By John Lang
John Lang is a retired Professor of English from Emory & Henry University.
Mark Powell may be unique among Southern novelists, not in having graduated from the Citadel (Pat Conroy famously preceded him in that regard) but in adding to that degree one from Yale Divinity School. His ninth novel, “The Late Rebellion,” reveals his intense interest in both war and religion, among other topics, as major thematic concerns. But the book is also a probing analysis of Southern identity, past and present, with special emphasis on the Appalachian South, “a place,” Powell has said, “far more diverse and complex than generally presented.” The book’s title refers not only to the Civil War but also to a documentary film made by one of Powell’s characters about the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse following the racially motivated mass shooting in 2015 at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church.
Set during the first Trump presidency, the novel focuses on a four-day period in its characters’ lives, although their memories of earlier experiences allow Powell to transition smoothly into past events as well. In large part a multi-generational saga revolving around the Greaves family, the book also includes a varied cast of engaging secondary characters, especially Nayma Gonzalez, a 17-year-old student whose grandparents the Greaves employ, and Elias Agnew, a former minister whose faith had lapsed, now teaching high school English.
The opening scene describes a fall that seriously injures Rose Greaves, the family matriarch and mother of Richard. That accident isn’t discovered until the following morning because Richard had failed to visit Rose that evening after learning that he, the Mountain Empire Bank’s founder and president, is under investigation by the FBI for financial malfeasance. Instead, he goes home and drinks heavily while awaiting the arrival of his younger son, Tom, from a three-month sojourn in eastern Europe, a trip that Tom had once characterized as a “pilgrimage.”
Some readers may feel that Powell packs too many special events into the book’s four-day time frame (Thursday through Sunday morning): Rose’s fall; the Germantown community’s annual Oktoberfest; the 25th high school reunion of Richard’s daughter Emily; the football team’s homecoming game, overseen by Richard’s older son, Jack, the school’s athletic director; and Tom’s return home to both a family dinner and a public performance of his skills as a former champion on “American Ninja.”
But through this range of events Powell discloses the personal crises and assorted challenges the characters face. Most find themselves dissatisfied with the direction their lives have taken. While their unease arises from quite different causes, the characters share a willingness to question themselves and their conduct, as well as to embrace change. For Powell this process of self-examination is crucial to authentic identity, whether individual or national.
Throughout the book Powell skillfully shifts narrative point of view among nearly a dozen characters so that the reader comes to know their thoughts and emotions intimately as the plot unfolds. Such shifts also heighten suspense by leaving the outcome of an event or intention temporarily uncertain. While the book’s closing episodes don’t indicate whether all the characters will resolve their problems, Powell does conclude the Sunday section, narrated from Elias’s perspective, with both a moving portrait of family unity that extends beyond blood ties and Elias’s renewed vision of divine light suffusing “all God’s creation.” “The Late Rebellion” thus combats what Richard thinks of as “the heart’s calcification” and what Leonard Cohen, to whose song “The Future” Tom alludes, describes as “the blizzard of the world” that “has overturned the order of the soul.” By turns ironic and satiric, tragic and comic and poignant, this is a masterfully crafted book.
