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Rebel Powers
A decorated Air Force officer and former POW returns from Vietnam alive but faces a dishonorable discharge and a two-year prison term. By the author of Violence. National ad/promo. Tour.
Hardcover
First published April 1, 1993
30 people want to read
About the author
Richard Bausch
92 books216 followersAn acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 3, 2017
In many ways, this is a coming-of-age story, as 40-something Thomas reflects on the year he was 17. Back in 1967, Thomas’s father Daniel, a decorated Vietnam War vet and former POW, finds himself incarcerated again after he is court-martialed for stealing a typewriter and writing bad checks. During the agonizing trip west to relocate near the prison in Wyoming, Daniel’s wife Connie and their two children, Thomas and Lisa, meet two shady characters, Chummy Terpin and Penny Holt. These two, whose story sounds like a con, seem to latch onto the family, and one of them resurfaces later in the novel. Chummy and Penny make the assumption that Daniel is in prison for protesting the war, and although this myth couldn’t be farther from the truth, Connie does nothing to correct it. I would say that the principal theme in this novel is humiliation. Daniel obviously cannot rejoin the Air Force on his release and struggles to figure out what kind of life he is going to have and what his role in the family will be. Connie’s father helps them out financially, but Connie finds his charity to be a necessary evil and a source of further humiliation. Young daughter Lisa just wants to go home, but for now home is a boarding house, and the entrance to their quarters has no door. If anyone needs privacy, this family does, but it’s a luxury they simply can’t afford. The fulcrum that the whole novel teeters on is a conversation in which Thomas overhears his mother express doubts about the future of her marriage. This uncertainty makes for a very wobbly foundation for Thomas as he crosses the threshold into adulthood, ready or not.
August 29, 2022
Richard Bausch? Never heard of him. I read a lot and widely, but he was never on my radar. I stumbled on his name when I was rereading the Salon.com reader’s guy. Saw he was born in Ft. Benning - another military brat.
Why Bausch is not more widely known and celebrated is a mystery to me. Such a beautiful heartbreaking story of the effect of war and displacement on the souls of dependents and servicemen. The narrator, now a bookseller in coastal Virginia, takes the reader back to his 17th year, the year his father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, is found guilty of theft and fraud. He is dishonorably discharged and sent to a federal prison in rural Wyoming. His family, Connie, Thomas and 7 year old Lisa must reconstruct their lives. This is complicated by a drifter named Penny who falls into their life on a train journey West. Rebel Powers is a beautifully nuanced story of five people grappling with a sense of belonging, home and their relationships to one another. While Thomas seeks cut and dried explanations and plans, the adults are struggling with the complexities of their intertwined lives.
I will be back for more, Mr. Bausch.
Similar writers? Peter Taylor and Bernard Malamud, when he’s playing it straight, not fantastical. Perhaps it is that Bausch is a writer in the straight forward tradition that he has not garnered attention that some of his peers have. No frills, just beautiful prose and a hauntingly acute sense of family.
Why Bausch is not more widely known and celebrated is a mystery to me. Such a beautiful heartbreaking story of the effect of war and displacement on the souls of dependents and servicemen. The narrator, now a bookseller in coastal Virginia, takes the reader back to his 17th year, the year his father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, is found guilty of theft and fraud. He is dishonorably discharged and sent to a federal prison in rural Wyoming. His family, Connie, Thomas and 7 year old Lisa must reconstruct their lives. This is complicated by a drifter named Penny who falls into their life on a train journey West. Rebel Powers is a beautifully nuanced story of five people grappling with a sense of belonging, home and their relationships to one another. While Thomas seeks cut and dried explanations and plans, the adults are struggling with the complexities of their intertwined lives.
I will be back for more, Mr. Bausch.
Similar writers? Peter Taylor and Bernard Malamud, when he’s playing it straight, not fantastical. Perhaps it is that Bausch is a writer in the straight forward tradition that he has not garnered attention that some of his peers have. No frills, just beautiful prose and a hauntingly acute sense of family.
November 27, 2008
Superb in every respect. Strong drama, strong characters, great setting, with that prison looming in the background.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews