Grant's War: A Novel of the Civil War - Hardcover

An ambitious first novel that attempts to explore the Civil War career of Ulysses S. Grant on two levels: a recounting of actual events during the war years by those who were there, and an interpretation of those events through the eyes of a young scholar attempting to write a book--during 1917-20--about the controversial general. This is a most unusual--and sometimes rewarding--approach, but it is ultimately unsatisfactory. The basic structure here consists of young Arthur Kelly doing research: interviewing a series of old veterans (a doctor half slumbering in a hotel-lobby chair, for example, or survivors from both sides sitting and watching the Galena River flow by day after day), observing blacks and whites playing out the remnants of the slavery system in Vicksburg Square, visiting the great battle sites. The stories told by these various fictional characters help illuminate familiar events and point up Grant's brutal genius as a military leader, but they are too often dispassionate--as the memories of the elderly frequently are--and lose their dramatic impact as a result of interruptions by the narrator's questions or comments. The story is at its best when Kelly becomes directly involved--as in a brief but memorable section that shows how his experiences as a combat officer during the closing months of WW I helped him better understand his material. The War Between the States still has the capacity to move us, but by electing to chronicle most events from a position one step removed, and by interposing his fictional historian between himself and his readers, Jones has created an unnecessary barrier and is left with a story that is too often passionless and uninvolving. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Half a century after the Civil War, historian Arthur Kelly, the protagonist of this absorbing first novel, sees Ulysses S. Grant as that conflict's central figure. Emerging from self-imposed obscurity, the general vitalized a grid-locked Union war effort and defeated Robert E. Lee, one of history's great captains. Seeking to understand just how the unpretentious, unassuming Grant determined the course of history, Kelly questions survivors of the war. On front porches, in veterans' homes, in taverns and in railway coaches, he taps the old men's memories. The result is an original, intriguing approach to a subject often reduced to cliche. Jones vividly reconstructs the horror of battlefields dominated by the Minie ball--an ounce of soft lead that inflicted unimaginable wounds. Descriptions of Cold Harbor, the Bloody Angle and the Petersburg Crater convey the costs of war, while other fictional veterans' accounts provide an interpretive analysis of the Civil War that stands comparison with the most respected modern scholarship. Through Kelly, Jones puts slavery squarely at the center of the national tragedy, and he presents the depth of commitment on both sides that made the Civil War a total war--a war ending only when the Union's moral and material powers were harnessed by Grant. Jones merits particular recognition for his unusually successful balancing of history and fiction within a relatively modest compass.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.