Jeffrey Lent reads from his book ‘A Slant of Light’ at Lemuria Books in Jackson, Miss., June 2, 2015. Photo: Jim Ewing
‘Slant of Light’ illuminates victims of civil wars
A REVIEW OF
Slant of Light
Jeffrey Lent
Bloomsbury
$27.00 355 pages
By Jim Ewing
Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Slant of Light begins with a brutal
crime.
Malcolm Hopeton had returned to his New York
homestead from war, maimed in body and mind from fighting in the Union Army. He
had witnessed countless deaths, but this death at his own bare hands of his
unfaithful wife who had not fulfilled her bridal vow and of her lover after
coming home from fighting for his country was unique. It would spell his long
and lingering agony and twist the lives of those around him.
In the South, we’re used to our Civil War tales
— of men returning, defeated and broken, with rage turned inward or all around
as if the devastation of war could be spat out from the soul.
And modern books, such as Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier, tell that tale of the loneliness of the lives of men who
see peace treaties but continue to war inside.
But Slant takes place in a bucolic
farming community in the North, where ostensibly the war was won, a place that
did not see the ruin of houses, cities and fields, the collapse of a way of
life. Or, at least, not obviously.
As the story plays out, we learn that Hopeton
was bayonetted at Antietam and left for dead in a pile of corpses. He recovers
and stays to fight though his enlistment ends, searching for the Reb who stuck
him and to “fight evil,” as he saw the conflict. But when he came home he found
that evil had resulted from his decision to stay and fight. He commits the evil
that kills his wife and her lover.
While Hopeton remains a constant, the book’s
action is in the day-to-day life of August Swartout, a widowed farmer, whose
toil and loneliness serves as a gateway into the lives and mores of those
around him. Revealed is a tale of layers: the characters — and the crime itself
— seen from various directions, like life itself, each with its own slant.
At heart, Slant is a love story taking
place near Jerusalm, N.Y., in the shadow of “The Public Friend,” referring to
Jemima Wilkinson, the evangelist who founded the city as an offshoot of
the Quakers.
Life, as Slant recounts, is ferocious and
yearning, yet restrained by the the conventions of the time. The characters
live with love and loss, stoic and constrained by the iron bonds of their moral
convictions, so that passion must build to bursting before freedom, or death,
is obtained.
But there is no freedom, not even in death, in Slant’s
world. We are immortal souls only caught in time for a brief period, playing
out our passions.
Lent has been called the William Faulkner of the
Northeast, and this book goes a way toward proving it. It is pure literary
fiction, not commercial fiction, an art work in itself.
While stemming from the Civil War, it is a saga
of civil wars raging inside, even as the world outside seems at peace.
The crime, it turns out, is by and against
humanity, and it has no end.
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, now in bookstores.