Atomic Love
Review of Held by Anne Michaels (Penguin Random House, 2024)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
In Anne Michaels’s Booker-shortlisted novel Held, Michaels poses two fundamental questions. The first is asked by John’s (the first character we meet) mother: “How can two bodies make a soul?” (54)
The second is posed by Mara, a character from the second half of the novel, who asks her partner Alan, “Do you think it's possible…for good to survive long enough, to outlast, to wait, to endure, while evil consumes itself?” (119).
Written to span a non-chronological timeline from 1902 to 2025, Held is well-positioned to explore the connection between these questions. Michaels introduces a cast of characters, some of whom share familial connections, but, more significantly, they are all connected by their powerful experiences with love (romantic and platonic), trauma, and grief. John is a World War I soldier who gets engaged to Helena just before he ships off to France; their daughter Anna (a battlefield doctor who likely served in WWII, although the novel doesn’t specify), married to Peter, dies in the field; their daughter Mara, a field hospital nurse in an unspecified conflict, falls in love with war photographer Alan sixty years later, and, somewhat inexplicably, Ernest Rutherford (the physicist) and his wife and Marie Curie also make appearances at the end of the novel. The one dominating connection between all their stories is an intensely intimate and loving relationship with their partner or children and (often) the trauma of losing them, or almost losing them, to death. The love each of these characters experiences is otherworldly–they are so deeply connected to each other that, beyond procreation (as the birth of children is never mentioned in the novel), they have melded into a single soul.
The characters also must navigate the tension between their involvement in significant and dangerous world events and their responsibility to those they love. Helena suggests that she and John go hide in a cave to prevent his conscription. Alan navigates intense fear when Mara, pregnant with their first child, is called back into the field, where both he and Peter are sure she will die. Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, as characters, are both aware of the extraordinary contributions they have made to physics but think more about the love they share with their spouses than their accomplishments. For the novelized version of Marie, her achievements seem almost meaningless to her in the wake of her husband’s death.
Each of these characters’ duties are divided between their public and private life, sometimes by choice and sometimes not, and the question of how we navigate caring for those we love and how we care for our greater global community is posited by all their storylines. Is the intensity of these personal loves cosmically significant enough to outlast, to wait, to endure, as evil consumes itself? Is love enough of an act of resistance against war, injustice, and especially death?
These divided duties are also reflected in the fragmentation of the novel’s form. Michaels is primarily a poet, although she has written three novels, all presented in nontraditional prose. In Held, the “chapters” are not arranged chronologically and often switch back and forth between storylines. The chapters are also divided even further into very short paragraphs separated by a significant amount of white space. Critics have generally tied this form choice to Michaels’ poetry, and her brief, vivid images certainly evoke her poetics. Much of this novel is also about memory, photography, and the relationship between them. John is a professional photographer and returns to his craft after the war. As more and more clients come in, he realizes a strange phenomenon is occurring—deceased family members of the subjects appear in the background as he develops the photos. This phenomenon is reminiscent of Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, where Lodge reflects on the death of his son in WWI and the possibility of continuing to communicate with him through letters sent from the spirit world. The cause of this mystery in Held is never revealed, but it establishes the supernatural power of memory that Michaels continues to explore throughout the novel.
Perhaps it is more likely, then, that in writing the novel in its fragmented form, Michaels is imitating the photographic artform—as we get snippets of John missing Helena as he lays wounded in the trenches or of Mara thinking of Alan and Peter at home before she decides not to get on her final flight to the warzone. Michaels captures snapshots of human thought and emotion in a way that is perhaps truer to the human experience than traditional prose would be. It also emphasizes the significance of memory. These small snippets of thought, presented in non-chronological chapters, allow these characters to continue existing beyond their deaths both through the love of their living family members in the novel and through the reader’s experience of their stories, much as the apparitions in John’s photographs do for their family members.
But, as the novel’s title suggests, Michaels is more concerned with what holds the fragments together than the fragments in isolation. Bringing in Rutherford and Curie’s stories at the end of the novel calls to mind the smallest fragments of matter that they explored--despite the fact that Held does not recount their scientific feats. We first meet the Rutherfords and the Curies at a dinner with Madame Palladino, a well-known medium, before skipping ahead to Marie’s own experience with loss. After Pierre’s death, Marie visits her friend Hertha in Dorset to mourn in private. As she is grieving, she reflects on seeing Becquerel’s X-ray: “I didn’t think of skeletons in the ground. I thought: these living bones are the beloved hand of his wife” (206). Even when she reflects on others’ scientific triumphs Marie’s thoughts are focused on the love that joins two bodies into one soul. And what happens when one of those bodies is lost? For Marie, life and love must keep going–Hertha tells her, “You were right to insist on love” (203). Her portion of the novel ends with her maintaining this insistence, as she sits down to write a letter to the deceased Pierre after putting her children to bed, much like Lodge does in Raymond. It is her memory, and her belief in the living power of that memory, that helps her go on.
Love outlasts the evil of the death of a spouse for Marie, but is it enough to endure more far-reaching examples of evil? It outlasts World War I for John and Helena, and Peter’s love for Mara sustains him after he loses his wife. When Mara leaves Peter and Alan to go back into the field, Peter’s community sustains them through their love for him by repeating a ritual they began when Anna was sent out on assignment. They gather in his kitchen and share stories throughout the night, waiting with him until he receives news of her hopefully safe arrival. As the night passes, Peter thinks about how “love was always a kind of rescue” (149) before he falls asleep on the table. And indeed, love is a kind of rescue in this case, because Mara returns home before the night is over, unable to get on her last flight because of her love for Peter, Alan, and their unborn child. It rescues her, and it rescues her family, but what are we to make of the unnamed warzone that she doesn’t end up helping? Michaels leaves us in this tension. Good has survived long enough for them, but the result of the conflict remains unknown.
Perhaps love, then, is the answer to the questions Michaels poses—like in Interstellar, love is a powerful force—it allows two bodies to form one soul, to transcend time, generations, and even death. Her reflections on the individual’s responsibility to loved ones and to urgent global conflicts distill these issues to their atomic levels, revealing love as the nucleus that everything orbits around. In “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats writes that, as the gyre of modernity widens, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” In Held, even as Michaels breaks down the world’s most serious problems to the individual level and fragments her prose into fleeting bits and pieces, she proves that perhaps, through love, it can.
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
