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A Shout in the Ruins
Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of THE YELLOW BIRDS explores the brutal legacy of violence and race in American society.
Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of a diverse cast of characters connected to Beauvais Plantation in Chesterfield County, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that mastery in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see.
Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of the interstate highway system through Richmond, Virginia, and recognizing that his days on earth are coming to an end, he travels south to try to fill in that void. With the help of a young woman, he goes in search of his beginnings, all the while remembering the life that witnessed so much change during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As the narrative finds that young woman farther in the future, now in her middle age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy?
Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made THE YELLOW BIRDS one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A SHOUT IN THE RUINS cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.
Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of a diverse cast of characters connected to Beauvais Plantation in Chesterfield County, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that mastery in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see.
Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of the interstate highway system through Richmond, Virginia, and recognizing that his days on earth are coming to an end, he travels south to try to fill in that void. With the help of a young woman, he goes in search of his beginnings, all the while remembering the life that witnessed so much change during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As the narrative finds that young woman farther in the future, now in her middle age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy?
Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made THE YELLOW BIRDS one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A SHOUT IN THE RUINS cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.
272 pages, ebook
First published May 15, 2018
256 people are currently reading
3174 people want to read
About the author
Kevin Powers
21 books344 followersKevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, VA. In 2004 and 2005 he served with the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. He studied English at Virginia Commonwealth University after his honorable discharge and received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 256 reviews
June 29, 2019
I really enjoyed Kevin Powers’ A Shout in the Ruins. A central thesis of this multigenerational novel which begins right after the Civil War is that history is destiny. And violence and racism are unfortunately part of that destiny which we need to come to terms with. Because of my own family history, I was especially intrigued by the references to the Lumbee/Croatoans of North Carolina. I continue to see consequences of my family history playing out in the present. Likewise, in Powers’ novel, the story doesn’t just end with what happened after the Civil War, but continues to impact his characters up through the 1980s. The shifting narrative, which swings back and forth in time, further demonstrates how memory and history are reshaped. Like the land which Powers so beautifully describes, his characters inhabit and live their shared and changing histories.
Aside, I met and introduced Kevin Powers at an author event in Wyoming in April. While he mainly talked about his powerful debut novel, The Yellow Birds, he also discussed A Shout in the Ruins and his view that fiction is one of the most powerful ways to come to terms with history. He was super nice, great to meet him! I highly recommend both A Shout in the Ruins and The Yellow Birds. I believe Powers has a great career ahead of him!
Aside, I met and introduced Kevin Powers at an author event in Wyoming in April. While he mainly talked about his powerful debut novel, The Yellow Birds, he also discussed A Shout in the Ruins and his view that fiction is one of the most powerful ways to come to terms with history. He was super nice, great to meet him! I highly recommend both A Shout in the Ruins and The Yellow Birds. I believe Powers has a great career ahead of him!
June 11, 2018
3.5 The lingering effects of the civil War isexp!ored in this novel, using multiple threads. The latter takes place nearly a hundred years after wars end, and this thread follows the quest of a very old black man named George. A man who doesn't know who he came from but does loosely remember where. He was only three when he was taken for safety, and given to someone else to raise. As hejournsys back through time, we also follow the story of Emily,her father John, two blacks who try to do anything and everything to stay together, and lastly Levellois, a man who will use any means necessary to gain what he wants.
These stories are not told consequentially, but are skipped back and forth, making it hard for me to follow. It wasn't until I finished that I could put the whole story together in my head, while reading I often felt like I had come in half way through a movie. The prose is lush, sometimes n my opinion, too much so. At its heart it has important things to say, the deleterious effects of war, the plight and effects of slavery and the many who lost life, limb and property, and the unscrupulous who will take advantage of those unable to fight back.
Iliked this but did not find it easy to read. My favorite thread was that of George, and the people he meets trying to discover from where he came. The author does to a fine job combining the threads showing how these people are connected to each other,but it was not easy getting there. Did like how the ending connected so wonderfully to the beginning.
ARC from Goodreads.
These stories are not told consequentially, but are skipped back and forth, making it hard for me to follow. It wasn't until I finished that I could put the whole story together in my head, while reading I often felt like I had come in half way through a movie. The prose is lush, sometimes n my opinion, too much so. At its heart it has important things to say, the deleterious effects of war, the plight and effects of slavery and the many who lost life, limb and property, and the unscrupulous who will take advantage of those unable to fight back.
Iliked this but did not find it easy to read. My favorite thread was that of George, and the people he meets trying to discover from where he came. The author does to a fine job combining the threads showing how these people are connected to each other,but it was not easy getting there. Did like how the ending connected so wonderfully to the beginning.
ARC from Goodreads.
May 13, 2018
At a time when our country is again in the midst of a noisy national conversation about race, Kevin Powers creates a powerful fiction to illuminate the not-so-distant terrors and strains of our Civil War. Powers touches our sensitive places and his sentences carry knowledge from which none of us can hide.
The work is a feast of imagination, packed full with exemplars of character definition, narrative structure, tone, style, language choice. The language is the first thing one notices. Each sentence conveys both a history and a future, though we won’t know that until later. Rounding back on the novel’s beginning after a time we realize how much we have already been told, by given names and place names, though we couldn’t have understood it. We grow watchful, anticipating these signposts, and read carefully.
The economy and poetry of the language gives our read a languor; we won’t rush to some conclusion because the journey is the point. We breathe in the foggy sea air, and the stench of rotting limbs. We note what the narrator chooses to notice: “Emily had been to Richmond only twice in her life. She found the endless stone and brick suffocating.” But of course. Only northerners or outsiders wouldn’t crave the breezy clapboards on tree-lined drives outside the city center in the heat of the summer.
Characters have real depth. We are introduced to the slave Rawls; at no time does this feel like appropriation of the black man’s experience. Rawls has a quiet unquenchable fury “inscrutable and vast,” but he determines to find something within himself his owners can’t touch. Levallois is Rawls’ white landowner near Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1860’s. The pathology of his character is sharp as a shard of untempered glass. He is calculating and exploitative, transactional only, sly in exploiting the human nature of others less damaged than himself.
The novel’s dreadful propulsion is because of this character Levallois: what horror he will perpetrate next, and will he get his comeuppance? How many will he infect with hatred or kill before he is stopped? The path to that answer winds through a later century that hints to some of what happened. We are introduced to a man called George Seldom, believed to be a Negro of ninety some-odd years in 1955, who carries a sharp, thin-bladed knife with a handle of elk antler with which we are already familiar. In 1863, Levallois used it to kill noiselessly, needlessly a ferry owner named Spanish Jim.
We read for voices like Rawls and his wife Nurse, strong and resistant yet vulnerable. They arouse in us a sense of justice, and give us strength in light of very poor odds, shades of the heroic classic Les Misérables . We know enough of Levallois to know his sociopathy and hollowness, his wife Emily not much better. Near the end of this small corner of Civil War history Emily begins to grasp responsibility for her role, but we can’t forgive her. She’ll have to carry her burdens alone in the many years she has to contemplate them in backward glances.
The timeline in the novel is ever-shifting, but that merely adds intrigue and mystery—the kind of the puzzlement books of history often leave us with. When George Seldom admits a kind of suspicion towards history, this reader is inclined to agree that fiction, done well, may capture more truth than some histories. We read to know why, not just how, and history doesn’t often give us that.
There, it happened. This fiction has become a kind of history, or this history has become a fiction. We’re not exactly sure except that the time is not that long ago—only a generation or two—and we should be able to grasp motivation if we had a few more connections. What we do know is that plenty people died before their time for reasons their children and their children’s children no longer recognize. When does memory become fiction and does what happens now matter more than what happened then?
