In May 1969, an American artillery platoon near Phu Bai suffered heavy losses during a night attack by North Vietnamese infantry. Since the platoon originated from a Kentucky National Guard unit, many of the dead hailed from the same county, which threw a community into deep mourning.

Paulette Livers, a native Kentuckian, has turned this collective grief into a novel, Cementville, named for the fictional county seat that lays to rest seven of its sons. Livers casts her net widely, trying to re-create an entire town, many of whose members are related by blood or marriage, and how they grieve the losses (or don’t). Each has an intersecting story, which gives the novel a mosaic feel.

There’s thirteen-year-old Maureen, determined to live an important life, while her mother, Katherine, does her best to keep the apron strings tied, the relationship that interested me the most. But Cementville also has a Vietnamese war bride; a murderous clan, the Fergusons, who live in trailers; Nimrod Grebe, an elderly black man who fought in World War I; a woman who invents reasons not to leave her house, except to visit the library; and many others.

What an ambitious scheme. I applaud the attempt to depict a world split in pieces by love, hate, heroism, patriotism, bitterness, and grief. That’s like reaching for the stars, and not enough novelists do that today. Also, as someone who remembers 1969 very well, I’m always looking for a full-fledged, honest rendition of that time. The jacket flap promises a “microcosm of a society shedding the old order and learning how to live with grief,” so I grabbed Cementville off the library shelf. And Livers writes well, beautifully, at times.

But Cementville remains mostly earthbound for me. For one thing, it’s more a collection of stories than a novel, unlinked by any common thread, except a murder that seems gratuitous, even trivial, next to everything else. Significant characters behave strangely, for no apparent reason, and some of the better-drawn figures, like Katherine and Maureen, need deeper inner lives.

Then too, the town isn’t a microcosm; it’s a pastiche. The narrative mentions that Katherine’s reading The Feminine Mystique, and also refers to possible resentment in the town that a young girl from the Ferguson trailer clan keeps house for Nimrod Grebe, the elderly African-American. But that’s the extent of feminism and race relations here.

I can’t blame Livers for not living up to the hype—authors don’t necessarily write their own flap copy—but I wish she’d provided a true sense of time and place. It takes more than passing references to Led Zeppelin or fish-net stockings to portray an era that feels lived in.

Nobody in this novel debates or feels strongly about signs of change, whether campus protests, the moon landing, hallucinogenic drugs, hemlines, haircuts, or any other aspect of that noisy era. Even more astonishingly, nobody discusses the war that has caused such pain, nor do the young men who lost their lives appear as anything but faceless ghosts.

This is a crucial weakness, I think, reflected in how there seems to be only one resident supporter of the war among many critics of it. That rings false, both to the fictional world and what actually happened. In fact, Livers could have used differing opinions about the war, and whether the local boys died in vain, as a driving (and dividing) force. Consequently, it’s not just outside events that fail to echo in Cementville; it’s the disaster in Cementville that fails to shake the place deeply enough. ( )

Where I got the book: free e-copy provided by publisher on NetGalley. This review first appeared on the Historical Novel Society website and in the May 2014 issue of the Historical Novel Review.

This debut literary novel is set in 1969, in a small Kentucky town that produces cement and whiskey. A funeral cortege brings home seven dead Cementville soldiers, all members of the National Guard whose families had expected them to remain safe from the conflict in Vietnam, and one surviving, maimed hero. An eighth dead soldier is not part of the cortege; severed from the others by religious denomination and class divisions, his family must mourn him separately. Around these deaths form a number of stories reaching back into family histories and well-kept secrets of love, hatred and violence.

With a large cast of characters united variously by ties of kinship and community, this is a novel that rewards the reader who can keep its diverse threads straight in her mind. Beautifully written and sensitively executed, it weaves the Vietnam era deftly into the family stories and touches on the civil rights issues that still arouse strong feelings in Cementville’s population.

The novel’s even tone and its understated ending may not satisfy readers looking for the sense of completion a rounded-out story brings, but it should certainly gratify those who enjoy good prose and a complex interweaving of past and present. A promising debut. ( )

A small town in Kentucky stunned by seven coffins sent home from a National Guard Unit reveals prejudices and strengths during the Vietnam Era. Told through the perspective of several community members, the novel is at it's strongest when thirteen year old Maureen works on her history of Cementville and uncovers suicide, murder and old prejudices. This could be any small town and any war and relevant today in our treatment of veterans. A bit awkward at times, but overall a timeless story and crafty mystery. As a Louisville, KY native, her sense of place and local references made me feel right at home. Paulette Livers is one to watch.

Provided by publisher ( )

A glass of bourbon to remember and forget

Cementville: A Novel by Paulette Livers (Counterpoint, $25)

A small Kentucky town relies economically on a fading cement plant and a prominent bourbon distillery, and in 1969, neither are doing well.

It’s cliché to call a first novel a “stunning debut,” but no other words will suffice for Paulette Livers’ first book: When seven young men—who’d tried to avoid Vietnam by entering the National Guard—are killed in a single day’s fighting, the entire town reels with grief, which brings older, simmering conflicts to a boil.

The day of the funeral for the group, a former P.O.W. returns, damaged in unimaginable ways; also back is a young man honorably discharged but still under a cloud, and the body of a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, killed on the same day as the respectable families’ sons, is also returned for burial.

Decades of conflicts and a fully-realized—and massive—cast of characters illuminates both the steaming guts of the town (there are two women murdered shortly after the funerals), its guilty conscience (racism, class bias, dysfunctional families), and its true, strong heart.

Livers writes with compassion and honesty about life in strained circumstances, about rising above our beginnings and falling below our families’ modest hopes. But despite the grim failures, the depression, the disappointments, still some of us manage to treat each other with a tiny bit of dignity—and that’s what really makes this novel work. ( )

Cementville is a small town in Kentucky. It was named for its now defunct cement plant and in the year 1969, the population is only 1,003. Eight young men from the town were sent to Vietnam and seven of them have just been returned in coffins. The eighth, football hero Harlan, who lost a leg in Vietnam and should return to a hero’s welcome, has instead returned to a town immersed in shock and grief.

The story is told from many viewpoints. There is young Maureen, Harlan’s little sister, who writes in her journal of her anguish and confusion while she tries to cope with Harlan’s PTSD. Maria Louise is a journalist in the city who returns to her home town to cover the story and finds herself falling in love when she least expects it. Giang Smith is a war bride who has fled the danger of Vietnam only to find a different kind of danger in Cementville. Wanda is a librarian who has been unable to leave her house for some time. While all those about her struggle to come to terms with the loss, she finds the strength to reconnect with her town. And elderly Evelyn, the wealthiest woman in town, who has her own share of secrets to keep.

This is a snapshot of a small town of the 1960’s which is being forced to change whether it is ready or not. Vietnam, Women’s Liberation and the Civil Rights Movement have impacted on this town and its people bringing political change and social upheaval. Life can never be the same again.

Livers has succeeded in bringing this town to life. The characters are written clearly and concisely. This is a story about what it means to be a hero, about how grief affects us all differently and how family grievances can be overcome through unexpected friendships and newly found respect. ( )