Soldier's Joy (First Edition)

A man returns home from Vietnam to his now abandoned family homestead outside of Nashville, suffering from a serious psychological wound incurred in combat. He meets up with a childhood friend who is black, and together they battle against a platoon of Klansmen for the literal salvation of a local preacher.

Bell's impressive talents as a writer, which include endowing settings (here the landscape of rural Tennessee) with the significance of character, and a patient, compassionate probing of injured souls, are on full display in this uneven but intriguing story of a young Vietnam veteran's slow, brave resumption of civilian life. Thomas Laidlaw lives alone on his family land; he raises sheep, grows hay and vegetables, roams the countryside at night and practices his banjo. (The title is the name of a song as well as reference to a questionable legacy of the Vietnam war; as in his Zero db and Other Stories , the author's absorption with music enriches his prose). Gradually Laidlaw reestablishes his friendship with Rodney Redmon, a black man he'd grown up with and with whom he'd spent time in Vietnam. Also gradually--the operative word for most of the book, where details accumulate with the authority of a natural process--Laidlaw puts together a band, including the fiddler Adrienne, whose lover he becomes, and they begin to play at local bars. At the end, when Laidlaw, Redmon and a third reclusive vet are involved in a shoot-out with a cadre of Klansmen who attack a popular evangelist, the story disintegrates in an unexpected, if powerful, finale. For all its lack of balance, this novel's rewards far outweigh its flaws.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Though in no way a typical "Vietnam novel," this major work by critically respected Bell concerns the postwar lives of two veterans from rural Tennessee. The two men are introduced separately, as Laidlaw (a white) returns to his dead father's land and teaches himself to play the banjo, while Redmon (a black) leaves jail (he'd been set up), works in a warehouse, and hangs out at a Muslim restaurant. When they meet up, these boyhood companions resume an uneasy friendship until local racial tension forces them to draw on their military training in a dramatic finale. With its well-developed characters and well-maintained tension for such a long story, this important, insightful novel belongs in most libraries.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.