This is a deeply involving read; the author spans one hundred years but he left out the boring bits. The work is a kind of model for how to keep the reader understanding complicated knots in intertwined personal histories that last more than one lifetime. The language is peerless, and the capture of human nature cannot be denied. It feels a long time since I have been as enraptured by a fiction. Beautiful work.
--------------
Postscript There is a young Australian author who has Powers' similarly expansive sense of literature and the writing chops to pull it off. Rohan Wilson places his fiction in earlier-century histories of Tasmania and manages to make the work as big and heroic as those he implicitly references. My reviews here cannot capture his overwhelming talent and the skill he demonstrates in The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost.
The work is a feast of imagination, packed full with exemplars of character definition, narrative structure, tone, style, language choice. The language is the first thing one notices. Each sentence conveys both a history and a future, though we won’t know that until later. Rounding back on the novel’s beginning after a time we realize how much we have already been told, by given names and place names, though we couldn’t have understood it. We grow watchful, anticipating these signposts, and read carefully.
The economy and poetry of the language gives our read a languor; we won’t rush to some conclusion because the journey is the point. We breathe in the foggy sea air, and the stench of rotting limbs. We note what the narrator chooses to notice: “Emily had been to Richmond only twice in her life. She found the endless stone and brick suffocating.” But of course. Only northerners or outsiders wouldn’t crave the breezy clapboards on tree-lined drives outside the city center in the heat of the summer.
Characters have real depth. We are introduced to the slave Rawls; at no time does this feel like appropriation of the black man’s experience. Rawls has a quiet unquenchable fury “inscrutable and vast,” but he determines to find something within himself his owners can’t touch. Levallois is Rawls’ white landowner near Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1860’s. The pathology of his character is sharp as a shard of untempered glass. He is calculating and exploitative, transactional only, sly in exploiting the human nature of others less damaged than himself.
The novel’s dreadful propulsion is because of this character Levallois: what horror he will perpetrate next, and will he get his comeuppance? How many will he infect with hatred or kill before he is stopped? The path to that answer winds through a later century that hints to some of what happened. We are introduced to a man called George Seldom, believed to be a Negro of ninety some-odd years in 1955, who carries a sharp, thin-bladed knife with a handle of elk antler with which we are already familiar. In 1863, Levallois used it to kill noiselessly, needlessly a ferry owner named Spanish Jim.
We read for voices like Rawls and his wife Nurse, strong and resistant yet vulnerable. They arouse in us a sense of justice, and give us strength in light of very poor odds, shades of the heroic classic Les Misérables . We know enough of Levallois to know his sociopathy and hollowness, his wife Emily not much better. Near the end of this small corner of Civil War history Emily begins to grasp responsibility for her role, but we can’t forgive her. She’ll have to carry her burdens alone in the many years she has to contemplate them in backward glances.
The timeline in the novel is ever-shifting, but that merely adds intrigue and mystery—the kind of the puzzlement books of history often leave us with. When George Seldom admits a kind of suspicion towards history, this reader is inclined to agree that fiction, done well, may capture more truth than some histories. We read to know why, not just how, and history doesn’t often give us that.
“The truth has not mattered for a long time…the only thing that matters here…is what people are willing to believe.”Of the several lives recorded in this novel, there are two that don’t fit easily the genealogies revealed here. One is a woman artist and part-time mail carrier who marries a reformed alcoholic and auto mechanic. The two live well together, deeply in love. Her heritage is mixed race including Croatan, black, and white and her maiden name is Bride. He appears to be white, his surname Rivers, perhaps descended from Sheriff Patrick Rivers, a “wholly unremarkable” and dull man who appears in this history after the war in Virginia near Beauvais Plantation.
There, it happened. This fiction has become a kind of history, or this history has become a fiction. We’re not exactly sure except that the time is not that long ago—only a generation or two—and we should be able to grasp motivation if we had a few more connections. What we do know is that plenty people died before their time for reasons their children and their children’s children no longer recognize. When does memory become fiction and does what happens now matter more than what happened then?
This is a deeply involving read; the author spans one hundred years but he left out the boring bits. The work is a kind of model for how to keep the reader understanding complicated knots in intertwined personal histories that last more than one lifetime. The language is peerless, and the capture of human nature cannot be denied. It feels a long time since I have been as enraptured by a fiction. Beautiful work.
--------------
Postscript There is a young Australian author who has Powers' similarly expansive sense of literature and the writing chops to pull it off. Rohan Wilson places his fiction in earlier-century histories of Tasmania and manages to make the work as big and heroic as those he implicitly references. My reviews here cannot capture his overwhelming talent and the skill he demonstrates in The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost.
June 19, 2023
As a National Book Award Finalist for The Yellow Birds, Powers was able to capture how war can unleash evil and violence among the combatants; and then be haunted by these memories in their dreams. In A Shout in the Ruins, Powers tackles the brutality of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He moves between two storylines: the nonagenarian George Seldom, whose home is destroyed in 1956 to make way for the new Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, is seeking to solve the mystery of who his people were; and the inhabitants on a Virginia plantation owned by the ruthless Antony Levallois before, during and after the Civil War.
Powers has distilled the essence of the Southern Gothic novel to its bare essentials. He does not shy away from writing about the inherent violence of the Civil War period and how mean and capricious plantation owners could be to their slaves. And not just to slaves--Levallois’ greed drives him to virtually ‘steal’ his neighbors’ land. As for Civil War battle scenes, Powers’ vivid imagery is so real that the reader will smell the infected wounds and feel the phantom pain from amputated limbs.
As counterpoint to the villain Levallois are the slaves Rawls and Nurse, and George Seldom. These are heart-warming characters and their respective stories are tied together eventually. The lyrical writing sometimes gets a little overwrought, but it is clear that Powers is a gifted writer.
Powers has distilled the essence of the Southern Gothic novel to its bare essentials. He does not shy away from writing about the inherent violence of the Civil War period and how mean and capricious plantation owners could be to their slaves. And not just to slaves--Levallois’ greed drives him to virtually ‘steal’ his neighbors’ land. As for Civil War battle scenes, Powers’ vivid imagery is so real that the reader will smell the infected wounds and feel the phantom pain from amputated limbs.
As counterpoint to the villain Levallois are the slaves Rawls and Nurse, and George Seldom. These are heart-warming characters and their respective stories are tied together eventually. The lyrical writing sometimes gets a little overwrought, but it is clear that Powers is a gifted writer.
May 15, 2018
Kevin Powers's debut novel, “The Yellow Birds,” was one of the first about the Iraq War and one of the most celebrated novels of the era. A finalist for a National Book Award, it won praise from Tom Wolfe, Dave Eggers and writer-vets who knew the horrors of battle firsthand. If Powers’s prose sometimes sounded florid, that seemed a blemish worth tolerating for the emotional insight he offered on that quagmire 6,000 miles away.
