Rachel Beanland (Photo by Caroline Wimmer)
"The Half Life” is Richmond author Rachel Beanland’s largest and steamiest novel. And this refers to more than the book’s setting in a warm Mediterranean climate.
The plotline involves romance. A contrast from Beanland’s previous works. “‘Florence Adler Swims Forever’ is set in the aftermath of a death, where no one’s really feeling their best,” Beanland says of her first book, which takes place in 1930s Atlantic City. “And then in ‘The House is on Fire,’ everyone’s trying to survive a massive catastrophe,” which is the Richmond Theater fire of 1811.
In “The Half Life,” 23-year-old Eileen O’Malley falls into a whirlwind love affair with charming military officer Paul Archer, who works in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear sector and sweeps her off her feet.
“They’re both young people, so sex plays a role,” Beanland explains. The setting is the island of La Maddalena in an archipelago off the northeastern coast of Sardinia, where U.S. nuclear-powered submarines are based. There’s heat of a nonromantic kind, too, as tension builds between residents concerned about the possible radiation hazards and the Navy’s insistence that there is no danger. Eileen is drawn into this dispute in part through her encounter with an investigative journalist, Teo.
Image courtesy Simon and Schuster
The mid-1970s backdrop includes the strained relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, and the Vietnam War, in which Eileen’s younger brother Lenny died. The trauma of his violent and unnecessary death is one of the significant threads in the storyline. Then, within this politically charged environment, NASA’s Viking lander arrives on Mars. Such an out-of-this-world event serves as a reminder about larger issues, but Beanland recalls she almost removed the mention, ultimately keeping it as an analogy for Eileen feeling like an alien.
In 2023, Beanland began writing and conducting extensive research. As many authors do, she used aspects of what she knew and then expanded upon them. Her father was an U.S. Navy officer; following a stint in Charleston, he was stationed with his wife and daughters at La Maddalena from 1986-1988. He did not, however, work in nuclear repair or in radiological controls, fields that play a significant part in “The Half Life.” Beanland harkened back to the ’70s to base some of the book’s events on actual submarine and nuclear mishaps. It was also a period of unrest opposing the U.S. foreign presence, even including car bombings.
To that end, the author almost leans out of the fourth wall during one of Eileen’s sessions with Francesca, her Italian language tutor. Eileen notices the cover of the 1974 novel “La Storia” by Elsa Morante, which depicts a child amid devastation, but she cannot tell whether the wreckage is a bombed building or piled corpses.
Francesca explains that, in Italian, the title refers both to a story and to history. The book, widely regarded as a pivotal work that captured a cultural moment in Italy, centers on ordinary people living in Rome during World War II, including a widowed Jewish mother of two sons — one conceived after the woman is raped by a German soldier. Woven throughout are the historical events the characters endure.
Francesca tells Eileen, “So, across Italy, readers are asking themselves if they’re reading truth or fiction.” Eileen replies, “Which is it?” Francesca, shrugging, responds, “For Italians who lived through the postwar years, it feels true. Which is probably all that matters.”
Beanland’s “The Half Life” also feels true, and the intertwined lives of its characters will matter to the reader.
Fountain Bookstore will host a launch event on July 14 at 6 p.m., including a discussion with Beanland, at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. Tickets are $38 and include a signed copy of the novel.
