Visible Spirits - Hardcover

Yarbrough, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411593 ISBN 13: 9780375411595

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

A heart-stopping story—by an award-winning novelist—located at the dead center of Southern mythology and our most intransigent national trauma.

The Mississippi Delta, fabled “South of the South,” is replete with plantations carved from the wilderness, rich soil and King Cotton, with field chants and blues laments, violence and tragedy. In this austerely beautiful landscape,
by 1902, Reconstruction is being encroached upon by Jim Crow. And in the town of Loring, the tenure of a black postmistress is compromised when the prodigal son of a once mighty planting family returns home. A gambler run
out of luck and a great many venues, he finds his diminished prospects as unappealing as the political moderation of his brother, now both mayor and editor of the newspaper. Their fraternal tension quickly spreads through the countryside—some citizens striving for the better world ostensibly promised, others for the vestigial antebellum order. Caught squarely in the center of this tortured dynamic is the postmistress herself, her fate further complicated when President Roosevelt, on federal grounds, intervenes personally.

And so this local, even familial dispute inevitably erupts, fueled by all the dark, brutal memories of slavery, civil war and emancipation. In this crucible of race relations and mythology, people black and white alike are tested relentlessly by history and human nature, by passions at once ambivalent and fierce. And with this masterful novel, Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, love with hatred, reason with blood—and with great authority and compassion he extends a rich tradition of our national literature.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Independent booksellers are really rooting for this lyrical novel, about a small Mississippi town during Reconstruction. They are hoping to win over the same readers who helped make the small novel Plainsong a big hit a few years ago."
–Editor's Picks, Wall Street Journal

"Absorbing and instructive . . . Visible Spirits brilliantly brings to life the beginnings of the bleak turn in Southern history that C. Vann Woodward once identified as "the strange career of Jim Crow."
–Christopher Tilghman, Washington Post Book World

"A compelling look at moral courage, full of passion . . . The place, people, events and emotions are so authentic in Steve Yarbrough's second novel, it's hard to believe the story is fiction."
–J. Ford Huffman, USA Today

"Invites comparison with Faulkner's greatest novels, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, even To Kill a Mockingbird . . .Yarbrough's novel holds up fine against its elder cousins."
–Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Visible Spirits is a strong, moving novel that captures the texture of daily life in the Old South, and the virulence and complexity of racial prejudice . . . Yarbrough writes with insight, compassion and humor, so a realistic tale becomes refreshing and vibrant.”
—Ha Jin

“Steve Yarbrough is a confident and elegant prose stylist and a storyteller who knows how empty spaces can resonate with power and meaning. It is the unspoken, the invisible and the unacknowledged that give this novel its dramatic complexity, its profound force and depth of feeling. It is the interstices between the lines that evoke not only historical grief but the grief of our own time.”
—David Guterson

“In clean elastic prose, Steve Yarbrough has fashioned a rich dark fable out of his Mississippi material—a fable whose moral applies as much today as it would have in the yesterday it’s written about.”
—Kent Haruf

“Steve Yarbrough’s Visible Spirits is fiercely remembered in the blood of every Deltacrat. A powerful novel that lays the guilt down freshly in a story that’s irresistible and, finally, howling to be told. True Art.” —Barry Hannah

From the Inside Flap

In 1902, in a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, nearly a generation after the end of slavery, events obscured by time but impossible to forgive or forget echo in the lives of blacks and whites alike. As bound together by history as they are separated by mutual distrust, the citizens of Loring face present tensions as they look toward an uncertain future.
Into this charged atmosphere rides Tandy Payne-prodigal son of a prominent planter and brother of the current mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate. When he takes advantage of a perceived slight from the town's black postmistress, the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by dark and brutal memories, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside. Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, reason with blood, in this moving novel that explores the farthest boundaries of human nature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375411593
• ISBN 13: 9780375411595
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288