information is there and for this child, William, the pinkest, fattest cloud of parental love can't obscure the fact that it did happen once, no twice, and he can see clearly how, out of the middle of Kansas a missile is rising, rising. No one is paying attention.

His knowledge is so sure that he begins to build a bomb shelter under the Ping-Pong table in the basement. He hears about the usefulness to this enterprise of lead and buys lots of pencils. His father has to say sadly when he sees the dozens of lead pencils covering the table, "I hate to break the news, kiddo, but pencils don't contain real lead."

In the sections dealing with William's childhood there's kind of gentle but rugged play with the American family—with the idea of the American family. Because Mr. O'Brien is truthful, not mean or vengeful, he is able to be pretty tough though kind.

Time passes. William acquires a strategy of silence, a natural arrogance. There is no one worth speaking to. He's the only one who knows or cares. He lives through the famous 60's which burn into the 70's the way they really did, with the American bombing of Cambodia, the fall of Saigon. In the course of these years he becomes a member of a group of antiwar campus radicals who with their mixed agendas, guns, armor dreams, disturb the purity of his vision but not the clarity. They all eventually descend into a military underground in Florida and Cuba. When the Vietnam War ends they rise as he does into big money, real estate, uranium.

Suddenly I'm angry with Tim O'Brien. What's wrong here? Is it my sense of the history of that period, my own experience of the deep-in and far-out women and men I knew and still know? It seems as though Mr. O'Brien has become afraid of the political meaning of William's sensible madness. Where William is consistently clear-sighted (which means he is more and more not out of his mind but out of the world's mind), Mr. O'Brien becomes devious and settles for mockery which usually means easy narrow characterization. In the case of the women this was particularly painful to me. William's love of Bobbi, the blonde poetry-writing stewardess, and his long pursuit of her seem fictionally just right. But the other women, his political comrades, are overly unattractive or extraordinarily beautiful. They seem to be the interfering author's clichéd decision. This is a tack a writer would take who is not particularly interested in the life and art of the nuclear age—or in any age for that matter. I believe that Mr. O'Brien is profoundly interested and probably dark with grief because of it, so I'm sorry to see these easy flaws.

What to do? What to do? William older, richer, madder, trying to be as American as possible owns a shovel and a stewardess wife. The hole he is digging in his backyard has become deeper. He has barricaded his wife and little girl in the upstairs bedroom. He is now using dynamite to deepen the hole when necessary. We begin to wonder whether he's digging for protection or burial.

I wish the novel could have been either more surreal or less. It falls into an untranscending middle which muffles the important cry of "Doom, doom." I do wonder with William why we are not all out on the street comers and village greens crying "Stop!" I wish either William or Mr. O'Brien had been more thoughtful about the powerful places from which the real madness radiates; I know it's not from my worried next-door neighbor. Is this because of the general discomfort American writers have confronting political complexity, or the way we are all stuck (even against our will) in a trough of private, individualistic complaint? Still, I thank Tim O'Brien (who wrote that wonderful, inventive novel, Going After Cacciato) for pouring these important concerns into fiction, which is not fed often enough with such disparate and essential themes.