Synopses & Reviews
For her acclaimed collection of stories,
Red Ant House, Joyce Carol Oates hailed Ann Cummins as a "master storyteller." The
San Francisco Chronicle called her "startlingly original." Now, in her debut novel, Cummins stakes claim to rich new literary territory with a story of straddling cultures and cheating fate in the American Southwest.
Yellowcake introduces us to two unforgettable families one Navajo, one Anglo some thirty years after the closing of the uranium mill near where they once made their collective home. When little Becky Atcitty shows up on the Mahoneys' doorstep all grown up, the past comes crashing in on Ryland and his lively brood. Becky, the daughter of one of the Navajo mill workers Ryland had supervised, is now involved in a group seeking damages for those harmed by the radioactive dust that contaminated their world. But Ryland wants no part of dredging up their past or acknowledging his future. When his wife joins the cause, the messy, modern lives of this eclectic cast of characters collide once again, testing their mettle, stretching their faith, and reconnecting past and present in unexpected new ways.
Finely crafted, deeply felt, and bursting with heartache and hilarity, Yellowcake is a moving story of how everyday people sort their way through life, with all its hidden hazards.
Review
"[A] complex, unusually mature debut novel...interweaving the personal and political with quiet authority." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Cummins brilliantly conflates the insidious damage wrought by radiation sickness with the maladies of the soul caused by prejudice, poverty, nature's abuse, and love's betrayal." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"A tightly drawn and absorbing novel of the modern American Southwest." Library Journal
Review
"Already much admired for her superb short stories, Ann Cummins excels once more with a first novel that places her among the most serious and original writers of her generation." Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and A Feather on the Breath of God
Review
"Ann Cummins has one of the most original and addictive voices around. In Yellowcake she uses it to tell a story that's filled with suspense, humanity, and a deep concern for what we make of the world we live in. This novel achieves a rare combination: it's both important and beautiful." Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
Review
"A memorable journey behind the buried news article or fleeting sound bite. Cummins's characters inhabit this world with dignity, humor, and complexity, and her treatment of them does what great literature always does better than the evening news: it includes its readers in humanity's profound engagement with righting wrongs. There's no one I wouldn't recommend this book to." Antonya Nelson, author of Some Fun and Female Trouble
Review
"Glorious...an unflinchingly honest look at the struggles faced by so-called ordinary Americans. But there is nothing at all ordinary about the wonderful, fully fleshed characters that populate this book. Cummins knows the souls of her people an incredibly wide range of them and she knows her place, a Southwest that is rendered in all its unromantic but somehow blessed beauty." Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Esther Stories
Review
"Yellowcake is about those solid citizens Navajo and white whose work helped construct America's postwar prosperity and power, and whose repayment was exploitation and neglect. Ann Cummins is wonderful on the way individuals, just like corporations, seek to erase history; she's wonderful on the way our compassion works in counterpoint to our heedlessness." Jim Shepard, author of Project X and Love and Hydrogen
Review
"A gorgeous novel about people who are as tender and ornery and passionate and mixed-up and real as the people we know in real life. I loved them, and I love this book." Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Review
"[A] smart, deftly written Southwestern novel....Cummins dodges an amazing number of pitfalls in her first novel. Yellowcake manages to avoid being preachy, depressing, melodramatic, or sanctimonious about either the environment or its native American characters. It deserves a half-life at least as long as its eponymous element." Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
Synopsis
More than thirty years after the closing of a nearby uranium mine, the arrival of Becky Atcitty, the daughter of a former Navajo mill worker and a woman involved in a group seeking damages for exposure to radioactive dust, sparks conflict in the life of Ryland Mahoney and his family, in the story of two families--one Navajo, one Anglo. By the author of Red Ant House.
Synopsis
This absorbing novel of the American Southwest introduces us to two unforgettable families -- the Irish-Catholic Mahoneys and the Navajo Attcitys -- who despite their differences are joined through shared history and tragedy. Two decades ago, Ryland Mahoney and Woody Attcity had both worked processing the radioactive concentrate yellowcake in a New Mexican uranium mill. Now both men are facing terminal illness. Woodys daughter is convinced that the mine is to blame and is determined to help her father fight for compensation. But Ryland wants no part of dredging up their past -- or acknowledging his future -- choosing instead to focus on his own daughters upcoming wedding.
Cumminss complex and fascinating characters shine through in a gripping read that is radiant with heartache and humor and the possibility of redemption.
About the Author
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, Ann Cummins is the author of Red Ant House, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best Book of the Year. She has had her stories published in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Quarterly West, and the Sonora Review, among other publications, as well as The Best American Short Stories 2002. The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.
