Postcards From A Green Planet

By Jim Ewing

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 warsA REVIEW OF
Slant of Light
Jeffrey Lent
Bloomsbury
$27.00 355 pages
By Jim...

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.

  • 4 June 2015
  • 1