Sarang's Low Background

Sarang's latest effort, Low Background, is surprisingly subdued, a pleasant, low-key diversion from present events. The novel is set in a small town in eastern Tennessee in the early 1990s, and it opens with a calamity—a flood has washed out a large bridge spanning the adjacent river. Luckily no one was hurt, but the bridge will take a long time to replace, and until then residents will have to drive several miles to the next river crossing.

As if that weren't enough, the mayor is soon at loggerheads with representatives of the county and the state over who will pay for the replacement. The problem is that although the bridge was built by the federal government, its ownership (and responsibility for its maintenance) was transferred to the state shortly thereafter. But the state apparently transferred the bridge to the town in the 1950s without fanfare (and without much in the way of documentary evidence). Maintenance costs have traditionally been shared equally between the town and the county, but this arrangement was never formalized (or if it was, the town's beleaguered attorney can't find any evidence of it). Now the state and the county are determined to avoid any financial responsibility for the bridge's replacement. The mayor, on the advice of the town attorney, decides to surrender. The expense will be crushing.

But before the documents are signed, a chance remark by the mayor's daughter sets the story on a new course. In her college physics course she learned that the detonation of atomic bombs starting in 1945 dramatically increased the "background radiation" in the atmosphere, so that steel made after 1945 is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material. As a result modern steel emits an elevated amount of radiation—not enough to matter for most purposes, but unacceptably high for delicate instruments such as medical imaging machines and Geiger counters. Manufacturers of those instruments have to pay a premium for "low background" steel, made before the contamination of the atmosphere. The ruined bridge was a cantilever bridge made in the 1930s, so it will be an excellent source of low background steel.

Now the tables are turned. Unfortunately before the documents are signed the hapless town attorney tips his hand, and the state and county immediately change their positions. The state argues that the bridge was never properly transferred to the town and still belongs solely to the state, while the county argues that by sharing maintenance expenses the parties established a "course of conduct" that gives it a one-half ownership stake in the bridge. I won't spoil the conclusion, but needless to say the town is at least spared the cost of replacement.

Low Background is not a long book or a particularly dramatic one. What is distinctive about it is precisely its calm, deliberate, one-damn-thing-after-another plotting, which feels true to life in a way that busier, more elaborate plots often fail to achieve. It captures the tedium of life without becoming tedious. I suppose that's another way to read the title, as an invocation of a calmer time, an elegy for a life of low stakes punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy, before technology made it impossible to be detached from day-to-day microbursts of outrage and nonsense. A way of life that can no longer be sustained, but still something to seek out in its restful graveyards of steel.