But now Powers has turned his scope on slavery and the Civil War, the most well-trodden battlefield of American fiction. “A Shout in the Ruins” marches with a phalanx of great novels by Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Geraldine Brooks, E.L. Doctorow, Paulette Jiles, Charles Frazier, Jeffrey Lent, Michael Shaara, Gore Vidal, Stephen Crane and so many more, stretching all the way back to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Any new writer who tries to join the ranks of these authors risks tripping over their feet or, worse, being set upon by the cliches that scamper after them like mangy dogs.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
But now Powers has turned his scope on slavery and the Civil War, the most well-trodden battlefield of American fiction. “A Shout in the Ruins” marches with a phalanx of great novels by Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Geraldine Brooks, E.L. Doctorow, Paulette Jiles, Charles Frazier, Jeffrey Lent, Michael Shaara, Gore Vidal, Stephen Crane and so many more, stretching all the way back to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Any new writer who tries to join the ranks of these authors risks tripping over their feet or, worse, being set upon by the cliches that scamper after them like mangy dogs.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
July 14, 2018
I made it to the 41% point of the book and gave up. There were too many characters and too much shifting among time periods. I also didn't enjoy the writing style. About an injured soldier: "He saw where he had been before his birth. The darkness there, too. A void broken only by spirals of color. A vastness so great as to be meaningless." About a slave "...she was taught a language beyond speech, one that existed when the ground on which all her torments occurred had been submerged below a channel sea, with a vocabulary that remained unchanged even with the unending forces of thrust and rift at work." What the hell does this mean? I'm sure this book will work for some people, but not for me.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
May 9, 2018
When I reviewed Kevin Powers’ elegiac first novel—The Yellow Birds—I began with this line: “All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”
In this, his second novel, Kevin Powers does not stray far from that theme; indeed, this new book explores the brutal legacy of violence that spans from the antebellum era to the 1980s. The focus is on the devaluing of human life through the hideous notion that one human could be “master” to another.
There are two key plot lines at play: the first centers around the Beauvais Plantation, outside of Richmond, Virginia. There, two enslaved individuals—Nurse and Rawls—struggle to keep the embers of love alive with the fates turned against them. The master of Beauvais, Antony Levallois, holds the key to their fates, as he does the fate of Emily, the daughter of a neighboring plantation owner who he does not love but wishes to possess. Interspersed with that line is the story of George Seldom, an orphan, who, in the 1950s, questions who he really is and where he comes from. It is no surprise that these two storylines merge.
I could not help but compare the two books, both written by an immensely talented author. There is, in The Yellow Birds, a strong sense of authenticity, mainly because Kevin Powers is writing from deep knowledge: he served in the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. In A Shout in the Ruins, Mr. Powers seems to be relying less on experience and more on research and the resonance is not nearly as deep. There are extraneous characters, such as Lottie Moore, a waitress connected to George Seldom; her role in the novel seemed dubious. Other ancillary characters take space away from the ones we, as readers, hope to invest ourselves in.
The portrayal of the world as indifferent and often nightmarish is the main canvas that Kevin Powers is working with; the characters’ stories are broad strokes that complete the picture. Here, for example, is one rumination: “Rawls did not know what people deserved, but he knew they did not get it. Instead they seemed to get what they did not deserve, as if the world had been built that way, like a machine that could produce only one outcome.” There is plenty of pain to go around and those who want relentlessly positive (or Pollyanna-ish) stories will not find it here. What they will find is fine prose from an author who knows how to command a story. My thanks to Little Brown for the kind offer of an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
In this, his second novel, Kevin Powers does not stray far from that theme; indeed, this new book explores the brutal legacy of violence that spans from the antebellum era to the 1980s. The focus is on the devaluing of human life through the hideous notion that one human could be “master” to another.
There are two key plot lines at play: the first centers around the Beauvais Plantation, outside of Richmond, Virginia. There, two enslaved individuals—Nurse and Rawls—struggle to keep the embers of love alive with the fates turned against them. The master of Beauvais, Antony Levallois, holds the key to their fates, as he does the fate of Emily, the daughter of a neighboring plantation owner who he does not love but wishes to possess. Interspersed with that line is the story of George Seldom, an orphan, who, in the 1950s, questions who he really is and where he comes from. It is no surprise that these two storylines merge.
I could not help but compare the two books, both written by an immensely talented author. There is, in The Yellow Birds, a strong sense of authenticity, mainly because Kevin Powers is writing from deep knowledge: he served in the U.S. Army in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq. In A Shout in the Ruins, Mr. Powers seems to be relying less on experience and more on research and the resonance is not nearly as deep. There are extraneous characters, such as Lottie Moore, a waitress connected to George Seldom; her role in the novel seemed dubious. Other ancillary characters take space away from the ones we, as readers, hope to invest ourselves in.
The portrayal of the world as indifferent and often nightmarish is the main canvas that Kevin Powers is working with; the characters’ stories are broad strokes that complete the picture. Here, for example, is one rumination: “Rawls did not know what people deserved, but he knew they did not get it. Instead they seemed to get what they did not deserve, as if the world had been built that way, like a machine that could produce only one outcome.” There is plenty of pain to go around and those who want relentlessly positive (or Pollyanna-ish) stories will not find it here. What they will find is fine prose from an author who knows how to command a story. My thanks to Little Brown for the kind offer of an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
May 28, 2018
How is it possible for love to exist in a world, or more specifically, in a country built on war and hate? That is the question Powers poses in his second novel. And what a special novel it is. The writing is beautiful, the characters are beautiful, and the story is both beautiful and horrible. A Civil War novel that does not paint with a broad brush. This is not a novel about two warring factions: it is a novel about individual actors who are fighting to find love and happiness.
Some samples that I hope will provide a taste of why this book is so great:
“ You think you’ll never love another thing in this world. And somehow it is there again. It comes from nothing and from nowhere. It comes from less than nothing. How does it happen? It is the only miracle.”
“You want to have a debate about justice? You’re a young man yet, Colonel. Open your eyes. Tell me what it looks like. Come back in five years, in ten, in a hundred, and tell me what you’ve accomplished. In the meantime, I will take what I need.”
“You will take what you want.”
“You act like there’s a man anywhere on earth who can tell the difference.”
The best book I have read this year. I can’t recommend it enough.
Some samples that I hope will provide a taste of why this book is so great:
“ You think you’ll never love another thing in this world. And somehow it is there again. It comes from nothing and from nowhere. It comes from less than nothing. How does it happen? It is the only miracle.”
“You want to have a debate about justice? You’re a young man yet, Colonel. Open your eyes. Tell me what it looks like. Come back in five years, in ten, in a hundred, and tell me what you’ve accomplished. In the meantime, I will take what I need.”
“You will take what you want.”
“You act like there’s a man anywhere on earth who can tell the difference.”
The best book I have read this year. I can’t recommend it enough.
July 23, 2018
“Open your eyes. Tell me what it looks like. Come back in five years, in ten, in a hundred and tell me what you’ve accomplished.”
Kevin Powers debut novel was the widely acclaimed novel The Yellow Birds which examined the lives of soldiers through and after the war – a novel which drew on his own experiences in the US army in Iraq.
This his follow-up novel has much in common: set around a war (in this case the Civil War) and examining the consequences of the war (in this case over more than a century). And that represents the strongest element of the book – examining how the injustices and violence of slavery and the Civil War resonate for generations in the South of the US (as alluded to in the opening quote of my review taken from a pivotal confrontation between a Confederate plantation owner and a Federal Colonel spearheading the occupation at the end of the war.
The book effectively has two main plotlines.
One is set in Virginia around the years of the Civil War: it features two slaves – Rawls (a “runner” who was hobbled as a child to stop him escaping) and a wet nurse Nurse with who he falls in love. Rawls owner is Bob Reid and Bob’s daughter Emily, despite being a rather distant presence in the book, both opens and ends it (disappearing after a fire destroyed a plantation house). When Nurse’s owner sells her to another, notoriously cruel owner (after she fails to save her first owner’s life after a horse fall) – Rawls attempts to flee and find her, only to be caught by the main plantation owner in the area, the domineering and manipulative Levallois who stabs to death a boat owner than shelters Rawls before purchasing him for his own use.
The other is set some 90 year later – George, a 90 year old (and hence we immediately gather with some connection to the earlier story) has his house demolished without compensation to make way for a turnpike and sets off back to the Virginia area where he was bought up to try and understand his own background.
