FICTION
‘Cementville’
By Paulette Livers
Counterpoint, $25, 304 pages
AUTHOR EVENTS
Paulette Livers reads and signs “Cementville.”
7 p.m., March 18. $5 members, $10 nonmembers. Margaret Mitchell House, 990 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-814-4150, www.atlantahistorycenter.com/lectures
Last month, President Obama announced intentions to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year. Around 38,000 U.S. military personnel remain in the country, down from the reported peak of 101,000 in 2011. When considering the numbers, though, let’s not forget the death toll. The two-front War on Terror has claimed more than 6,700 American lives since 2001 and left 50,000-plus veterans with debilitating injuries — both physical and mental.
With talk of military homecomings in the air, it’s a relevant moment for the arrival of “Cementville,” an ambitious contemplation of grief, violence and the aftermath of war in a tiny Southern town. Debut novelist Paulette Livers begins the book in May 1969, with the striking description of an envoy of hearses descending like a biblical plague of locusts upon the titular community.
Cementville, Ky., population 1,003, has made national news with its unprecedented loss of seven hometown boys killed in one night in Phu Bai, Vietnam. The young men from prominent families had enlisted in the National Guard expecting to avoid foreign deployment.
Also returning home is Byard Ferguson, who had foreseen no such luck for himself and fled to Canada years before. He ventures back to Cementville to attend the funeral of the town’s eighth recent causality, his younger brother who’d been drafted. It’s a believable, heart-breaking historical footnote for the setting: 1969 was the second worst year for American fatalities in Vietnam, averaging almost 1,000 fallen soldiers per month.
Livers doesn’t linger on Byard’s draft-dodging predicament. The rapid-fire narration jumps to other citizens mangled by the military. Harlan O’Brien, a one-legged POW, becomes a reluctant local hero in the face of the tragedy, jostled into grand marshaling the Memorial Day parade and trotted out to square dances, much to his chagrin. Meanwhile, young Billy Juell has been discharged for drunkenly assaulting a fellow soldier. Billy and Harlan’s relatives regard the silent men with caution, wondering if their sons and brothers have been replaced by imposters.
The vignettes don’t end there. Like the all-knowing Stage Manager in Wilder’s “Our Town,” the novel’s omniscient narrator flutters past the cliffs and trenches of Cementville to consider local products (“passable cement and remarkable whiskey”) and deliver updates on simmering feuds and social minefields, even tracing the town’s ancestry back to the Jacobite exodus from England.
Along the way, readers can connect the dots between countless overlapping story lines by paying attention to surnames and a few key players, a dizzying process. The effect of tracking so many characters across such a sprawling canvas is sometimes less “Spoon River Anthology” and more like an Appalachian “Peyton Place.”
Livers is a former Atlantan who grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Chicago. The novel makes obvious her gift for crafting textured landscapes and authentic characters. Forgoing the late Elmore Leonard’s famous rule of fiction, “if it sounds like writing, rewrite it,” she looks elsewhere for guidance apparent in an overt reference to Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House,” known for its intricate network of characters, manifold plots and complex narration. “Dickens was a first-class noticer of gloom and smoke and rain and fog,” notes Maureen Juell, a scrappy 13-year-old whose scenes in the novel provide affectionate (and much-needed) comic relief from the melancholy of back-to-back funerals.
The trouble with mourning? Grieving doesn’t always make for gripping fiction. Some of the most vivacious personalities exist in bubbles less affected by the town’s central tragedy, at least at first. A sudden thunderstorm adds electricity to the opening act, but even the astonishment of watching a central character get struck by lightning fades as we trudge again through page after page of genealogy and gossip.
Perhaps sensing the reader’s restlessness, Livers takes a dramatic turn in the book’s second half and brings the violence of war home. A shocking murder sets the town on edge, with everyone asking who among their neighbors could be the killer. Livers uses news of the summer’s Apollo 11 lunar mission in an apt comparison to the mood back on earth, where what was once familiar ground now feels like walking on the moon. Our attention turns to the broken soldiers left fractured by service, but as the bodies begin to pile up, so do the doubts.
With nods to not only Dickens but Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson too, Livers asserts the novel’s far-reaching intentions via her deployment of ornate, high-powered language. The thought-provoking debut wears its literary aspirations like a velvet funeral gown, calling attention to the grim legacies of combat and the changing realities of small-town U.S.A.
As another bloody American entanglement staggers to a close, “Cementville” makes it clear that the consequences of warfare reverberate much further than on battlefields, for civilians as well as soldiers.
About the Author
