By Jim Ewing 

Special to The Clarion-Ledger

Sometimes, fiction can be more revealing of the truth than nonfiction, and in Jeff Shaara’s The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War, the bones of nonfiction shine through his artful narrative.

This 614-page saga focuses on a less studied segment of the war, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea and thence into the Carolinas, which is usually overshadowed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Lightning is the fourth and final volume of Shaara’s Civil War series that previously included the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga (though it’s not necessary to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one). It covers the campaigns from November 1864 through the end of the war in North Carolina in April 1865. For the South, Lee’s surrender was the symbolic end of the war, while Sherman’s march continued the war’s misery for generations. It set a heinous standard of “total war,” waged intentionally against civilians.

Shaara adds the insights, motivations and behavior often overlooked: breakdown of civil authority in the South; the assistance of Confederate forces in the destruction, in advance of Sherman in order to starve his army; the hatred of the civilian population of both sides of the conflict for that destruction; as well as the need for constant foraging for food by both armies, including for the freed slaves numbering 50,000 following Sherman’s 60,000-man army.

We may think of Sherman’s march as a lightning strike, as the name suggests, but it might more accurately be seen as a big, hungry hurricane consisting of four broad columns of men about 75 miles wide moving about 15 miles per day through 2,000 miles of the South.

Shaara takes pains to say that Sherman only ordered facilities of use to the enemy to be destroyed, that the actual burning of entire cities — including his worst conflagration, Atlanta — was the result of being unable to control his men.

Shaara lays bare the outlines of this segment of the war, keeping up the suspense, even as the outcome is known, by detailing Union Gen. Ulysses Grant’s concerns in the East; Sherman’s burning the heart out of the Deep South; both men fighting constant rearguard actions against politicians, the press, the duplicitous greed of those whose allegiance is to profit, no matter whose flag flies over it; and the jealous, second-guessing of subordinate generals.

Shaara’s brilliance is credibly crafting the thoughts, motivations, strategies and personalities of the leaders on both sides of the conflict. He also weaves the narrative of a slave named only Franklin, who gives the unique perspective as one of the emancipated, giving voice to those who latched on to the hope of freedom and Sherman as savior, a faith at least somewhat betrayed at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia.

There will be some grousing, for sure, from those who see Lightning as a whitewash of Sherman. It’s a point Shaara notes, saying that perhaps no more polarizing figure exists from the conflict, regarded alternately as its finest battlefield commander and ranking among the nation’s finest with George Patton and Douglas MacArthur versus a “savage,” his very name “a profanity.”

While Lightning may not be a history book, but historical fiction, students of the Civil War will find much to debate, and readers just looking for an absorbing novel will be well rewarded.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

“Well.”

This is how all of Harrison Scott Key’s stories begin, according to the end of the first chapter of his tragicomic memoir about his father, The World’s Largest Man.

He doesn’t literally begin all his stories this way, at least not in writing, but I’d like to think he really does when he’s telling them aloud, whether to his children at bedtime or to a small group at a party in somebody’s kitchen.

It’s a little pause that gives opportunity to the storyteller to think about if he really does want to tell what he’s about to, and for us if we really want to hear it. In the moment of the pregnant pause between collecting his thoughts and dispersing them, lies the warning I first heard from the late, great Lewis Grizzard: “I don’t believe I’d-a told that”.

But that’s the difference between him and me, I guess, and I’m glad he committed to the story. And once he commits to telling, we also commit to the listening, because it’s impossible to resist the honest, hilarious, stylized absurdity that is about to follow.

Key begins by telling us stories about a man—shaped by a culture—that has no use for the art of storytelling. Our protagonist gravitates towards his mother, growing to prefer the quiet gentleness of her cooking and reading to the violence-soaked nature of his father’s obsessions: hunting, football, fighting, and farm work. Yes, even the miracle of (bovine) childbirth aims its roughest edges at Key, working on a neighboring farm, for free, at his father’s behest.

Did I say “gentleness” in that last paragraph? That’s not exactly what I mean.

Although sometimes uncomfortable with the more physical aspects of attempting (and often failing) to fulfill the expectations of Southern masculinity, he brilliantly unleashes his own aggression through his God-given talents for sarcasm and smart-ass-ery at every target available: his father in particular, the South in general, his rivals on the baseball field, potential bullies, his ne’er-do-well Savannah neighbors, later his wife (who is just as good at dishing it back), and even (and especially) himself.

His twin talents of insult and empathy lead him to say things which he then instantly regrets throughout all of his stories. That’s easy enough to let happen in conversation, or the dialogue of these stories, but leaving such joking truth on the page, after having enough time to consider what you’re saying? That’s a practiced and glorious art.