He had not taken much from the house he’d left behind; a few changes of clothes, a copy of The Negro Travelers Green book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neg...
),another book he had been given as a gift ... and a lovely little knife with a handle of elk antler that he’d owned as he could remember.
The large book is an old and unread diary gifted to him which he “found useful mostly for the way it’s weight functioned as a preservative for his oldest possession” , that possession being a note saying “1866. My name is George, I’m nearly three years old. Look after me. I now belong to you” which was handed to the lady that adopted him as a child.
He meets a young waitress Lottie and with her help finds the now ruined shack where he was bought up and finds some limited healing in his memories.
I have commented on the similarities with the author’s debut novel - where it differs is the narrative voice – first person on his debut, but omniscient third person in this book – and voice is probably the most intrusive I have read in any literary novel I can recall and gives the novel a distinctive (and often not completely successful) feel.
To give some examples:
Firstly at best each character’s dialogue and thoughts end up as best as simply a cipher for the author’s own artistic writing (regardless of their own levels of intelligence or education
Nurse we are told
was taught a language beyond speech, one that existed when the ground on which all her torments occurred had been submerged below a channel sea, with a vocabulary that remained unchanged even with the unending forces of thrust and rift at work.
And at worst they are completely over-written, for example on the first meeting of two characters – I am still not sure what this means:
Though still very much a girl, Emily looked to Levallois like a woman who had once been beautiful. It seemed somehow difficult to see her clearly, as if a thin haze obscured that beauty, rather than the fact that what he saw in her was more possibility than residue, though each could have diverged from his ideals by a matter of the same degree.
Secondly the narrator cannot help interfering in the novel – a classic example is when Lottie sits with George and his foundation-note protecting book and the narrator tells us:
The diary of William Byrd II of Westover still sat open on the table between them, though they never acknowledged it, and it’s doubtful either of them bothered to read the passage it lay open to, which was as follows: November 13, 1710 .... [we are then given the diary entry]
So a diary never even read by any of the characters is read by the narrator to us – the sole purpose of which (as far as I can see) is to set the story of slavery 150 years before the civil war – presumably in symmetry with our position 150 years after it.
Thirdly the narrator (and by extension) author has a George R.R. Martin tendency to be distracted by a minor character, lose attention to the main characters and start tracing the minor character instead. For example we suddenly veer off to trace Lottie’s life through two future marriages and into the 1980s and even have a point of view chapter from her second husband. At another stage we are told about the Federal colonel (himself a secondary character) and some postcards he sends to his parents who the narrator tells us have actually died (even though the Colonel does not know it) and then for two paragraphs about the postman on whose desk they sit undelivered and a conversation he has about them with his wife.
Astonishingly though and unlike George R.R. Martin, Powers manages this level of narrator interference, chronological wandering and minor character distraction in 250 well-spaced pages.
I referenced earlier George’s “lovely little knife with a handle of elk antler that he’d owned as he could remember” and this is perhaps the most impressive element of the whole book, the narrator and author giving us space here for once to gradually unravel its backstory and its fundamental links to George’s own story.
The book relies on a level of deus ex machina coincidence and cross-links (for example Nurse nursing Rawls as he lies in a hospital recuperating from terrible wounds received in a battle; the same scavengers that Reid witnessed bashing in the face of a wounded Union soldier as he lay wounded, later playing a crucial role in George’s story) but there are two operators of the “machine” – the narrator/author but also the terrible and manipulative Levallois.
Overall a powerful and memorable if flawed novel.
October 23, 2025
This compact and powerful novel is remarkable in the way it conveys over a hundred years of Virginia (and by extension, United States) history, tracing the lives of characters who are deliberately archetypal and also credibly presented as individuals. It's a well-written and moving book, to my mind, ultimately an origin story: both about the roots of people in a specific place, and those of violence in all people. Just after finishing it, I am left with a sense of tragic interconnectedness that is hard to shake.
February 6, 2018
Perhaps my expectations were too high after Powers' wondrous Yellow Birds, because I found it hard to get involved in this book. Again, we have big themes of violence and history, but it's the intimacy of the first book that I missed. With too many characters, two many time switches, and too much going on in what is a short novel, this lacked the impact of the first book. There are moments when Powers' distinctive voice emerges from the text, but then it is submerged again... Hopefully this is the fabled difficult second book, as Powers remains a writer to watch.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley.
March 5, 2019
I read this one last week.
No character is exempt from pain in this book. It's a hard hitting story set during the civil war. It's a power play between whites and their slaves, white against white. It was the worst of times where no one was free to live the life they wanted. This story is full of heartache.
No character is exempt from pain in this book. It's a hard hitting story set during the civil war. It's a power play between whites and their slaves, white against white. It was the worst of times where no one was free to live the life they wanted. This story is full of heartache.
March 13, 2018
A must read - Powers taps into a harrowing sense of fatalism that remains unparalleled. Moving and intimate.
August 3, 2018
3.5 stars A very slow burn. I was tempted to give up on this Virginia family saga multiple tunes in the first half. It’s confusing, and desolate and the story kept swerving before I could settle in. But there were flickering moments of beautiful prose and raw emotional truth.
Then, halfway through those flickers became a steady flame. Either Powers began drawing threes together or I somehow found a way to connect, but either way, I ripped through the second half with my heart in my throat.
It’s still desolate, as most stories of the Civil War and its long-lasting devastation are, but there was beauty to be found in the wreckage.
There always might be trouble. The good Lord’s up there playing dice, far as I can tell.
The trouble he was born with was not the kind that can be locked away in a cedar chest and left behind. And he also knew that the terms the world lays out for us are not negotiating me.
Then, halfway through those flickers became a steady flame. Either Powers began drawing threes together or I somehow found a way to connect, but either way, I ripped through the second half with my heart in my throat.
It’s still desolate, as most stories of the Civil War and its long-lasting devastation are, but there was beauty to be found in the wreckage.
We are born forgetting. It’s a kindness nature grants us, one of the few, because it lets us believe we are not born whole, that we’ll have some say in the matter, when in fact our ending is written long before our beginning.
May 19, 2018
This could've been a great read...but it wasn't. Powers' prose is fine, but the storyline jumps around in different timelines, often without warning. Some of the bits don't mesh well with the overall plot. Some characters are finely drawn, others fall flat. There's a lot of headhopping, often within the same scene. It might've worked better if told in a linear mode, or at least with some cohesion to the timeline.
February 12, 2018
This is a story of actions and consequences, as well as inactions and their consequences, and the ripple effect they have on lives.
Read More Book Reviews at It's Good To Read
Common Thread:
George Seldom is the common thread that weaves through the lives of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation, Virginia just after the American Civil War in 1865, all the way through to the closing years of the 1980’s.
George, we are told, was rescued as a three-year-old boy by a travelling band of brothers called Seldom, who gave him their name. They left him with their old teacher, and rode off to be hanged as bandits, and in later life the grown George himself leaves this house, and never looks back. However, nearing the end of his life 75 years or so later, George retraces his steps and, through a helpful waitress called Lottie, returns to find his roots in the tumbledown shack.
The lawless nature of the defeated South is laid bare early on, with roaming bands of Confederate soldiers raping, pillaging and murdering across Virginia. Newly liberated slaves are most at risk, especially if they give the wrong person “a look”, a situation that can only end in violence.
Characters:
Anthony Levallois is the shrewd, rapacious and debauched master of Beauvais, when we meet him just after the war. His neighbour Bob Reid went off to fight and presumed dead, Levallois swooped to take his land and daughter. He builds a railroad through the old homestead, and has ambitions to buy up the whole county. When Reid arrives back, he finds his wife dead, his daughter married, his home destroyed, and he lives on the charity of his son-in-law, slowly descending into madness.
