Two-thirds of the way through the writing of her luminous first novel, Mother of Pearl, Melinda Haynes started working on a second novel. The process that had taken her deep into Mother of Pearl had been so amazing and inexplicable that she was afraid it was just a one-time thing. She needed to test this new experience out.

"When I started the second book, I thought ‘Oh, man, I hope the same thing happens as it did with Mother of Pearl,’" Haynes says during a phone call to her home in Grand Bay, Alabama. "Then I thought, No, what I hope will happen is that I realize that I’m the force behind all this."

Well, Mother of Pearl is now in the bookstores. It’s a Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Club selection. It arrives with enthusiastic advance notices. And Melinda Haynes is pretty clearly the force behind it all. But at 44 years of age, the first-time novelist is still dumbfounded by what is happening to her.

Afflicted by panic disorder since childhood—before anyone even knew what panic disorder was—Haynes didn’t finish high school. "I would ride the bus to school at 7 in the morning and get off and walk back home. At the end of the 11th grade, I just couldn’t handle it anymore."

She dropped out of school and got married right away. "My dad is a preacher, a Baptist minister. He was the pastor of two small churches in Petal, Mississippi, and he was finishing up at New Orleans Theological Seminary while we were living in Hattiesburg. Well, I married another preacher’s kid. We were too young. It was the wrong thing to do, but I didn’t really admit it was a mistake until 20 years later. We were just dirt poor. I mean I was living the definition of poor Southern: three daughters in diapers, no education, and no job."

At some point during these years, a friend paid for her to study art, and she discovered that she had talent. "Basically, I just had a gift. My grandfather, Opie Braswell, painted baptistry scenes, and he taught me from the time I was real small about the values of light and color and how to really stand still and see things." The classes at a local gallery emboldened her. Haynes ended up supporting herself and her family by painting commission portraits. Her paintings and water colors won local and national awards. "By the time I crashed and burned, I was making $6,000 per portrait," she says. But "everything depended on pleasing someone else. I crashed is what happened, and I was in the hospital for a while. And Dad came in and told me ‘It’s time to take the pack off. You’re trying too hard to fix something that cannot be fixed.’ He was talking about my marriage, and I knew it."

Part of what Melinda Haynes calls her "crashing experience" led her to the Catholic Church, to a job as production manager for the Archdiocese of Mobile’s newspaper, The Catholic Week, and eventually to her current husband, Ray. "The news that I converted really hit my father hard. It was tragic. It was also a turning point in my life. I was practically middle-aged, and I was suddenly breaking away from everything I had done—painting, my husband, my father. I experienced independence for the first time. Even my children, who were grown, were completely shocked by it."

She also began writing fiction. A short story at first; then something longer. "I wrote the short story and I fell in love with one of the characters. I didn’t know if I could write. But the story was so big, I thought I would just try and meet it half way." Later, sounding perplexed, she adds, "This is such a puzzle. I’ve been thinking about this for days, trying to figure out where this came from. The story just fell into place. Is this a common experience with writers? I don’t have any way to measure it. There’s no measuring stick for Mother of Pearl. It’s like the story was waiting there in the weeds by the side of the road."

Set in Petal and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the mid-1950s, Mother of Pearl tells the intersecting stories of Even Grade, a 27-year-old black man who was orphaned at birth, and Valuable Korner, a 14-year-old white girl who is the daughter of the town whore and an unknown father. Raised by her grandmother, Valuable longs for a real family and turns increasingly to Jackson McLain, the neighbor boy she has grown up with, for emotional sustenance. Even Grade, who becomes the moral center of the book, falls in love with Joody Two Sun, the local prophetess/witch who lives in the woods by a creek, where she reads the future for visitors. When Valuable becomes pregnant with the baby she wants to name Pearl, she turns to Even and Joody for assistance. They draw a family of friends around themselves, and Mother of Pearl becomes a powerful novel about destiny, identity, family, forgiveness, and love.

