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It’s the mid-1960s, and Walter Selby is living the American dream or so he thinks. A decorated World War II veteran, he has a beautiful wife and children and an important job as the right-hand man to the governor of Tennessee. Selby seems to have everything going for him, but on the first page of Jim Lewis’ new novel, The King Is Dead, his dream starts to crumble. He comes home early, delighted to have some extra time with his wife, and finds her palms are wet. It’s the first clue that all in Selby’s world is not as secure as it seems. His wife, Nicole, cannot forget the past, in which she loved a jazz musician with a passion that eclipses the tame affection she feels for her husband. Unable to commit herself emotionally to her marriage, she undertakes a series of meaningless affairs until her husband catches a lover naked in his backyard. Soon his destiny spins out of control.

The first two-thirds of the novel focuses on Selby, and the last third takes up the story of his troubled son, Frank, a boy brought up in foster and adoptive homes, haunted by his past. Lewis also peoples his tapestry with a myriad of small character portraits, including a moving description of Kimmie, Frank’s first love a beautiful, but psychologically fragile young woman who falls over the edge of sanity into a gulf of paranoia and obsession.

The Selbys, father and son, intersect with the century’s key institutions: war, Hollywood, illegal immigration, industrialization and violent crime. In a page-turning narrative, Lewis explores the underbelly of American society from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s eviction of poor African Americans to the failure of the U.S. military to protect its minority soldiers during the world wars. Lewis’ writing distills what is most important about the social and political realities of his age. Like the Victorian political storyteller Anthony Trollope, Lewis is more than a novelist. In The King Is Dead, he has produced an ambitious epic of ideas, one that, in many ways, captures the changes and attitudes of the 20th century. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

arker makes second splash It’s been eight years since Michael Parker introduced himself with Hello Down There, a debut novel the New York Times called “a serious, memorable novel that begins a very serious career.” Now Parker’s follow-up, a book that was “never supposed to be my second novel,” continues the story of the residents of fictional Trent, North Carolina. Filled with melancholy prose and slow Southern charm, Towns Without Rivers takes readers on a journey to escape family and find identity. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Reka (short for Eureka) has just been released from jail after serving time for administering a fatal overdose to her morphine-addicted boyfriend.

“[Reka] makes some awful decisions in this novel,” Parker says. “But that’s what we do; we make questionable decisions in our lives and learn the hard way.” BookPage caught up with the boyish-looking author on the fourth stop of his 14-city book tour where he revealed what it means to be a Southern writer and discussed the ups and downs of crossing the country to promote a book.

Why did you come back to the characters from Hello Down There? I ended that book on a real ambiguous note and a lot of people would ask me what happened afterwards. I never would say, and it was really because I didn’t know. It wasn’t because I was being coy; I just didn’t know. So I really wrote the book to find out what happened to them afterwards. Also, I was really interested in the challenge of writing about characters over time and writing about them after other things have happened to them that I didn’t actually write. That part of it intrigued me.

You’ve been called a Southern writer. Do you accept that label? Yeah, proudly. I do, and then I have problems with it at the same time, because I feel that it limits my work. I had a review last week for this book, and the guy took me to task for not reinventing Southern literature, which is not at all what I set out to do.

There’s a great tradition there, which I’m happy to be a part of, but I don’t really feel like I am trying to carry on the mantle of [William] Faulkner and [Flannery] O’Connor.

How would you describe your Southern writing style? I think my characters have a relationship to place that people assume is real Southern because they love where they come from or they hate where they come from, but they are never indifferent towards it. And that’s something that people think is intrinsically Southern.

Also, most of my characters love language and delight in language. They’re subtly indirect and very alive. And I think Southerners excel at that kind of irony.

It almost seems like you’re fascinated with words themselves. Yeah, that’s what Hello Down There was really about about language and how you define yourself by what you say. There’s a great discrepancy between the words you use to say something and the way you really feel, so that’s something I’m interested in writing about. Writing is like that you’re trying to nail it, you’re trying to say what happens to these people, but there’s always this other story that’s not getting told and trying to get on the page somehow.

I like the title of your new book and I was just wondering if you could explain the significance of Towns Without Rivers. The way I go about titling is that I have titles that I like and I try to make them work for the book instead of it coming up organically, which is pretty stupid really. Don’t tell anybody. This one I just liked the idea; I’ve thought a lot about how rivers can change towns and how the presence of the river means something to the people that are there, and how landlocked towns are different from towns that are on water. It just has to do with the way people are being defined by place and where they are.

You teach creative writing. Have any of your students read your work? Some of them have.

Any feedback? They’re shy about talking about it to me. But some of them aren’t. They say, I read your book and I thought it stank.’ That’s fine with me; at least they read it.

The pleasure of reading a good philosophical novel is a greedy one. Not only do you get to enjoy interesting characters in dramatic situations, you are also confronted with the ideas that have formed those characters and led them into those situations. The ideas can assume a life of their own, becoming “characters” in their own right, crackling and uncontrollable, full of promise and risk. The ideas of Whitbread Award-winning British author Nicholas Mosley are out of control in just this beautiful way in his new novel, Inventing God. As the title suggests, Mosley sets in motion an inquiry into what a new idea of God might be an idea that could offer more hope for humanity than the current belief systems. Even the central character of the book is more an idea than a person, a maverick theologian named Maurice Rotblatt who has disappeared from Beirut and is presumed murdered by terrorists for his radical statements about the follies of various religions. To the other protagonists, who are all searching for Maurice in one way or another, his absence is almost God-like. If they could only understand what he really meant and what happened to him, then Maurice’s new vision of God could be realized.

Mosley gradually unfolds the ways in which, from disparate points, the men and women in his story become bound to each other and so to the quest. At a crucial juncture, a connection arises between a Muslim man involved in biological weapons research and an Israeli teenager. Their tale is strange proof of a new theology, depending not on ethnic identity, doctrine, or even on God, but on individuals who take responsibility for each other. Such a story seems a small sort of miracle in the end, not much on which to build a religion. But that is precisely Mosley’s point: inventing God anew demands the assigning of ultimate significance to what happens between one person and another. God, as in a good novel, is in such details. Michael Alec Rose teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.