Book Review: “Atmosphere” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Atmosphere” is a masterpiece.  There, I said it.  Nothing more needs to be added, but I will say more because perhaps you have not yet read “Atmosphere,” and therefore you don’t know that it’s a masterpiece.  “Atmosphere” is the story of two young women astronauts who fall in love while they prepare to fly on NASA’s ‘Navigator’ space shuttle in the 1980s.  That’s really all you need to know except that such a bare outline doesn’t explain why I’m calling “Atmosphere” a masterpiece.  It is one because of the way the story unfolds as methodically and mechanically as a NASA space mission, incrementally increasing in pressure and dramatic tension with each sentence and each chapter, until, toward the end, it achieves liftoff like the shuttle itself.

At this point, it has to be said that Taylor Jenkins Reid does not need book reviews; she has no need for reviewers.  That’s because her writing is so close to flawless that there’s really nothing more important to say about each one of her unique novels than “wow.”  Her books sell, and they don’t need reviews or reviewers to sell them.  Why do they sell?  Because they are at once accessible and speculative.  Her realistic and punchy dialogue, splashed generously across almost every page, contributes to her books’ accessibility and her characters’ believability.  Her dialogues and her character sketches also reveal her to be a master of the group dynamics of young people coming of age.  Just as Reid’s bestselling novel, “Daisy Jones and the Six,” dramatized the dynamics of a handful of bandmates wrenched apart by the arrival in their midst of the uber-talented but drug-addicted Daisy, “Atmosphere” rolls out the dynamics of a group of young men and women thrown together to train at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But I mentioned that Reid’s books are as speculative as they are accessible.  Her early  novel, “Maybe In Another Life,” speculated about what would happen if the story line split itself between two alternate universes.  When the young female protagonist attends a party in Los Angeles where she unexpectedly runs into her high school boyfriend, the novel asks two questions:  what would happen if she went home with him after the party, and what would happen if she didn’t?  From that point onwards, the novel proceeds to unfurl both contradictory sails in a series of alternating chapters that somehow manage to come together at the end, making the story complete.

From a lesser writer this would come across as cheap science fiction, but from the master storyteller that Taylor Jenkins Reid is, it offers a clue to how the universe truly unfolds.  A lesser writer would not have been content with only two alternate universes; he or she would have tried (and failed) to produce a myriad of story lines that split off from each other as often as living cells divide themselves and multiply.  Reid was smart to limit the options to only two, and having always been interested in the theory of parallel universes, I was struck by how effortlessly she transformed a complex philosophical theory into a simple and believable story.

The speculative element in “Atmosphere” is even more ambitious.  What is the nature of man’s (and woman’s) relation to the stars?  Does God exist, and if so, who or what is God?  On the latter question, Reid masterfully devotes only four pages to her lead character Joan Goodwin’s view of God, reducing what would take most philosophers an entire treatise to explain to a simple, stunning and convincing argument that made me clap my hands in applause.  Joan Goodwin, I agree with your conception of God!

Of course, it takes more than accessibility and speculation to turn a novel into a masterpiece, and this is where it comes down to the heart.  Reid’s stories are heartfelt and her heroines are full of heart.  The queer love story at the center of “Atmosphere,” full of the dangers, traps, and tribulations that lay in wait everywhere for gay men and women in Reagan’s America of the 1980s, is a triumph.  As trite as it may sound, the phrase “love conquers all” is the most winning formula for any novel or movie, and here Reid flies love as close to the sun as she dares.  Having just written and published a memoir about gay love in the 1980s, I can report that Reid uses fiction to catapult queer love to a higher level than nonfiction is capable of.  That she does so with two women instead of two men is essential because, of course, along with the need to overcome homophobia, the main theme running through the novel is the struggle of women to be accepted as equals within the quasi-military, male hierarchy of NASA, not to mention all the other institutions in American society.

Taylor Jenkins Reid would never be accused of producing what is called “literary fiction,” although I’m not quite sure where publishing’s boundaries between ‘literary’ and ‘trade’ are drawn.  Her books start out like beach reads or airplane reads; they do not scream Dostoevsky or Toni Morrison or even two of my favorite contemporary ‘literary’ novelists, Zadie Smith and Alan Hollinghurst.  But after reading the first few chapters of each of Reid’s books, you realize you are not lounging on the beach after all; you are sitting straight up in a chair, at full attention.  And that’s what makes Reid’s trade fiction equal if not superior to any literary novel you might hand me. “Atmosphere” is a page-turner that would make a great movie.  It would make a great Stephen Spielberg movie, not an Ingmar Bergman movie or the work of any other intellectual film director who comes to mind.  And how many people, I ask, would prefer “Cries and Whispers” to “ET the Terrestrial?”  It goes without saying that I cried at the end.  Tears of sadness followed by tears of joy.