Curiously, he wounds his father mostly with disappointment rather direct verbal attacks, until about halfway through the book one day when his father beats our teen-aged narrator, half-naked and cornered on top of a washing machine, angrily with a belt. Key asks his father the question that has been building in his mind, and many of the readers’, throughout the narrative: “What the hell is wrong with you, old man? Are you crazy?”

Crazy can be a relative term, defined by both culture and circumstances. The second half of the books shifts the focus to his adulthood, leaving him a husband and a father himself in Savannah, Georgia. While he escapes the condemnation of the rural Rankin County mores he rejects, he examines the more unreasonable side of his nature in the face of challenges such as his wife’s pregnancy, his daughter’s potty training, tweaked-out neighbors relocation next door, and the very same home-invasion paranoia he began the book mocking his dad for.

The power dynamics do shift from a boy trying to connect with his different-natured father to a man trying to connect to his wife, the mother of his children, and sometimes partner-in-insanity.

Key has to learn which lessons to remember from his raising, and which ones to forget before it’s too late. It’d be easy to sell this book on Father’s Day as a exploration of a certain type of fatherhood, but there’s a lot to relate to whether you’re somebody’s child, parent, or spouse.

Mostly, I can guarantee if you make it to the book, you’re going to laugh a lot. You may even be tempted to tell a few stories about the things you remember from the harrowing experience of growing up.

Would you or I have the courage to celebrate and excoriate ourselves and even those we love as faithfully as Key has here?

Well…

Harrison Scott Key will be signing copies of this book at Lemuria on Thursday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. and will be reading at 5:30.

In the heart of Belhaven stands a little house among all the other mismatched houses. It is framed by flowers and pine trees, and children run through the carpet of green lawn, blowing bubbles and fingers sticky with the melted popsicles they claim as priceless treasures in the heat.

On this porch is a blue wicker rocking chair, and as the summer storm rolls in, it rocks, empty, a glass of sweet tea by its side.

Earlier, before the children were let loose to run like wild banshees, they sat on that same porch and listened to a story or two. This June, every Thursday from 3 to 4 p.m. I have been fortunate enough to read stories in conjunction with the Eudora Welty House for Summer Storytime. Last week, the group of children was so big that we split it up into three separate groups to hear multiple stories before they clamored for popsicles and ran through the sprinkler.

This upcoming Thursday, June 18, we will be reading stories about writing your own story, and what a better place to do this activity than at the Eudora Welty House, the home of an author who made her own stories. We hope you and your children will join us from 3:00 to 4:00 to make a book.

Who can say whether there is or isn’t a certain magic imbued in a place? When the last of the children left, led by the hand by their parents, it was just as if Ms. Welty herself had been there the whole time, smiling as words and stories filled these children, just as they in turn filled her garden.

As I turned to leave, the rocking chair creaked in the wind, and the little house was quiet, the grass worn by the patter of little feet, standing just as it was before with all the other mismatched houses, right in the heart of Jackson.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

—Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Every once and awhile (and it is more rare than you would think, since hundreds of books are released every year) a book comes out that is important.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, is one such book. It is full of misery, injustice, wrongs so wrong they cannot be undone or fixed or ignored. But it is also full of small moments of joy. Glimmers of hope, not that the past can be reckoned with, but rather moments when the clouds clear and the future holds a promise.

This book is about many things, without the self-consciousness of being about anything. It is first and foremost a story.

A Little Life follows four friends struggling to survive in New York City after college. They are all full of ambition, as we all are after finishing college and trying to “make it big” in the city. JB is an aspiring artist, Malcolm an architect working for a big firm that is paying the bills but killing his spirit, Willem is handsome and friendly and failing to land a role in any plays, and Jude is a lawyer working for the public defenders office.

Although they all have their secrets and their suffering and their insecurities, the lens of the novel slowly tightens on Jude. Jude and his mysterious past. His scars and limp and success; he is the surprising point around which the four friends revolve.

The story does not linger. It is not about how these four friends find their paths and become successful (although we watch them fall into the decisions that will determine their futures), rather it is about life. All of it. Yanagihara pushes us forward, from Thanksgiving dinner to Thanksgiving dinner, from dinner parties to fallings out. With each step forward in time, more of the past is remembered.

A Little Life could be about the unattainable nature of justice or the mysteriousness of love or about forgiveness. It could be about homosexuality. But A Little Life is more then even that.  Yanagihara has successfully written a book in which sexuality is a non-issue and anyone arguing that this book is about homosexuality or sexual identity is missing the point. By identifying ourselves solely by our sexual preference we do ourselves an injustice. Before we are gay or straight or whatever we are, we are human. We are kind (or not) and generous (or not). We fall in and out of love. We try and succeed and fail.

But again, A Little Life is not about that. Or it’s not only about that. A Little Life is the story of Jude.