"The location is completely real," Haynes says; "the visuality of it is real. The cemetery is real. I know the creek because of my dad baptizing down there. The way Joleb Green feels about life is similar to what I felt: he’s just your typical bungler, and that’s really the way I saw myself. The way he’s afraid of everything. I’m afraid of so many things, it’s just ridiculous. Everything I was afraid of, I put in the book. But other than that, it is not autobiographical. My mother wanted to know if anything had happened to me like what had happened to Valuable. And I said ‘No!’

"It’s a strange way of looking at it," Haynes continues. "Even though I created these characters, I feel like they created me. Any time I’m talking about the book, I feel they’re with me. It’s a new strength. I look for Even Grade in every person I meet. I owe so much to Even Grade, because he changed me. He taught me to take a deeper look."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

Time has moved in mysterious ways for writer Howard Bahr. It wasn't until 1973, when he was 27 years old, that he became a college freshman at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, "so deeply moved by the writing of Mr. William Faulkner that I wanted to be where he had written about." He then spent much of the next two decades working at Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home, and writing "a real cheap imitation of Mr. Faulkner's baroque prose." He then spent a good deal more time learning how not to write like William Faulkner. And finally, last year, well along in life, he published his first novel, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, a darkly radiant work, released this month as a Henry Holt Owl paperback. It blossomed in the shadow of the extravagant success of another first novel set in the South during the Civil War, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

About these and the other odd turns his life has taken, Mr. Bahr is philosophical. "Nothing happens before it's supposed to," he tells me during a telephone call to his home in Tennessee, where he has lived for the last five years, teaching English at nearby Motlow State Community College. "It just took me all this time to get ready, to prepare, to learn enough to be able to do it."

The "it" in question — The Black Flower — is a wonderfully compact novel with authentic emotional power. Set during the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) in November 1864, the novel's action spans barely a single day and ranges over a narrow corner of one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War. At the story's center is Bushrod Carter, a 26-year-old veteran soldier from Mississippi, and his two boyhood friends, Jack Bishop and Virgil C. Joining them in the line of battle are two conscripts, the memorably evil Simon Ropes and the dull-witted Nebo Gloster. There is humor in Mr. Bahr's depiction of the friendship of the soldiers, and a terrible beauty in his description of the chaos of battle and its effects on his characters. But The Black Flower only reaches its full force when the armies have moved on and the wounded Bushrod Carter meets Anna Hereford.

According to Mr. Bahr he had always wanted to write "a realistic but pretty Civil War story," working on The Black Flower as a short story for nearly three years. "Then I got to a certain point — specifically where Virgil C. gets shot in the back of the head — and I ended it there. But the characters were not finished. They kept clamoring and clamoring. And so I commenced to writing some more, and pretty soon Anna showed up. She's based on a student I had here that I loved very deeply and who was eventually killed in a car wreck. When Anna showed up I didn't have anything but trouble after that. The characters started taking off in all directions, and suddenly I had a novel. Suddenly after three years."

Mr. Bahr's manuscript was rejected — apparently unread — by several reputable publishers. He sent it finally to the Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company, a small press that usually specializes in military nonfiction but was seeking first novels about the Civil War and other historical topics. The Black Flower was published with excellent reviews and limited sales, and almost simultaneously with Cold Mountain, the runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner.

The comparisons are inevitable: both are love stories, both take place during the Civil War, both are written by writers with an ear for language.

Mr. Bahr has the formal, gracious manners of the 19th-century South, using "Yessir" and "Nossir" to reply. He refers to writers who have influenced him as "Mister" — Mr. William Faulkner, Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mr. Loren Eisley, Mr. T.H. White, and Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter includes the sentence that gave Mr. Bahr his title, "Let the black flower blossom as it may."

