The Sheltering

Mark Powell

Description

"'You set yourself up as judge, jury, and executioner,' Pamela had said, but that was wrong: you set yourself up as angel, and await the word of God." Luther Redding lost his job, and almost lost his wife, Pamela, and teenaged daughters Katie and Lucy, when the real estate bubble burst in Florida. Now he pilots a Reaper drone over the mountains of Afghanistan from a command center in the bowels of Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, studying a target's pattern of life and awaiting the command to end that life. Meanwhile Bobby Rosen has returned home from his tours in Iraq to a broken marriage and an estranged son, his promising military career cut short in a moment of terrible violence in a Sadr City marketplace. As the tales of Luther and Bobby unfold, Mark Powell masterfully engages with the vexing, bifurcated lives of combatants in the global war on terror, those who are simultaneously here and there and thus never fully freed from the life-and-death chaos of the battlefield.

As Bobby sets off on a drug-fueled road trip with his brother Donny, newly released from prison and consumed by his own inescapable impulses, a sudden death in the Redding household sends Luther's daughter Katie spiraling into grief and self-destruction. Soon the lives of the Reddings and the Rosens intersect as the collateral damage from the war on terror sends these families into a rapid descent of violence and moral ambiguity that seems hauntingly familiar to Bobby while placing Katie in a position much like her father's—more removed witness than active participant in the bloody war unfolding in front of her. Overarching questions of faith and redemption clash with the rough-hewn realities of terror and loss, all to explosive ends in Powell's dark vision of modern Americana.

Novelist Ron Rash has deemed Powell "the best Appalachian novelist of his generation." In this, his fourth novel, Powell broadens the southern backdrop of his earlier work into a sprawling thriller taking readers from the Middle East to Charleston, southern Georgia, Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, and into the storied American West. In its themes, perspectives, and pacing, The Sheltering recalls the work of Robert Stone, Jim Harrison, and Ben Fountain while further establishing Powell as a unique voice capable of interrogating unfathomable truths with a beauty and cohesion of language that challenges our assumptions of the human spirit.

Sujets

• Psychological
• Triaje
• Sense of Place
• I Wish (manhwa)
• God Knows (novel)
• Proactiv Solution
• Conjugal visit
• Garret
• Widow's walk
• Grandparent
• Truancy
• Military
• Parchment
• Psychology
• Townes Van Zandt
• Orgy
• Arnold Lobel
• Confit
• War
• Cordite
• Sake
• Buddy Holly
• Triage
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 12 août 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611174359
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE SHELTERING
STORY RIVER BOOKS
Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
THE SHELTERING
A Novel
MARK POWELL