We also meet Nurse and Rawls, two emancipated slaves (though still slaves in Lavallois’s eyes), and are privy to the brutal lives that was their lot in post-War Virginia. George is Nurse’s child, by Levallois.
Emily is the young daughter of Reid, who grows up very fast as a married woman, and her actions/inactions tear the Plantation apart. We watch helplessly as she becomes lonely and embittered, her girlhood gone before it really arrived. She feels as much a slave or a prisoner as Rawls and Nurse, except she volunteered for this life.
There are minor characters in the book, and their descendants are also relatively minor characters (e.g. the Sherriff Rivers and Billy).
There is no overseeing, ex machina narrator. We have the dialogue of each of the participants, and see events through their eyes, as they happen. There is an undercurrent of violence, especially in the 1860’s chapters.
Plot:
The book opens in the 1950’s with George, about 90 years old, being forced to move from his home as the Interstate is being built through it. It is a black neighbourhood, the only whites being the Jewish shopkeepers, who, when George says they must be the last white people there, tell George they “will be Jews when they cross the river to the white neighbourhood”. Racism is alive and well.
George begins to reminisce, for example about his old friend Huggins, and undertakes a journey to get back to his roots. He eventually meets Lottie, who helps him find the old house where he grew up. We leave George broken-hearted at the site.
While that journey is happening, interspersed we travel back in time to the 1860’s, where we see the fallout of the war, as well as how George came to be found.
We also go forward in time to the now middle-aged Lottie in the 1980’s, who has had her own life’s troubles and joys to deal with.
It is a very well-written book, a lot of things hinted at as opposed to being overt, and Power keeps the story flowing steadily. There is a strong connection between the main characters, although sometimes invisible and unknown inter-generationally.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to NetGalley and the author for giving me a free copy to review.
Read More Book Reviews at It's Good To Read
Common Thread:
George Seldom is the common thread that weaves through the lives of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation, Virginia just after the American Civil War in 1865, all the way through to the closing years of the 1980’s.
George, we are told, was rescued as a three-year-old boy by a travelling band of brothers called Seldom, who gave him their name. They left him with their old teacher, and rode off to be hanged as bandits, and in later life the grown George himself leaves this house, and never looks back. However, nearing the end of his life 75 years or so later, George retraces his steps and, through a helpful waitress called Lottie, returns to find his roots in the tumbledown shack.
The lawless nature of the defeated South is laid bare early on, with roaming bands of Confederate soldiers raping, pillaging and murdering across Virginia. Newly liberated slaves are most at risk, especially if they give the wrong person “a look”, a situation that can only end in violence.
Characters:
Anthony Levallois is the shrewd, rapacious and debauched master of Beauvais, when we meet him just after the war. His neighbour Bob Reid went off to fight and presumed dead, Levallois swooped to take his land and daughter. He builds a railroad through the old homestead, and has ambitions to buy up the whole county. When Reid arrives back, he finds his wife dead, his daughter married, his home destroyed, and he lives on the charity of his son-in-law, slowly descending into madness.
We also meet Nurse and Rawls, two emancipated slaves (though still slaves in Lavallois’s eyes), and are privy to the brutal lives that was their lot in post-War Virginia. George is Nurse’s child, by Levallois.
Emily is the young daughter of Reid, who grows up very fast as a married woman, and her actions/inactions tear the Plantation apart. We watch helplessly as she becomes lonely and embittered, her girlhood gone before it really arrived. She feels as much a slave or a prisoner as Rawls and Nurse, except she volunteered for this life.
There are minor characters in the book, and their descendants are also relatively minor characters (e.g. the Sherriff Rivers and Billy).
There is no overseeing, ex machina narrator. We have the dialogue of each of the participants, and see events through their eyes, as they happen. There is an undercurrent of violence, especially in the 1860’s chapters.
Plot:
The book opens in the 1950’s with George, about 90 years old, being forced to move from his home as the Interstate is being built through it. It is a black neighbourhood, the only whites being the Jewish shopkeepers, who, when George says they must be the last white people there, tell George they “will be Jews when they cross the river to the white neighbourhood”. Racism is alive and well.
George begins to reminisce, for example about his old friend Huggins, and undertakes a journey to get back to his roots. He eventually meets Lottie, who helps him find the old house where he grew up. We leave George broken-hearted at the site.
While that journey is happening, interspersed we travel back in time to the 1860’s, where we see the fallout of the war, as well as how George came to be found.
We also go forward in time to the now middle-aged Lottie in the 1980’s, who has had her own life’s troubles and joys to deal with.
It is a very well-written book, a lot of things hinted at as opposed to being overt, and Power keeps the story flowing steadily. There is a strong connection between the main characters, although sometimes invisible and unknown inter-generationally.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to NetGalley and the author for giving me a free copy to review.
March 15, 2018
Like so many others, I thought Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds was quite exceptionally good. Sadly, A Shout In The Ruins isn't of nearly the same quality. There is a lot of Powers's lyrical and sometimes very beautiful writing, but as a novel I found it very disappointing.
The story cuts between time periods (seemingly almost compulsory for new novels at the moment) around the Civil War and the early 1950s, both in Virginia. The stories are…well…confusing, to be honest. There are illustrations of the cruelty of the slave era and depictions of the characters who both suffered and imposed that suffering, and there is also a pretty good evocation of its legacy in the era of segregation. Both of these still have relevance today and it should form a powerful indictment of racism in modern society, but for me it was too mannered in structure, too disjointed and too full of disparate characters to have the necessary coherence. I also felt that after books like The Underground Railroad, Days Without End and The Sellout (to name just a few) it was treading well-worn ground without adding much.
I'm sorry to be critical of an author I respect greatly, but that's the truth of it. It was well written and it certainly wasn't terrible, but it just didn't engage me and I didn't think I'd gained much from reading it. Only a very qualified recommendation from me, I'm afraid.
(My thanks to Sceptre for an ARC via NetGalley.)
The story cuts between time periods (seemingly almost compulsory for new novels at the moment) around the Civil War and the early 1950s, both in Virginia. The stories are…well…confusing, to be honest. There are illustrations of the cruelty of the slave era and depictions of the characters who both suffered and imposed that suffering, and there is also a pretty good evocation of its legacy in the era of segregation. Both of these still have relevance today and it should form a powerful indictment of racism in modern society, but for me it was too mannered in structure, too disjointed and too full of disparate characters to have the necessary coherence. I also felt that after books like The Underground Railroad, Days Without End and The Sellout (to name just a few) it was treading well-worn ground without adding much.
I'm sorry to be critical of an author I respect greatly, but that's the truth of it. It was well written and it certainly wasn't terrible, but it just didn't engage me and I didn't think I'd gained much from reading it. Only a very qualified recommendation from me, I'm afraid.
(My thanks to Sceptre for an ARC via NetGalley.)
May 26, 2018
A Shout in the Ruins
Kevin Powers
There are two intersecting stories here, one set during the US Civil War, the other 100 years later, both set in the vicinity of northern North Carolina and southern Virginia. The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time-frames. But in one's mind, a third time-frame -- right now -- adds another data point as we compare progress, or lack, over time.
Levallois, the plantation owner, is cunning, resourceful, greedy, hungry for power and control, but without a code of ethics. Rawls and Nurse are slaves on the plantation. Emily, the overseer's daughter, gradually loses her grip on reality. These characters, and others, could have been treated as stereotypes, but rather they seem real and appropriate to their situation. There were a few stray characters that didn't seem to serve much purpose, but that didn't detract from the story.