Author Q&A
Why is your novel titled Yellowcake?
My novel is set in the uranium-rich lands of the American Southwest,
the Four Corners area, including the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and
the Navajo Indian reservation in northern New Mexico and Arizona. My
subject is the lives of Navajos and Anglos for whom the mining and
milling of uranium was a way of life from the fifties through the early
seventies. Yellowcake,
a controversial energy source used to power both nuclear bombs and
power plants, comes from processed uranium ore. I titled my novel Yellowcake
in part because the making of yellowcake was such an important element
of my characters' lives, but also because it's a long-lived energy
source emitting radiation for years after the ore is mined. My novel is
set in 1991, twenty years after the closing of many uranium mines and
mills on the Colorado Plateau, but my characters continue to feel the
industry's effects in many ways physically, emotionally, and
spiritually. History and the present converge in the characters. Yellowcake,
or rather the "half-life" of the processed ore, represents the echoes
and consequences of historical events and how they play out in the
present.
So is it like the Karen Silkwood story about environmental hazards associated with uranium?
Only a small part of the story explores environmental hazards.
I'm more interested in creating complex characters driven by a range of
interests in the land and in each other. I tell the story from five
points of view. One character, an ailing man in his sixties, a former
uranium mill foreman, comes from generations of miners and has always
seen mining as his legacy, his right. Even though he's sick, he is not
quick to blame, and environmentalists irritate him. Another, a
twenty-five-year-old Navajo woman whose father worked in the mill and
was diagnosed with cancer at an early age, is angry at the industry,
and yet she feels conflicted, too. She turns to Western medicine to
help her father and thereby alienates her Navajo grandmother, who is as
suspicious of Western medicine as of the uranium industry that she
believes made her son sick. My other characters play out different
conflicts. An Anglo mill worker who had an affair with a Navajo woman
who was a rodeo pro obsesses about his lover twenty years later, though
he rarely sees her. His mixed-blood son, virtually fatherless and
raised by a mother who was always on the road, has grown up to be a
solo flyer. For this young man family is tenuous; he has come to
believe he has only himself to rely on, but still his big passions get
him into trouble. There is also the story of a uranium mill
divorcée who lives in the half-life of a marriage gone bad,
still haunted by memories of her ex-husband.
Why did you choose this subject?
I grew up in the Colorado Plateau area and, like some of my
characters, I'm from generations of Colorado miners. So the history and
landscape are personal to me. My father was a uranium mill worker in
Durango, Colorado, and his company began operating a mill in Shiprock,
New Mexico, on the Navajo reservation when I was nine. So the
reservation, too, is personal to me. I lived there for nine years and
went to public school there.
To what degree does autobiography play into your fiction?
It's interesting to answer that question at the end of a
project rather than at the beginning. When I started this novel, my
intent was to write a story based on my parents' marriage, using the
uranium industry for plot. My parents had a long marriage; my father
was sick for the last nine years of it, and my mother took care of him
until he died. It was hard work and literally broke her back. To be
honest, such a burden frightens me, so I wanted to create characters
that would allow me to explore that sort of commitment. I had Tilly
Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle
at the back of my mind. That book, so brutal and beautiful, is such a
moving portrayal of a marriage that has atrophied under the burden of
historical events in Olsen's case, the Holocaust that
continue to play out for decades in the characters' minds. I wrote a
couple of hundred pages about this testy old guy bucking against his
growing dependence on others, who all blame his work in uranium for his
illness. As usually happens with my characters, this guy quickly
developed into somebody very different from my father. As the story
develops, the characters encounter problems, and they have to improvise
to solve them.
Improvisation is the life source for my characters, who,
through the drafts of the book, matured into wholly unique people. I
was pretty happy with how my couple wrestled with each other, but the
book was turning into bitter medicine because the subject was illness.
My editor suggested I try some other points of view to broaden the
story. It was a great suggestion. It got me out of the sick room and
into New Mexico's high northern desert, a landscape I love, and it
allowed me to do something that frightens me, writing from the
perspective of characters who are racially and culturally different
from me. Risky business, I think, but a challenge worth taking,
especially when trying to tell how these events affected a diverse
community. I find character-driven fiction liberating. Ultimately, I'm
interested in creating individuals, not races or cultures, though I
guess individuality, race, and culture are intertwined. It helps to
know something about the people one auditions for fiction, which brings
me back to autobiography. This is a novel about the kinds of people I
grew up among, set in a place I know well, but while the characters and
story germinated in fact, they matured in the
imagination.