Brice and Kip are born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos. They share many experiences as they grow up together in the place they know as "the hill." It is certainly a fresh perspective on the place of gestation of the world's first atomic bombs. We are given a great description of several pivotal events in the relationship between Brice and Kip, the first being a journey to Chimayo where they break into the church that houses miraculous earth. This place becomes sacred for the two throughout their lives.

The believers who, in the early part of the last century, fashioned Chimayo from the barest elements around them, knew that trees rise from wet earth, and that wood and mud are old biological friends. More than this seems an excess, and somehow faithless.

Both go to college in New York in the heady days of tumult that were the sixties. While Brice becomes involved in the anti-war movement, Kip leads a life that eventually convinces him to enlist. Not only do they take such seemingly opposite and antagonistic paths but they both fall in love with the same woman.

What is conviction? It is different from a conviction. Conviction when followed with strict, unveering resolve, can lead to arrest and arrest to conviction. Convicts are sometimes convicted because they took their convictions out and did things that might seem crazy to people who didn't share those convictions, or at least didn't share them to the intensity that might carry them away into action.

Jessica is the woman both have fallen in love with. At first she is in a relationship with Kip but Kip does not return from Vietnam at the war's end and eventually she marries Brice. We are witness to the circumstances of the marriage and also to, eventually, Kip's reasons for not returning from Laos. Part of this story may not be able to refute the description of romantic. The relationship between the three main characters is the key to the novel. But the novel holds a lot more than this romance alone. Just as often as relationships cannot be separated from the times during which they occur, the story of these relationships cannot be seperated from the backdrop of the Vietnam war and the allegiances they seemingly demanded of people. The various characters have constructed edifices of justification for their actions and we are witness to how they pan out. This is a complex novel which is compelling and well written. It is a beautiful story woven between some very ugly episodes in history. At a glance it may sound similar to Underworld by De Lillo or Purple America by Moody but it is in quite a different vein. This book breathes on a much more personal level and if it has any flaws it it is probably due to this aspect alone. Trinity Fields is a good novel and well worth reading.