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Mississippi Books and WritersJanuary 2004Note: Prices listed below reflect the publisher's suggested list price. They are subject to change without notice.
Knopf (Hardcover, $23.00, ISBN: 0375414789) Publication date: January 2004 Description from Publishers Weekly: Set in the same small Mississippi town as Yarbroughs
critically acclaimed Visible Spirits, this complex WWII-era novel explores
questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of
German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers
on nearby farms. The novel opens with the uncomfortable friendship between
young Dan Timms, who drives one of his enterprising Uncle Alvins “rolling
stores” (old school buses boasting all the necessities of country life:
sodas, coal-oil lamps, radios), and L.C. Stevens, the black employee who drives
the other. While L.C. vainly struggles to make his work partner see the “parallel
universe” in which black Americans are trapped, Dan yearns to join the
army and escape the fresh memory of his fathers recent suicide and his
suspicions about his mothers past. But Dans friend Marty Stark
shows him another side
of war when he returns damaged and changed from the German theater and is reassigned
to help guard the towns German POWs. The story shifts subtly when a Polish
prisoner informs Dan of an escape planned by several other prisoners, setting
in motion a chain of events that eventually brings Martys troubled war
memories to the surface. Meanwhile, L.C. suffers a beating by an older, powerful
white
man who, after losing his own son in the war, uses his influence to ensure
that the young black man is drafted. The multiple subplots slow the novels
pace, but Yarbroughs warm, measured voice, clean prose and rich character
studies make this an unusually tender and accomplished study of the reverberations
of war on the home front.
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