Thinking of our laws and practices over those time-frames, we have clearly made significant progress. But, with respect to emotions and values: not so much.
Kevin Powers
There are two intersecting stories here, one set during the US Civil War, the other 100 years later, both set in the vicinity of northern North Carolina and southern Virginia. The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time-frames. But in one's mind, a third time-frame -- right now -- adds another data point as we compare progress, or lack, over time.
Levallois, the plantation owner, is cunning, resourceful, greedy, hungry for power and control, but without a code of ethics. Rawls and Nurse are slaves on the plantation. Emily, the overseer's daughter, gradually loses her grip on reality. These characters, and others, could have been treated as stereotypes, but rather they seem real and appropriate to their situation. There were a few stray characters that didn't seem to serve much purpose, but that didn't detract from the story.
Thinking of our laws and practices over those time-frames, we have clearly made significant progress. But, with respect to emotions and values: not so much.
June 13, 2018
I'm going to go ahead and DNF this one. I think maybe a few years ago I would've been deeply interested in this storyline, but I've read a lot more books since then, where the characters are easy to follow, and the story isn't broken up by loads of jumps between time periods. The writing style just isn't for me, and I think the edition I was sent had some glitches - I found it quite hard to actually read, which was a shame. I DNF'd at 35% (around 96 pages in) - I couldn't get into it, and didn't want to spend much more time trying to power through it when I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the experience.
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with the e-copy.
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with the e-copy.
May 28, 2022
Finished Mockingbird essays and started my first book in forever. Now if I can whittle down this pile so that I can buy Franzen, Whitehead, Strout, Doerr and all those I've been dying for this year...
On one hand I’m kind of surprised that the average rating here on Goodreads is 3.64. On the other, I guess an author’s follow up to a debut is always under scrutiny, and there are some stylistic choices that some readers could object to.
I randomly thought of Kevin Powers over the winter while thinking back to books I’d read a couple of years ago, wondering “What happened to this guy? What happened to that person? Did he/she ever write another?” I was looking at both Redeployment by Phil Klay and Yellow Birds, and I was thinking how great each of those were, so when I saw Powers had written this four years ago I was shocked that I hadn’t heard of it and so I bought it (even though I have plenty of books I need to get to; as an aside, Phil Klay also released Missionaries in 2020 that I’d like to read, dealing with war and American involvement in foreign conflicts).
My thought (semi-confirmed by looking over a lot of other reviews) is that people either A) didn’t need another Civil War story, or B) thought there were too many characters and jumps in chronology. Personally, I really liked these choices. It makes sense that Powers would focus on a story involving war, considering his past focus, but it’s not a retelling of the Civil War, not focused on a specific battle or logistical decisions from a general’s position or anything; but I feel like Powers broadened his scope beyond simply focusing on war and soldiers by focusing the story on a number of individuals and on how history and society and environment affects their lives, leading to a legacy that we’ve seen in this country with people growing up on different sides of this massive divide in our country’s past, with some not even knowing where they come from. I really liked (and I thought it was quite timely) how the story attempted to draw a line between the era of the Civil War with society 100+ years later; but to do this Powers had to sculpt his story around different characters from different eras. I disagree with the people who say it seemed like the chronology jumped at random places or in a discombobulate way. I thought it was pretty clear how one chapter would focus on characters before the onset of the war in 1860, then a chapter would focus on characters in 1956, then we’d bounce back to the era of the war, then back, etc. One section might focus on a plantation owner, his slave, and his daughter, and the next of a man named George, teasing the idea of where he came from, then back to the war but following the slave or a different plantation owner, and slowly the reader starts to see how all these characters are connected. Again, I don’t know if readers had a problem with the nature of a Civil War story and were left wanting more of a focus on the war itself and how it played out or if people want more of an epic nature expanding this section or that – it is a book that almost reads like a series of interconnected short stories – but I thought Powers writing was honed and terse as he tends to say a lot with a little, focusing on the emotions and primary motivation of each character and his/her struggle, trying to get through whatever issue or conflict they find themselves in, capturing the environment and mentality of the moment, illuminating a little bit of what it meant to be alive and in that situation in our county’s history. I can totally see how each character and each section could be expanded and this book could easily have become a 500-600 page epic; but I liked how honed everything was, showing us just a blip of each character’s place in time, contrasting a plantation owner with a slave with a soldier with an opportunist with an injured returnee with a psychotic boy with a general whose moral compass and world view have been affected with a soldier bent on revenge against those who’ve wronged him and his loved ones while he was absent with a woman faced with impossible decisions in a world where she has no real decisions; and the lines and connections he draws between each are subtle, revealing, and insightful. It’s a story built around violence and devastation without coming across as too over the top or nihilistic --- you root for these characters (most of them), you hold on to hope, and you empathize with the conflicts that each (again, nearly each) hope to overcome.
If I had one complaint, I didn’t see the Billy and Lottie characters/plotline fitting in as seamlessly with the rest of the story. I get that Powers is drawing a line from 1860 to 1956 to 1985, but the 1985 sections were less effective and less thematically tied/powerful as those from 1860-1956. They were emotional, and all by themselves they would have worked as fine mini-short stories that stood alone; but the strength of the connection to the whole was clearly weaker.
More than anything I just loved Power’s writing style. The sentences were smooth, the pages flew by, and his tone as he addressed each character and plotline was the perfect mixture of somber, fatalistic, empathetic, and ominous. This paragraph was my favorite in the whole book: “Mr. Levallois did not know how unremarkable he was. But Nurse did. For all his cultivated distance and machinations, he was of a type she knew all too well. An insignificant tooth in a gear that would continue turning whether one broke off or not. She had met dozens like him in her life, and could figure the hundreds and thousands that played the same role all throughout the South. He pretended at sophistication, but his next violence was never more than a whim away, or at a distance closed by some minor disappointment. And she could not say for sure if she or Rawls or both would die by his hand, but she figured whoever’s hand it was would look enough like his as to make no difference. What counted as a blessing in this world made her want to curse God, to dismiss the notion of him with the ease with which Rawls dismissed life’s whole absurd affair. To say, Today will be a hard day, and tomorrow even harder, and leave that as sufficient commentary. But now was not the time for yet. Now she must deal with again. She opened the door. She knew everything he would say and all the ways the hatred of his own flesh would be twisted and forced upon her. He was, like all of them, predictable. Nurse tried to surrender to it, but in the end she struggled just enough to make him eager.”
Wow. Devastating. Such a perfect mixture of tone and characterization, specific and general, insightful, damning, depicting on the violence and oppression but maintaining the focus on the character and not sensationalized or obscene description.
I loved this book, and after seeing his leap from his first book top his second I’m really looking forward to seeing how his style and worldview evolve as he continues to tackle the human condition, with all our faults, flaws, violences, struggles, and efforts.
On one hand I’m kind of surprised that the average rating here on Goodreads is 3.64. On the other, I guess an author’s follow up to a debut is always under scrutiny, and there are some stylistic choices that some readers could object to.
I randomly thought of Kevin Powers over the winter while thinking back to books I’d read a couple of years ago, wondering “What happened to this guy? What happened to that person? Did he/she ever write another?” I was looking at both Redeployment by Phil Klay and Yellow Birds, and I was thinking how great each of those were, so when I saw Powers had written this four years ago I was shocked that I hadn’t heard of it and so I bought it (even though I have plenty of books I need to get to; as an aside, Phil Klay also released Missionaries in 2020 that I’d like to read, dealing with war and American involvement in foreign conflicts).
