By Nicholas Mancusi ’10

A young protagonist lives through her own mini post-apocalypse, believing she will be held accountable for the actions of her father, a nuclear officer at an ill-fated plant.

[Fiction] The apocalypse that begins Chris Bohjalian’s 17th book, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, turns out to be not so bad after all. The term “nuclear meltdown” is a scary one, a metonym for the worst possible scenario imaginable, but when it occurs in rural Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom at the start of this novel, it’s merely a local disaster. Although thousands of people are displaced, only 19, mostly plant employees, actually die.

Two of the dead, however, are the parents of teenaged Emily Shepard. For her, the cataclysm is fully world-ending. Eluding authorities after the meltdown, she plays out a kind of mini post-apocalypse, living on her own in the newly abandoned territory, unwilling to return to society because she thinks she will be blamed, or at least shamed, for the actions of her father, a nuclear officer at the plant. His drunkenness, as the rumor goes, either caused the meltdown or hindered his ability to stop it once it had begun.

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Chris Bohjalian ’82 in front of clapboard house
But Emily was never quite well-placed within society to begin with, and she finds that a life of isolation suits her, much as it did for her idol, Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares a hermetic nature and darkly poetic disposition. (“The leaves don’t fall off one by one. They fall in drapes,” Emily narrates. “What everyone understands but no one thinks about is that the leaves are spectacular because they’re dying.”)

Bohjalian (left) is the author of 17 books, including many New York Times bestsellers. Midwives was a 1998 Oprah’s Book Club Selection.

Emily tries to make it at a halfway house, and then as the ward of a low-life who strings girls out on drugs and pimps them out to truckers. Finally, Emily ends up in a situation that seems to suit her: in an abandoned parking lot, sheltered under an igloo constructed out of trash bags filled with frozen leaves.

Life within an irradiated trash-bag igloo is not easy, and Emily, speaking in first person, is candid with the reader about the degradations she must endure in order to maintain her independence. “There was no code,” she says of her interactions with other refugees. “Sometimes we helped each other and sometimes we didn’t.” A guiding principle enters her life and her igloo in the form of Cameron, a younger and sicklier runaway whom she feels an obligation to protect. When his illness becomes too much to ignore, she is forced to abandon him at a hospital. At that point she concocts a desperate plan: she will head back into the exclusion zone, where her childhood home awaits, irradiated but undisturbed, a tomb for all that was.

Bohjalian does impressive, well-researched work to bring to life a difficult-to-render plot, in which everything feels real, from the science of nuclear catastrophe, to the machinations of a small-town gossip mill, to the actions of an intelligent and troubled teenage girl (the acknowledgments list nuclear reactor operators alongside child-services specialists).

But the real achievement is one of pacing and voice. This is a fully mature book, but the way in which Bohjalian accesses and animates Emily’s teenager-ness should earn him new young fans looking for an expression of their deeper reservations. More than facility in adolescent argot (“Suddenly my mind was filled with images that raced past like a tumblr feed”), what impresses most is Bohjalian’s empathy toward that common intuition held by young people: that the adult world was not made for them, that the system doesn’t work and that if it were to all come crashing down and they were free to do as they pleased, that might not be such a bad thing.

Nicholas Mancusi ’10 has written for The New York Times Book Review and many other publications.
Victoria Blewer photo