ABOUT THE BOOKABOUT THE AUTHORREVIEWS
READER'S COMMENTSEXCERPTSCOTT'S BLOG

"A rollicking but provocative saga
across three decades
of the cold war!"

Similar in dynamics to California’s “Gold Rush ” were demographic, environmental and financial impacts from the trillions of dollars the Department of Defense disbursed into California during the Cold War. While the gold rush era was a frenzy of exploitation, the “defense rush” was the opposite — for a tidal wave of fortune poured into the State, and it became emblematic of what President Eisenhower called the “Military-Industrial Complex.” This novel links these two exploitative times through Fernville, a town whose roots are from the 19th-century gold rush, but its sustenance is the 20th-century missile rush — and its characters, despite distractions of romance and mystery over thirty years, cannot ignore the glint from gold and the shadow cast by uranium. The novel takes place in 1955 and 1986, two watershed years of the Cold War. If whimsey and a slight parody tend to intrude in the distant narratives of 1955, they are brought up short by the hard edge of reality in those of 1986. The characters find their relationships drastically change over those years, through the pitfalls of sex and uranium.

NIKE, an easy read in spite of its troll through the ugly years of the Cold War, gives a slanted and wicked portrayal of life inside the secret missile industry in 1955. A murder mystery parallels a more serious narrative ­ that greed, hubris and character flaw, along with the playing out of those dark and lurking contingencies, can potentially visit disaster upon both an individual and a society.

Nike is a non-genre, multi-narrative, whimsical and linear novel designed, if you will, to keep the reader a little off balance. A diverse group of characters relate Message, mystery, history and romance in a fluid mix that sorts itself out in the end. Or maybe it doesn’t! Of course, Nike has a bottom line of serious intent that the turmoils in the secondary narratives cannot obscure.

Fernville, an invented old Gold Rush town in California, is representative of other towns and cities across America that were transformed by the influx of defense spending during the Cold War period. The Winged and Garlanded Nike is a sprawling saga in which action is confined to several months in 1955 and to a week in 1986. A correspondence of terse notes between two of the main characters bridges the thirty year gap. These two years were perhaps the most significant as well as the most dangerous in that era. 1955 saw the fruition of strategic weapon systems and the perfection of nuclear bombs that then lent a real gut meaning to the word “annihilation.” Nuclear force stances begun then still dangerously persist in some fashion today. 1986, even a more dangerous year, saw the most controversial, expensive and perhaps inane Pentagon program ever – President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, ‘Star Wars’. It is these issues and that background which provide for the novel’s basic structure, but it is the multiple characters and their bittersweet relationships and personal narratives across those thirty years that are the heart of the novel.

The cast of those characters is the same in the two time periods. With several minor exceptions, nobody dies, but everybody, as well as their relationships, change – driven by the forces of absence, love, sex and the specter of uranium.

A reader, depending on his or her inclinations, may be drawn more to the novel’s romantic and ‘hearts-on-sleeve’ sentimentality or perhaps to the divertive and maybe unsolvable decades-long murder mystery. Ironies and metaphor may amuse another reader, and the muted environmental cry for California will touch another. The documentary but also slanted look into the Pentagon’s defense industry, with its authentic voice from 1955 and 1986, can capture the attention of others. But whatever the reader brings to the novel, he or she must not ignore the underlying tone of dread over the nuclear confrontation that pervades these pages. The author’s aim and hope, of course, is that most readers will take in all of these elements to gain an informative and enjoyable read.

At the reader’s first encounter with the novel, the large cast of characters might seem a bit daunting. However, the author holds that after a few pages of sorting out, the characters will ingratiate themselves and the reader will then find it to be easy going.

Thumbnail sketches of major characters:

Richard Hervey, A middle aged non-PhD associate professor on the downhill career skids and stuck in a small state college obsesses over the historical mantra and burning question of “How did we blunder into this uranium nightmare?” Divorced, acerbic, solitary and perhaps alcoholic, his frustrations over his impotence in the bureaucratic nuclear labyrinth are at least partly redeemed by his short three minutes of fame in 1986.

Alice Smith, spirited and romantic, but the bored and restless wife of a powerful executive, Ryland Smith, she achieves some measure of fulfillment as a successful mystery author, her material gleaned from the history and personalities of Fernville. She and Richard Hervey find some brief solace from their lives’ frustrations in an improbable love affair.

Clarissa Hervey, in 1955 the nineteen-year-old nubile daughter of Richard Hervey, finds her modest future possibilities in provincial Fernville dramatically blossom when the big defense company, Maxtar Missile Systems Division, relocates to Fernville, bringing in crowds of ties and sport coats in the persons of young, high-earning missile engineers.

Ryland Smith, pompous CEO of Maxtar and fast-rising in the corporate world, aims for the Senate but settles for a long career in the House of Representatives. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War doesn’t quite register with him for thirty years until it’s brought to the forefront by an early and lingering revelation about it.

Arthur Sonett, a young engineer in the defense missile industry, finds himself rootless and loveless until Clarissa Hervey briefly and pyrotechnically enters his life. His accomplished career over the next thirty years is derailed by several enlightening seductions, none of them sexual.

Dave Cornwell, his own man, who lets nothing, especially advanced degrees, intimidate him or distort his simple but clear vision into the heart of a complex matter.

Beverly Kloits, fourth generation descendant of Fernville’s founding father, and Maxtar’s disruptive “interplant mail girl.” She lands the most ambitious and successful of Maxtar’s young technical types and lives close to the heart of the nuclear genie, but oblivious to its presence.

Helen Crossman Needham, Fernville’s matriarch whose burial doesn’t bury all of the long-held secrets from Fernville’s history.

Austin Cooper, prototypical, hard-driving, narrow-visioned missile engineer of the fifties who burns out early in his career trajectory. Insanity, though, helps clear his vision to the inanities of President Reagan’s “Star Wars.”

Alex Mannoy, who always wanted to live in the sweet heart of the nuclear genie and did, never suspecting, or not caring, its person to be a monster.

John Wickware, professor of biology at Fernville State College, inward, alcoholic and well published, sees California’s environmental degradation magnified through the extinction of his academic specialty, a newt sub specie and his namesake.

Fred Jennings, engineering manager who solved missile problems handed to him, and let the chips fall where they may.

Howie Stadler, who actually hefted plutonium “pits,” but was done in by a bad gene, a horrendous run of stubborn probability, and a wife with her own view of what made sense at the roulette table.

Bernie, the house pianist, whose hot-blooded rendition of “Stella by Starlight” incited too many ill-advised proposals of marriage.

THE Bernadette, John Wickware’s wife. Does not make an appearance in the novel.

The title of the novel comes from the old army Nike Ajax guided missile, obsolete well before its short deployment, which featured in its publicity the winged and garlanded figure of Nike, Goddess of Victory, as its icon of perfection.