SOURCE: "Digging a Shelter and a Grave," in The New York Times Book Review, November 17, 1985, p. 7.

Below, Paley offers a mixed review of The Nuclear Age, faulting O'Brien's characterizations but praising his choice of "disparate and essential themes."

What subjects! The probable end of the world, survival, madness. Whose madness? One-person madness or world-madness. Fear. When Tim O'Brien's new novel, The Nuclear Age, begins, the year is 1995 and a man is digging a deep hole in his backyard. Why? Because the world hasn't changed too much and neither has he. The world is still accumulating its thousands of nuclear death heads. And he, although he now owns the blonde wife and clever child any American male assumes is his due, is still the boy we meet in flashbacks. About 40 years earlier, William Cowling was a child suffering such extreme clear-sightedness that he was unable to put on the...