Review: "A Shout in the Ruins" by Kevin Powers

I was pleasantly surprised late last year when I heard about Kevin Power’s forthcoming second novel A Shout in the Ruins. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I never expected him to publish a novel again (maybe some short stories, but he has garnered praise as a poet), but it surprised me to see his follow up novel come out so soon after his first novel, The Yellow Birds, the one and only fiction book you need to read about the Iraq War. With a book as compact and powerful as that, it seemed Powers had said all he needed to say with his first book and he would go the way of Joseph Heller, who waited 13 years between publishing Catch-22 and his follow-up Something Happened. I’m glad we did not have to wait more than a decade for this book, because it is truly fantastic, an epic in miniature form that covers nearly 150 years of American history through the forgotten lives of a few of its inhabitants. But while it’s reach is sweeping, it never becomes overbearing and what really shines forth in this book are its finely drawn characters, both good and evil, who are fighting toward impossible goals that they, as well as us the readers, suspect they will never be able to obtain. The book is split into two time lines, one beginning in the 1840s and the other in the mid-1950s. The first section concerns the Reid family, made up of Lucy and Bob as well as their daughter Emily and their slave Rawls. In the second section we meet the nonagenarian George Seldom, who is traveling by himself to Virginia to seek out the answers to his chaotic upbringing. The two are seamlessly woven together, with little subtleties peppered in each one that create a whole and rather beautiful narrative strain that addresses the themes of failure, non-progress and fatalism that I think Powers was trying to convey. The book is filled with many striking and sometimes disturbing characters and scenes, like the first time Antony Levallois, the cold man Emily will marry out of convenience, shows his heartless nature in a scene of quick and devastating violence. The whole book is drenched in a sort of fatalistic view of life: eventually, despite our best efforts we will lose, shown through the eventual fates of Rawls and Nurse, the fellow slave he falls madly in love with, which is mirrored by the sad life of Lottie Bride, the waitress who helps George in his search for the truth about his past. It might sound bleak and in some cases it is, but maybe within Power’s hearty prose is a kind of beautiful acceptance of this fact, and within it, is the power to love those we do even harder knowing that it will eventually fade away, much like the book’s beautiful ending that melds the two storylines in a magnificent way, which reminded me of the ending to Philipp Meyer’s The Son, another great sophomore novel. This book was a pure pleasure, weighty but not overbearing, rich yet not overstuffed, brutal yet full of hope. 

Rating: 5/5