My thought (semi-confirmed by looking over a lot of other reviews) is that people either A) didn’t need another Civil War story, or B) thought there were too many characters and jumps in chronology. Personally, I really liked these choices. It makes sense that Powers would focus on a story involving war, considering his past focus, but it’s not a retelling of the Civil War, not focused on a specific battle or logistical decisions from a general’s position or anything; but I feel like Powers broadened his scope beyond simply focusing on war and soldiers by focusing the story on a number of individuals and on how history and society and environment affects their lives, leading to a legacy that we’ve seen in this country with people growing up on different sides of this massive divide in our country’s past, with some not even knowing where they come from. I really liked (and I thought it was quite timely) how the story attempted to draw a line between the era of the Civil War with society 100+ years later; but to do this Powers had to sculpt his story around different characters from different eras. I disagree with the people who say it seemed like the chronology jumped at random places or in a discombobulate way. I thought it was pretty clear how one chapter would focus on characters before the onset of the war in 1860, then a chapter would focus on characters in 1956, then we’d bounce back to the era of the war, then back, etc. One section might focus on a plantation owner, his slave, and his daughter, and the next of a man named George, teasing the idea of where he came from, then back to the war but following the slave or a different plantation owner, and slowly the reader starts to see how all these characters are connected. Again, I don’t know if readers had a problem with the nature of a Civil War story and were left wanting more of a focus on the war itself and how it played out or if people want more of an epic nature expanding this section or that – it is a book that almost reads like a series of interconnected short stories – but I thought Powers writing was honed and terse as he tends to say a lot with a little, focusing on the emotions and primary motivation of each character and his/her struggle, trying to get through whatever issue or conflict they find themselves in, capturing the environment and mentality of the moment, illuminating a little bit of what it meant to be alive and in that situation in our county’s history. I can totally see how each character and each section could be expanded and this book could easily have become a 500-600 page epic; but I liked how honed everything was, showing us just a blip of each character’s place in time, contrasting a plantation owner with a slave with a soldier with an opportunist with an injured returnee with a psychotic boy with a general whose moral compass and world view have been affected with a soldier bent on revenge against those who’ve wronged him and his loved ones while he was absent with a woman faced with impossible decisions in a world where she has no real decisions; and the lines and connections he draws between each are subtle, revealing, and insightful. It’s a story built around violence and devastation without coming across as too over the top or nihilistic --- you root for these characters (most of them), you hold on to hope, and you empathize with the conflicts that each (again, nearly each) hope to overcome.
If I had one complaint, I didn’t see the Billy and Lottie characters/plotline fitting in as seamlessly with the rest of the story. I get that Powers is drawing a line from 1860 to 1956 to 1985, but the 1985 sections were less effective and less thematically tied/powerful as those from 1860-1956. They were emotional, and all by themselves they would have worked as fine mini-short stories that stood alone; but the strength of the connection to the whole was clearly weaker.
More than anything I just loved Power’s writing style. The sentences were smooth, the pages flew by, and his tone as he addressed each character and plotline was the perfect mixture of somber, fatalistic, empathetic, and ominous. This paragraph was my favorite in the whole book: “Mr. Levallois did not know how unremarkable he was. But Nurse did. For all his cultivated distance and machinations, he was of a type she knew all too well. An insignificant tooth in a gear that would continue turning whether one broke off or not. She had met dozens like him in her life, and could figure the hundreds and thousands that played the same role all throughout the South. He pretended at sophistication, but his next violence was never more than a whim away, or at a distance closed by some minor disappointment. And she could not say for sure if she or Rawls or both would die by his hand, but she figured whoever’s hand it was would look enough like his as to make no difference. What counted as a blessing in this world made her want to curse God, to dismiss the notion of him with the ease with which Rawls dismissed life’s whole absurd affair. To say, Today will be a hard day, and tomorrow even harder, and leave that as sufficient commentary. But now was not the time for yet. Now she must deal with again. She opened the door. She knew everything he would say and all the ways the hatred of his own flesh would be twisted and forced upon her. He was, like all of them, predictable. Nurse tried to surrender to it, but in the end she struggled just enough to make him eager.”
Wow. Devastating. Such a perfect mixture of tone and characterization, specific and general, insightful, damning, depicting on the violence and oppression but maintaining the focus on the character and not sensationalized or obscene description.
I loved this book, and after seeing his leap from his first book top his second I’m really looking forward to seeing how his style and worldview evolve as he continues to tackle the human condition, with all our faults, flaws, violences, struggles, and efforts.
June 29, 2019
This novel was so heartbreaking, so precisely written, that I’m almost prepared to vow never to read another novel not written by a poet—except then, of course, I’d have precious little to read. What’s the word for that feeling of despair mixed with awe and an inability to return to one’s place in present tense? I don’t know. I don’t have Mr. Powers’ gift for language. But I feel changed.
On a less dramatic note... I have read quite a few novels with black characters written by white men. This is the first one that didn’t make me cringe the whole way through.
Finally, if Hollywood ever manages to sink its syphilitic talons into this story, I suggest Lee Pace for the role of Levallois. Maybe he would find that insulting, but he’s who I pictured the whole time.
On a less dramatic note... I have read quite a few novels with black characters written by white men. This is the first one that didn’t make me cringe the whole way through.
Finally, if Hollywood ever manages to sink its syphilitic talons into this story, I suggest Lee Pace for the role of Levallois. Maybe he would find that insulting, but he’s who I pictured the whole time.
May 20, 2018
Visit the locations in the novel
An epic and all encompassing read. It takes place over many many years from before the Civil war in 1865 leading up to 1980s. There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of characters to keep track of. But this author is not afraid of a challenge.
It’s a novel of shadows – black, white and lots of shades of gray – there’s several voices all at one – speaking and trying to get their point across which is often hard to separate. But on another note, this technique does translate the confusion of war well.
The landscape, the violence, the rawness and the breathtaking passion of those who live there is amazing to read. The truth of slavery and inhumane behaviour , less so. But it’s like a sketch on a wall – too large to appreciate in its entirety and it would have been good to spend time with one character at a time for longer period.
The cruelty and hopeless of the Civil war comes through loud and clear but I I think a simpler timeline with less voices would have made even the whispers of the message a lot more powerful.
May 11, 2018
More Virginia with Kevin Powers's second book, A Shout in the Ruins. Consensus seems to be that it's good, but not on the same level as his debut novel, The Yellow Birds, which set the bar for early literary explorations of the (Second) Iraq War. Having not read The Yellow Birds, all I can say is that it must be absolutely bloody outstanding, because A Shout in the Ruins is really very, very, very good.
Powers is clearly interested in war in general: A Shout in the Ruins alternates between chapters set during the American Civil War, and chapters set in the 1960s and 1980s, during which the Vietnam War and its aftermath crops up regularly. Much of Powers's best writing focuses on the intimacy and the brutality of armed conflict, such as a scene in which Bob Reid, the owner of a shipping business near Richmond, loses half his arm during a skirmish near Mechanicsville. His conversation with a nearby, and equally badly wounded, enemy soldier is made possible because both men believe they will die. When Reid is rescued, the Confederate scavengers who find him savagely murder the man whose companionship has kept him awake and alive. Powers is too canny a writer to do more than show us a brief glimpse of this, but what we do see is haunting. He does the same thing when outlining emotional states. The manipulative behaviour of Mr. Levallois, Reid's neighbour and eventual son-in-law; Reid's mental disintegration after his injury; his daughter Emily's diminishment in her marriage; and, over all, the untold emotional traumas of Rawls and Nurse, a slave couple whose fates are entwined with the Reids: all are recounted but not dwelt upon. Powers leaves us to conjure for ourselves the deep horror of, for instance, Rawls's crippling, as a child, by a master determined to stop him running away.
