In Atmosphere, lust and tragedy are written in the stars

Critics didn’t really begin to notice Taylor Jenkins Reid until 2019, the year the American novelist published Daisy Jones & the Six, an oral history of a 1970s rock band loosely drawn on Fleetwood Mac. By that point, TikTok had long been abuzz with her previous novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a tricksy tale of an old Hollywood star – and the source of nearly half of Reid’s 21m sales worldwide.

The appeal of her books is old-fashioned but wholly explicable: in an era of narrow autofiction, Reid serves up twisty plots and richly drawn characters in glamorous habitats – supermodels, tennis players – much in the manner of the old 1980s bonkbusters.

Conceived as a drama-filled romance à la Titanic, Atmosphere follows two rookie Nasa astronauts in 1984: Joan, a prim-seeming astrophysicist, and Vanessa, an aeronautical engineer who spent her teens in revolt against her mother’s Catholicism. Vanessa is on a mission to put a naval satellite into orbit when disaster strikes on board her space shuttle, leaving four other crew members dead and one out cold. Guided by Joan on ground control in Houston, she must repair the shuttle and fly it back alone – and trying to save her remaining living crewmate might mean nobody makes it home.

It’s a dire choice, but we can’t gauge just quite how impossibly painful the situation is until Reid, having established the crisis in her prologue, rewinds seven years to follow Joan and Vanessa from the start of their training, slowly spooling back to the present as they overcome stacked odds to thrive in a male-dominated sphere.

The structure, sandwiching the novel’s prehistory between episodes from the narrative present, is a steady source of pathos. We’re lulled into rooting for characters whose deaths we’ve already been shown, and, when one female crew member is earmarked as a potential backstabber, we already know she isn’t. We regularly forget where the story is headed, carried away instead by the trainees’ daily trials, whether fending off sexist remarks or trying not to puke while being hurled around in a cargo plane in preparation for microgravity.

Bit by bit, the novel makes good on the promise of its opaque subtitle, A Love Story, as the two leads tentatively sound out each other’s pasts in increasingly nervy dialogue. Joan, who once sent a high-school suitor packing, says she’s never been in love; Vanessa is more coy. Clarity – and complexity – follow a visit to a strip club on a stopover in New Orleans after a training exercise.