The University of South Carolina Press
2014 Mark Powell
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
Manufactured in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powell, Mark, 1976- author.
The sheltering : a novel / Mark Powell.
pages cm. - (Story River Books)
ISBN 978-1-61117-434-2 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-435-9 (ebook)
1. Families of military personnel-Fiction. 2. War on Terrorism, 2001-2009-Moral and ethical aspects-Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)-Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.O88S53 2014
813 .6-dc23
2014004292
For Silas, my only son
You come to us once each day and never a day rises into brightness but you stand behind it; you are upon us, you overwhelm us, all of each night. It is you who release from work, who bring parted families and friends together, and people for a little while are calm and free, and all at ease together; but before long, before long, all are brought down silent and motionless.
JAMES AGEE, A Death in the Family
It occurred to me with some amusement that a student in the future might have his grade dropped on an exam from a B to C because he misguessed the exact number of My Lai dead.
JIM HARRISON, A Good Day to Die
CONTENTS
Foreword
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
FOREWORD
The Sheltering is at once haunting and an act of pure grace. What you notice first when you come to Mark Powell s fourth novel is his remarkable gift for language, the bleeding edges around his dialogue, the starch and vigor of his sense of place, the sharp delineation of his characters, and a stylishness all his own. He is that rarity among male writers of fiction in that his female characters are as strongly presented as any of his troubled, endangered males. In these spiritually exhausted times, The Sheltering is a philosophical novel with a belief system that collapses in on itself because the membranes of our storm-tossed faith always seem so gossamer and imperiled. Powell s dexterous novel is deeply spiritual and deeply religious, but in ways that might scare you to death. You find yourself wanting to believe in Powell s characters because he turns them into townspeople of your unconscious by the power of his art. They capture and take possession of you even as these unreliable pilgrims can no longer hold on to a firefly s belief in themselves.
Powell s narrative voice is surefooted from his first sentence to the last. This book is a study of concision by a writer who can make you hurt as he takes you through hard lives and bad choices and who can assuage you with the pleasure he takes in the juice and bite of our delicious language. In his stories of two families, Powell juxtaposes the modern South with the old South. He seems as comfortable in a Florida country club or Miami Beach hotel as he does in a honkytonk in Waycross or a Victorian house in the Garden District in New Orleans. He possesses as well a poet s eye for the fuzziness and fragility of a besieged vision of the American dream.
On a U.S. Air Force base near Tampa, Predator drone pilot Luther Redding sits at a control panel, staring at a small house and a Chevy Bronco parked next to it. This watched building in southern Afghanistan houses several families and a terrorist, Kareem Samaan. There is no escape from the eye of the drone, no act of absolution, no purging that will alter time s verdict on Kareem s life. Luther is about to kill a man six thousand miles away in an all-consuming fountain of light. The image of light is used to great effect in this book as Powell reminds us that it can wield destruction, creation, or those moments of epiphany when we long for tongues of fire to light our way. The all-seeing eye of the Predator drone is an overarching vantage that sets its faraway gaze on the lives and destinies of our major players; it can watch in untroubled composure at the scrimmage of troubled souls who will flounder in helpless bondage to their fates.
While Luther Redding is launching the hellfire missile that will kill Kareem Samaan in Afghanistan, Bobby Rosen is meeting his brother Donny, who has just been released from prison in a ghastly Florida town. The brothers come from a far more traditional geography of the southern experience, as seen in the works of Erskine Caldwell and Harry Crews. It s an unsentimental, hardscrabble background that produces two sons of loving, hard-working parents, sons who both go bad for different reasons.
Bobby is an Iraq war veteran burdened with the disabling knowledge of a young life he took under direct orders, a wound that traps him in an everlasting nightmare of regret. He has lost his wife, who still loves him, and has little contact with a son who adores him. When he takes his son to a lake on the last night in our lifetime that Venus will align with Mercury, it is a moment of emotional grandeur in the novel, a beacon in the darkness far removed from the explosive burst that ended Kareem. Like his former sister-in-law says, You are a good man, Bobby, and it s true-but it s already too late to make a difference.
Bobby s brother Donny walks out of prison a far more dangerous man than when he entered it. Donny is one of the most authentic psychopaths to surface in American fiction in a long while. He carries the scorpion s sting and the conjurer s charm. Everything he touches turns leprous and dangerous. His love of death is the moral pivot that turns into an unforgettable flight toward madness and beyond.
From a different social order entirely come the Redding women. There is the mother, Pamela, the Ivy League-educated real estate agent and yoga student who has found her salvation in the gym. She and Luther had gained and lost a fortune during the real estate boom and bust of the Bush era, falling prey to the age of greed when the American economy imploded and the country began to consume its own entrails after easy money and floating mortgages evaporated almost overnight. With their livelihoods threatened, their property devalued, and their dreams of themselves now wingless and floating, Luther and Pamela turn briefly to each other, each desperate to cling to something precious in their tenuous love of each other. They are in a free fall from each other when we meet them, and their tragedy is one of the cohering forces of this novel.
In his descriptions of the two Redding children, sisters Lucy and Katie, Powell achieves masterful portraits of late teenage angst. When we meet Lucy, she is attending a fundamentalist Christian college in Jacksonville and wears her faith heavily in a family that does not. Her commitment to Christ is Bible-haunted, ferocious, and enough to include her well-thumbed copy of Thomas Kempis s Imitation of Christ. She has read Kempis deeply and can quote him with accuracy, as she tries to live up to the selfless directives of his visionary Christian life. The committed Christian has been thrown overboard in the modern fictional world, but Lucy s fiery spirituality is delightful to encounter, and her lack of confidence and constant warfare with her beautiful yet harrowed sister lend both comedy and pathos to their story. When Lucy, with her sister tagging along, helps lead a group of summer students to a Bible theme park, Powell produces a comic tour de force that is itself worth the price of the book. Yet it contains a conversion scene of the cynical Katie Redding that brims with a power that is as surprising as it is transcendent.
In that fearful world of American girlhood, Katie harms herself in secret, thinking that her own pain is the only knowable reality in a life dulled by drugs and alcohol. Still, in her lostness, it is Katie who has the most transfiguring spiritual moments in the book. Her despair leads her on a journey that seems conceived in a nightmare by Dante as she seeks out enlightenment in a dreadful flight away from her own best instincts.
Like all good novelists, Mark Powell is a precise and all-knowing weatherman of his locale of choice, and he understands the despair and loss to be found in the futile orchards and starving lawns of the suburban southern coast. The American suburb has become one of the most demonized landscapes in American fiction-the Yoknapatawpha County of the modern young writer-and so it is again in Powell s novel. The old southern whir of cicadas and the rustle of wind through palms are usurped by the sound of sprinkler systems on endless acres of green lawns, the hum of air conditioners, the noisy labor of icemakers, and the murmur of surrounding pool cleaners. The manicured neighborhood of suburban mansions begins to rot around the lives of the Redding family like some incurable germ disease. Houses foreclosed by banks suffer in the chilling silence of abandonment. The fruit of orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees drops off by the thousands and decays in the brutal Florida sunshine.
This crumbling modern American dreamscape is juxtaposed in the second half of the novel with an older landscape of the American dream, that of the vast, unknowable West. Powell lets us ride shotgun on one of the most nihilistic road trips into the wounded heart of Americana I ve ever encountered. He can race along with Kerouac any time he desires, but he could teach Kerouac things about a shared darkness that Jack never dreamed of in his nomadic life. The Rosen boys take wing across the remnants of