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New York Times bestselling novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid — author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, about an iconic movie star from the golden age of Hollywood, and the 1970s-set Daisy Jones and the Six — has written another period piece in the form of her ninth novel, Atmosphere.
Set in the early 1980s, it concerns the US’s space shuttle programme. Hot on the heels of Group 8 — the first cohort of Nasa astronauts to include women, one of whom became the first American woman to fly in space — Jenkins Reid has invented a fictional Group 9, of which protagonist Joan Goodwin and her lover Vanessa are part.
Although the novel charts Joan’s journey from astrophysics professor to gold-pin-wearing astronaut (the trainees get a silver pin when they qualify, a gold one after their first space flight), Jenkins Reid begins the novel by throwing readers in at the deep end: mid-mission. Vanessa is among those in orbit, while Joan is “CAPCOM” — the astronaut back at Mission Control through whom all communication with the shuttle flows.
It’s not really a spoiler to say that something goes disastrously wrong. Thereafter, it’s a race against time to get the damaged shuttle and its astronauts safely back to Earth. With tension mounting in the present, Jenkins Reid unfurls the backstories of her characters: their training, their friendships with one another and, first and foremost, the two women’s romance.
Literary fiction this isn’t — and Jenkins Reid herself recently put us in our place when she admitted that she loves being the “Candy Land [Jonathan] Franzen”, as one critic disparaged her — but when it comes to character, plot and good old-fashioned storytelling, she knows exactly where and how to land the beats her readers flock to her books for. She’s great on the specifics of life at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, and the bristling mix of “cowboys” and “nerds” who are attracted to a career at Nasa. Somewhat less convincing is the broader historical context. “Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum,” one of Joan’s male colleagues tells her, speaking like a good 21st-century feminist. “It does a disservice to us both.”
Although she flirts with the bigotry that Joan and Vanessa would face if their relationship became public, Jenkins Reid neither digs deep nor offers any practical resolution. Instead, the message of this book is that love really can overcome all. Joan’s voyage of self-discovery through the bumpy internal landscape of her heart is depicted as every bit as momentous as her first flight into space.
I’m not saying you won’t buy it — you can’t help but root for these two women — but it is all rather saccharine, sanitised and oversimplified. Unsurprisingly, a big-screen Hollywood adaptation is already in the works, for which much of the dialogue can presumably be lifted straight out of the novel. “Bravery is almost always a lie,” thinks Joan. “Courage is all we have.”
Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid Hutchinson Heinemann £20, 352 pages
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