The effect is that the evils of slavery are fully presented, but in a way that doesn't read with the almost pornographic flavour of explicit violence. Unlike Marlon James's The Book of Night Women, or even a scene or two in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, A Shout in the Ruins doesn't dive deeply into the physical torture inflicted upon slaves by white folks; it just shows us, on nearly every page, that it's there. As a white Southern male author, Kevin Powers's position in relation to the history of American slavery is necessarily going to be different from the positions of Whitehead or James, and as such, his decision prevents the novel from falling into prurience (the white gaze on the tortured black body). It feels as though the book respects its characters, even as their lives are made increasingly difficult.
Powers is clearly interested in war in general: A Shout in the Ruins alternates between chapters set during the American Civil War, and chapters set in the 1960s and 1980s, during which the Vietnam War and its aftermath crops up regularly. Much of Powers's best writing focuses on the intimacy and the brutality of armed conflict, such as a scene in which Bob Reid, the owner of a shipping business near Richmond, loses half his arm during a skirmish near Mechanicsville. His conversation with a nearby, and equally badly wounded, enemy soldier is made possible because both men believe they will die. When Reid is rescued, the Confederate scavengers who find him savagely murder the man whose companionship has kept him awake and alive. Powers is too canny a writer to do more than show us a brief glimpse of this, but what we do see is haunting. He does the same thing when outlining emotional states. The manipulative behaviour of Mr. Levallois, Reid's neighbour and eventual son-in-law; Reid's mental disintegration after his injury; his daughter Emily's diminishment in her marriage; and, over all, the untold emotional traumas of Rawls and Nurse, a slave couple whose fates are entwined with the Reids: all are recounted but not dwelt upon. Powers leaves us to conjure for ourselves the deep horror of, for instance, Rawls's crippling, as a child, by a master determined to stop him running away.
The effect is that the evils of slavery are fully presented, but in a way that doesn't read with the almost pornographic flavour of explicit violence. Unlike Marlon James's The Book of Night Women, or even a scene or two in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, A Shout in the Ruins doesn't dive deeply into the physical torture inflicted upon slaves by white folks; it just shows us, on nearly every page, that it's there. As a white Southern male author, Kevin Powers's position in relation to the history of American slavery is necessarily going to be different from the positions of Whitehead or James, and as such, his decision prevents the novel from falling into prurience (the white gaze on the tortured black body). It feels as though the book respects its characters, even as their lives are made increasingly difficult.
September 2, 2018
Similar to Varina, which I also read recently, this book takes a pitiless view of the Civil War. No heroic portraits of courage on both sides. Just evil and cruelty and blood and death. This seems to be a theme in American Civil War literature in our own divided times.
Also similar to Varina, this story shifts among multiple timelines and is often confusing. But there is poetry in the way I is written, and it is given gravitas by the fact that the author is a war veteran himself. His portrayal of Colonel Tom Fitzgerald, the Union officer who becomes the governor of the county where the book takes place, is razor-sharp. I wish we had seen more of Fitzgerald in the story. I suspect Fitzgerald’s mental war scars are very similar to the author’s own. They made my heart ache.
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Also similar to Varina, this story shifts among multiple timelines and is often confusing. But there is poetry in the way I is written, and it is given gravitas by the fact that the author is a war veteran himself. His portrayal of Colonel Tom Fitzgerald, the Union officer who becomes the governor of the county where the book takes place, is razor-sharp. I wish we had seen more of Fitzgerald in the story. I suspect Fitzgerald’s mental war scars are very similar to the author’s own. They made my heart ache.
Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog
Author of The Saint's Mistress: https://www.bing.com/search?q=amazon....
July 6, 2018
A Shout in the Ruins is an intense, haunting, bleak and true-to-life civil war novel. Kevin Powers’ writing is gritty and uncompromising. Mostly set around Richmond, Virginia, this story is one of those that weaves together several timelines, characters, plots and years, so it’s best read in long sittings. At first I had a hard time keeping up with the chapters moving back and forth in time, but then I was able to spend some time with it this holiday mid-week and finally got absorbed. It’s pacing is well-done and the story is powerful. Understandably, the plot is sad, and there is violence and minor gore, but it’s not gratuitous - I could handle it and I’m a wimp. Lynchings, senseless violence, amputation tents, the daily violence of slavery, groups of scavengers following battles, scorched Earth left behind - Powers doesn’t gloss over or romanticize any part of it, and the effect is haunting. Rawls’, Nurse’s, and Emily’s stories will stick with me for a long while. The ending was expectedly tragic, and left me solely with a stark sense of closure.
September 8, 2018
This book is great. The writing is superb, painted a great picture. The concept of the intimacy of violence was a really interesting one.
I think what most impressed me was the empathy employed by Powers in the telling. This empathy along with the intimacy helped to illustrate the true consequences of violence and incivility. These consequences seemed to transcend the physical world in some instances, in other instances it obliterated their world. This often set off a chain reaction leading to tragedy.
Tragically, a number of the characters seemed to bear the burden of cruelty despite their better natures, all of them dealing with this in their own ways.
It was a bit difficult to keep track of the characters at times, but it is worth sticking with. Powers painted a terribly compelling picture of the casual cruelty of oppression and managed to do so beautifully.
I think what most impressed me was the empathy employed by Powers in the telling. This empathy along with the intimacy helped to illustrate the true consequences of violence and incivility. These consequences seemed to transcend the physical world in some instances, in other instances it obliterated their world. This often set off a chain reaction leading to tragedy.
Tragically, a number of the characters seemed to bear the burden of cruelty despite their better natures, all of them dealing with this in their own ways.
It was a bit difficult to keep track of the characters at times, but it is worth sticking with. Powers painted a terribly compelling picture of the casual cruelty of oppression and managed to do so beautifully.
April 25, 2018
This is an insightful and upsetting description of the barbarism of southern whites before and during the civil war. It also deals with the relatives of some of the main characters decades later. The story jumps from one period to the other,sometimes confusingly. Well written,with solid historical background,it will appeal to those who want to know more about these times.
July 26, 2018
A beautifully written book that put me much in mind of COLD MOUNTAIN. Partly, of course, because of its setting in the aftermath of the Civil War, and partly because of the elegant, yet economical writing.
Replete with sad, ruined characters and set in both the 1860s and the 1950s with one surviving character, George, offspring of the landowner who is a tyrant in the historical time (although not as cruel to his slaves as many) and Nurse, one of his slaves.
I'd like to get this on audible to reread more slowly. There were portions I read aloud to myself. Set mostly in Richmond, although with mentions of lands to the west towards our town of Charlottesville and Fluvanna County where our son and his wife and many grands and greats live.
Replete with sad, ruined characters and set in both the 1860s and the 1950s with one surviving character, George, offspring of the landowner who is a tyrant in the historical time (although not as cruel to his slaves as many) and Nurse, one of his slaves.
I'd like to get this on audible to reread more slowly. There were portions I read aloud to myself. Set mostly in Richmond, although with mentions of lands to the west towards our town of Charlottesville and Fluvanna County where our son and his wife and many grands and greats live.
March 14, 2018
I received A Shout In The Ruins by Kevin Powers as a Goodreads giveaway. The novel was very well written and it will definitely make the reader think about the cruelty of the Civil War era. I found myself reading one chapter at a time then putting the book down for a day or two. I wished that the author had just written the story in chronological order and also left the Lottie character out entirely. If Mr. Powers had done the above, I would have given the book five stars.
October 27, 2018
Wanted to love it as Heywood Hill sent it to me but what a confusing mess!
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