An Epic in Short Fiction

Kevin Powers demonstrates skillfully and passionately how to write an epic novel spanning more than 100 years, from the American Civil War to nearly the turn of the 21st century, containing textured characters and illustrating the pain and legacy of slavery, the prejudice that continues from it, and the suspect vision and dream of a better future—and brings the whole thing in at around 250 pages. Added to this, he does it with some beautifully evocative phrasing, not a little humor, and some nearly overwhelming emotion, including one of the best bittersweet romances and parting scenes readers have probably read in a very long time.

The terrain of the novel is in and around Richmond and North Carolina coast. Powers opens the story a few years into Reconstruction. He swings back and forth in time to paint a full picture of the Beauvais Plantation and the Reid farm and transport business, including the masters, mistresses, and slaves. Antony Levallois is master of Beauvais, a man of vision, but immensely cynical and cruel, a subtle dissembler and legal prestidigitator, a scoundrel who brooks the authority of no man, not even the Reconstruction administrative colonel. He is the Simon Legree of the tale, though French not Northerner, but possessed of the same greediness. Bob Reid, though a slaveholder, stands in contrast, a freight hauler with a modest spread, a sickly wife and vibrant daughter, Emily, and slaves Rawls and Aurelia, the kind of master, observes Rawls, who wishes constantly to apologize for owning a man by being too nice to the man who is his slave. Rawls navigates skillfully within his restricted boundaries, and stretches them, which is how he comes upon the fascination of his life, Nurse (through whom we witness the terror of slavery and war). For his life before, during, and after the war, he harbors Nurse in his heart. These characters interact in some horrifying ways not only endemic to slavery but to the privilege and control it bestows on the few for the purpose of evil.

Spawned from this Reconstruction stew, though how we aren’t quite sure at first, is George Seldom, a black man who could be mistaken for a Native American, born in the 1860s, who takes us beyond Beauvais and Reconstruction into late 19th and early 20th centuries. As we see how time changes his home ground through his eyes, we also travel with him in search of his origin. Which is how we meet Lottie, who becomes his guide to what he takes as his home. Through Lottie we meet Bill, and with them get a sense of what love between two people can be, sweet often, with a bitterness we can’t control.

The above provides you with a framework for linking the main characters and following the story, which does move quickly and jump about, to its explosive culmination. Powers has written the kind of novel that surprises you while reading it and gives you the pleasure of knitting all the narrative threads into a linear history. If not one of the year’s best novels, it certainly is one of its most ambitious. You should not miss it.

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I chose to read A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers because of its setting. The time period immediately following the Civil War is not one about which I have read much. How did the promise of emancipation translate to reality? Did it? Has it yet? The tale this book tells is sordid and dark and narrowly focused story surrounding one plantation. I never quite get out from the details to the bigger picture of the history.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2019/01/a-shout-in-ruins.html

Reviewed for NetGalley. ( )

I thought I had read Kevin Powers first book but now realize I wanted to and never did. I am glad that I read this book. Many of the critics of this book take issue with Powers narrative being very dense and hard to decipher. The prose was excellent and very complex. I can see where it could put off some readers but if you take the time you will see the beauty in his use of language. As to the story, I thought weaving the civil war time with 1956 and 1984 worked well. Powers showed the continuing impact of the Civil War into our time. As to the Civil War story, it was creative and engaged me. The fact there have been many good novels about the Civil War should not diminish the value of Power's effort. The book did a good job of evoking emotions and feelings. I will definitely read Power's first book. This book is 250 pages so your investment will not be large, but to me this is a worthwhile read and another depiction of the singular important event of our country. The impact of slavery, and the destruction of the Indian population never should be dismissed. As current events show, they continue to stay with us. ( )

What a disappointment after the glory of The Yellow Birds. Kevin Powers' earlier novel told an emotionally complicated story with the bracing brevity of a young Hemingway, but A Shout in the Ruins burns that bridge seemingly in favour of another American antecedent, the more artificial style of Faulkner. But it falls short of that new influence. As a result, the book is difficult and often impenetrable, and it doesn't attain the lofty perch it is reaching for (and with not a little self-regard).

The book's fatal flaw is its poor sentence structure. It lost me on the very first page, which is a feat, and I gamely tried to decipher the author's prose and intentions with regards to the story. I am reluctant to quote, because then it could be laid against me that I am quoting out of context, but there were many passages where I just thought, 'what?', and had to re-read them a number of times. I did start to make a list of the worst examples, but by the end of the book there were too many to choose between. There is an inflated importance about many of the passages and none of the words land gracefully in your mind. There are even some outright groaners, and many lines you have to translate from literary-speak into English before you can process them – a real drag on the pace and on the reader's goodwill and a far cry from The Yellow Birds.

What makes this worse is that your mental endeavour to translate the book is not rewarded. Not only is the content unoriginal in the current market (another lofty piece of literature about slavery in America?), but the book's theme is rather simple – that there is always violence in the world, and it is present not only in exceptional moments of war and change but in small, forgotten moments – and it doesn't warrant the graft. It is told in a high-minded and obfuscatory way, and sounds for all the world like a writer getting carried away with his ability to write.

Only one scene – with Ernst Drahms on pages 99-100 – really captures Powers' theme of the intimacy of violence, and it is a scene that is all but removed from the main story. (And, to give him credit, it shows that Powers can still write.) The sense in A Shout in the Ruins is one of disconnect, of scenes of pointless and maybe godless desolation, and the book ended while I still felt it was warming up. It is a peculiarity. It is meandering, like a river, and like a river you think it must have some grand purpose for its motion, until you watch it for a while and realize that's just what it does.

I don't know where Powers' head was at when he wrote this. It doesn't seem like it was reaching for something among the stars and fell short (which would be forgivable and even admirable), and it doesn't seem like it is preening in exchange for sycophantic kudos from the literati (though it definitely got them). It seems composed, delivered exactly how Powers wanted it delivered, and yet it is a failure. Given Powers' previous talents, that is something which is more disconcerting than any incident of violence he describes. ( )

George Seldom is an old man who decides to take some time to revisit his personal history on a road trip. He travels through the Deep South and as he does so the reader is given some of the events that have led to a country on the brink of race equality. The plantation of Beauvais is owned by a cruel master Levallois who, even before the Civil War, has recognised that industry is the way forward, not agriculture. His neighbour goes to fight in the war and Levallois usurps his land, his daughter and his life. Rawls has been in love with Nurse but both are purchased by Levallois and are subject to his mind games. Reid goes off to war a proud Confederate but returns to find that he has lost everything. Minor characters fight for what they believe is right.

This is a complex and very moving book which looks at aspects of the Civil War and the changes in society from numerous perspectives. The characters are not easy to pin down - Emily seems powerless to stop her fate but does she fight back in the worst way. Even the minor characters, the gang leader, the apprentice and the boatman are given a sympathetic perspective and the descriptions of violence are visceral in the extreme. I hadn't read Powers' first novel but know it was well received, I can see why. ( )