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NASHVILLE 1864

Name: NASHVILLE 1864
Author: Madison Jones
ISBN: 1-879941-35-X

THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

by Madison Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1997

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A somber, spare portrait of the Confederacy's twilight, as witnessed by a 12-year-old. The plot has the simplicity of a folk tale. Steven Moore sets out to find his father, a soldier, on the eve of a great battle, and becomes an eyewitness to the carnage. Jones, the author of seven previous novels (To the Winds, 1996, etc.), has the measured cadence of southern voices down perfectly. The book is purportedly a memoir written by Moore decades after the events it describes, as he seeks to make sense of what he experienced. In December 1864, the ragged, shell-shocked Confederate army under Gen. Hood moves to confront the Union forces outside Nashville. Steven's younger sister is seriously ill, his mother exhausted, their farm, close to Nashville, menaced by Union forces, so he decides to bring his father, an officer in Hood's forces, home. He takes Dink, one of his family's slaves, with him. Dink, who is Steven's age, views the trip, at first, as a curious adventure. But their encounter with a black Union soldier, who tells Dink that he is free, confuses and disturbs him. The boys reach Hood's army just as the battle of Nashville begins. Steven discovers that battles are entirely unlike his imaginings: They are confused, bloody, terrifying events. Dink is killed, and a wounded Steven begins a hallucinatory journey with the retreating Confederates. These scenes have a raw power and harsh originality that set them apart from most recent fiction about the War. The narrative, though, suffers by seeming so entirely partisan. Dink is a cipher. The grown Steven's rhapsodic celebration of the Confederate soldier, and his defense of slavery- -while perfectly believable in this character—diminish the book's power somewhat. The story would have benefitted from some authorial distance. It seems, finally, too partisan to be entirely compelling. A flawed but intermittently powerful work.

Pub Date: May 15, 1997

ISBN: 1-879941-35-X

Page Count: 144

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BEAUTIFUL RUINS

by Jess Walter ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2012

A superb romp.

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Hollywood operators and creative washouts collide across five decades and two continents in a brilliant, madcap meditation on fate.

The sixth novel by Walter (The Financial Lives of the Poets, 2009, etc.) opens in April 1962 with the arrival of starlet Dee Moray in a flyspeck Italian resort town. Dee is supposed to be filming the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton costume epic Cleopatra, but her inconvenient pregnancy (by Burton) has prompted the studio to tuck her away. A smitten young man, Pasquale, runs the small hotel where she’s hidden, and he’s contemptuous of the studio lackey, Michael Deane, charged with keeping Dee out of sight. From there the story sprays out in multiple directions, shifting time and perspective to follow Deane’s evolution into a Robert Evans-style mogul; Dee’s hapless aging-punk son; an alcoholic World War II vet who settles into Pasquale’s hotel to peck away at a novel; and a young screenwriter eagerly pitching a dour movie about the Donner Party. Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from watching Walter ingeniously zip back and forth to connect these loose strands, but it largely succeeds on the comic energy of its prose and the liveliness of its characters. A theme that bubbles under the story is the variety of ways real life energizes great art—Walter intersperses excerpts from his characters’ plays, memoirs, film treatments and novels to show how their pasts inform their best work. Unlikely coincidences abound, but they feel less like plot contrivances than ways to serve a broader theme about how the unlikely, unplanned moments in our lives are the most meaningful ones. And simply put, Walter’s prose is a joy—funny, brash, witty and rich with ironic twists. He’s taken all of the tricks of the postmodern novel and scoured out the cynicism, making for a novel that's life-affirming but never saccharine.

A superb romp.

Pub Date: June 12, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-192812-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 1961

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A major novel — the first since East of Eden — this brings into focus a conflict within a man's personality which will have wide, perhaps too wide, recognition value. John Steinbeck's special gift of compassion might have turned this into a sentimental exercise. As it develops, however, this is a taut, realistic, controversial portrait of Ethan Allen Hawley, scion of an old family, bearing his heritage of high ideals, intrinsic honesty — and fear of insecurity, while confronted with a shattered fortune- the old homestead the only thing left, and a job as grocery clerk in a store he had once owned. The pressures on him come to a head in this winter of his discontent, as his wife (who is basically an ideal mate, sensitive, perceptive, loving) lashes out at him for not giving his family the wherewithal to support their name; his son and daughter chide him for his failures — and a tiny inheritance of his wife, Mary, offers a possible loophole for taking a long chance. And then he is shown a way — involving a compromise with his integrity, a betrayal of his standards-and he succumbs, actually going beyond the initial opportunity to trap two men to whom he owes affection and loyalty. What happens is not wholly within the accepted pattern — nor is the outcome predictable. But Steinbeck sustains the reader's suspense, poses issues of responsibility — a man to his friend, to his employer, to his son, to himself — and leaves the resolution in final analysis to the reader. It is a fascinating and disturbing book, uncomfortably close to the challenge the average man faces in today's materialistic world.