After The War
Just as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is a microcosm of the anguish of the post-Civil War South, so Marius's Bourbon County in eastern Tennessee is a mirror of the anxieties, racial tensions and xenophobia of mainstream America in the aftermath of World War I. Paul Alexander, the narrator of this magnificent novel, is a Greek immigrant raised in Belgium who is haunted by the specters of his two closest friends, both killed alongside him in battle. As Alexander, himself a wounded young veteran, adjusts to life in provincial Tennessee, where he works as a chemist in an iron foundry, the shades of his two dead buddies--or his hallucination of them--interact with him and comment ironically on the action. Bourbonville's crises turn on the conflict of values between Moreland Pinkerton, a crude, expansive foundry owner emblematic of untamed industrial progress, and Brian Ledbetter, an old independent farmer with five wayward stepsons. Writing with the depth and veracity of classic realist fiction, Marius ( Bound for the Promised Land ) spins subplots about Paul's search for the cowardly father who abandoned him; Paul's passionate but loveless affair with an older woman; and a black WW I pilot's visions of political revolution. A wondrous odyssey, this moving novel is a deep meditation on whether our lives are shaped by destiny or a chain of accidents.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.