Villages

A combat veteran returns home from Afghanistan haunted by his combat experience and desperate to help others in Inman’s novel.

Jonas Boulware was only 18 years old when he joined the United States Navy immediately after his mercurial father Rodney banished him from the house. When Jonas returns to his small, Southern hometown of Copernicus, he’s a 21-year-old transformed by the horrors of war. As a medic, he was shot twice and badly injured while heroically rescuing his fellow soldiers—after multiple surgeries, he lost two fingers, and will forever walk with a limp. He remembers almost none of it and takes some small measure of consolation from that fact. Before he comes home, he visits Sgt. Ray Willis, one of the Marines Jonas saved in Afghanistan, in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Ray is tortured by guilt—he blames himself for the injuries his men sustained—and commits suicide in front of Jonas, a particularly grim moment in this funereal work. Back at home, Jonas rekindles his friendship with the avuncular Doctor Frank Ainsley, the physician who delivered him when he was born and someone who has been like a surrogate father to him. Ainsley pushes Jonas to seek therapy as a means to lift the depressive fog that envelops him. But Jonas, a born caregiver, seems more interested in helping others, including his father Rodney, who is haltingly convalescing after a major stroke, and Ben Cameron, a 14-year-old boy whose home life is dangerously precarious. Even Franny, the beautiful singer looking for a break for whom he develops a deep attraction, is a damsel in distress he longs to save. However, Jonas remains dogged by nightmares and the freight of combat trauma, as well as the fallout from the troubled childhood that served as an unhappy prelude to war.

Inman thoughtfully portrays the intramural drama of a small town that’s been around long enough to have a dark history rife with secrets. (Jonas’ mother Gladys—“Sweet, quiet, uncomplaining Gladys”—suffers from “toting the great weight of family shame on her shoulders,” a burden he slowly comes to fully comprehend.) The author also poignantly depicts the ennui that often issues from trauma—the depression that expresses itself as a kind of joyless paralysis. However, the novel as a whole suffers from two serious defects: First, it is unremittingly lugubrious, too insistently (and redundantly) eager to make sure the reader understands just how unhappy Jonas is. (“Jonas started to speak, but then it hit him, a blow in the soul – the realization of just how incredibly miserable he was, and fragile, and wretchedly sad and the whole fucking screaming mess. He started to cry and didn’t make even the slightest effort to stop, the poison leaking out.”) Second, the author crams too many subplots into a novel not quite 200 pages long, and offers one too many revelatory twists at the tale’s conclusion. Despite the work’s impressive literary virtues, the reader is finally overwhelmed by these considerable vices.

An emotional drama too densely packed with subplots and trauma.