Photo courtesy Little, Brown and Company
The new novel from author and former Richmond resident Kevin Powers, “A Shout in the Ruins” hits store shelves this month and addresses the nature of violence, its place in American society, and how we either learn from or forget our past.
Set during the Civil War and spanning about 90 years beyond, “A Shout in the Ruins” follows the fates of the inhabitants of the fictional Beauvais Plantation in Chesterfield County. The novel tells the stories of the plantation owners and slaves and the future that results from decisions made, exploring what happens when history turns into memory and memory turns into history.
Image courtesy Shreve Williams Public Relations, LLC
Powers who now resides in Austin, Texas, grew up in Chesterfield County, and he used his knowledge of the area to shape the different eras of the novel, all surrounded by Richmond’s role in the slave trade. Mentioning actual places such as Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, aka The Devil’s Half Acre, Powers says his goal was to connect readers with the past and draw correlations with current American society.
“Especially for people in Richmond who happen to read the book, it’s dealing with serious subject matter; it’s heavy, and my intention is not to get people to see the bleakness of the world, but to read the book [and] consider what that history really means for Richmond, for Virginia and for America, rather than letting [that history] live on a shelf of the library in the history section,” Powers says. “Readers can decide for themselves, but I think we have a responsibility to acknowledge that history is still alive.”
This is Powers' second novel. His first, “The Yellow Birds,” is based on his experiences touring in Iraq in 2004-05 while serving in the Army National Guard. That award-winning book made the New York Times best seller list and has been adapted into a film starring Alden Ehrenreich, Jennifer Aniston, Tye Sheridan and Toni Collette. It will be available streaming on demand and in select theaters next month.
While on the surface his two novels seem to address different subject matter, Powers says that’s actually not the case. “In a weird way, the subject and the setting and the specifics are very different, but they have a lot in common, at least in my mind, thematically,” he says. Powers notes that the large-scale violence he saw while overseas was something that he couldn’t have imagined prior to experiencing it. “I started to look at Richmond, Virginia and really America as a whole through that lens, and I looked at our shared history and the way that it changed my perception of that history,” Powers says.
He notes that while he certainly was aware of history through what he had learned in school, his epiphany during his tour connected him much more to what he already knew. “Having that added layer with a real, personal experience with violence and seeing how it affected the people who I saw living [through it], in a sense I wanted to try and address it and these questions that I had about how the past influences our present and the ways in which that legacy is not quarantined off in the history books.”
Powers notes that he immersed himself in his research for the novel and found himself surprised by the utter pervasiveness of slavery in America. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised with it,” he says. “It wasn’t just sort of woven into the economy, it was the economy … of course you understand that these things happened, but to be confronted with how powerful a force it was, how pervasive it was in every aspect of life, it was shocking, but appropriately shocking. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, it was a thing that happened a long time ago,’ it was a thing that in many ways defined the origins of the commonwealth.”
Powers hopes this novel gets readers thinking critically and allows them to take a closer look at history. “[The novel is] a combination of knowledge that a lot of us get growing up in Richmond and in Virginia and approaching the [historical] periods with real intention, trying to make sure I do justice to the important work that historians do to preserve that history.”
Kevin Powers will be at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Thursday, May 17, for a reading and signing hosted by Chop Suey Books. The event is free to attend and begins at 7 p.m.