"Cold Mountain is a beautiful book," Mr. Bahr says without reservation. "But the two books are about two different things. His is a journey novel, not a war book at all. His [central] character is much different from mine. He is so much more attuned to nature and the Indians, and he doesn't believe in God. He's an almost New Age person. So while I thought Cold Mountain was a lovely book, I would not trade books with Mr. Frazier."

In fact, Mr. Bahr is entirely proud of his book's authenticity. "I believe it to be a true representation of the human experience, of people in a bad situation finding redemption and love." For its details, Mr. Bahr walked the Franklin battlefield, explored the McGavock house — around which most of the fictional action takes place — drew on 20 years of experience as a Civil War re-enactor for his vivid depictions of smells and sounds of battle, and mined his own experiences of the Vietnam War to capture the startling disassociations of battle.

"There is a mystical quality to the experience because it is so awful. When people are in a situation like that, their minds push away from it. The Archbishop of Canterbury [a character who loses his mind on the battlefield] just refuses to accept it and shifts to another identity. And when Bushrod gets into battle, his 'other' takes over. Although I was never in really bad combat, whenever we'd get in ticklish situations, I found that to be true. It was like I was watching somebody else doing it. Only later did I realize, or remember, that it was me."

But the most remarkable achievement of The Black Flower may be the 19th-century sensibility that informs it. This is due to an oddity of Mr. Bahr himself. He is certain that he would have been more comfortable in the last century than his own. He adheres to "what Mr. Robert Penn Warren called the threshold principle: in my own house I have the world the way I want it." That means no television and no computer, something he considers "a great evil." He even has a rotary phone. "But," he adds dryly, "not long ago I did buy caller ID because I realized that it is the greatest weapon against technology I have ever encountered."

"I have never felt comfortable in my own time," Mr. Bahr says. "Now in the late 20th century I sometimes feel like I'm on another planet. But eventually you tell yourself you've got to accept the world you've been given — because there's no alternative. And I do find plenty of wonderful things in this world."

Lucky thing. Because with the paperback release of The Black Flower, and with a little good fortune, Mr. Howard Bahr's time may have come at last.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to this publication.

Charismatic and controversial, Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest has been the subject of many a narrative. Now, novelist Madison Smartt Bell–a fellow son of Tennessee, National Book Award finalist and entertaining dinner companion–takes on this complicated man in Devil's Dream, a thought-provoking and deeply felt study of a general who truly was larger than life (Forrest was six-foot-two, almost as tall as President Lincoln and an unusual height for the time).

Devil's Dream guides readers through much of Forrest's life, from his unconventional courtship of Southern belle Mary Ann Montgomery to the close of the Civil War. Bell, who most recently chronicled the Haitian uprising in a trilogy of novels based on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, has created a vivid portrayal of Forrest, who was a natural leader and an amazing horseman (he claimed 30 were shot out from under him during the war) as well as a slave trader and staunch supporter of the Confederacy. We asked Bell a few questions about history, Forrest and the war's legacy.

Much is made of Forrest's ability to inspire his men against the odds. What would you say was his best quality as a general?
To get it into one sentence: he would do anything himself that he would ask his men to do, from carrying provisions across a ford to charging a numerically superior enemy all out. A leader that actually leads in that way—out in front when the going is tough and the risk is high—is kinda special.

The structure of Devil's Dream is unusual—the chapters move backward and forward in time, from Forrest's marriage to the end of the Civil War. How did you decide on an order for the chapters?
Well. The proximate motive was to keep it from getting too long. . . . I needed to cover Forrest’s whole career in the war and a chronological linear approach would have swole up on me, I feared. So I picked four narrative lines that I thought I would weave altogether throughout the book, and then I began writing what I thought were the most attractive episodes in any order. When I had about half of them done, me and my daughter (also a fiction writer, then in high school) spread all the chapters out on the floor and played solitaire with them till there was a tentative arrangement. The rest of the chapters were fit into that arrangement (which evolved as it went along and as I wrote more chapters).

Aside from controlling the length I thought this approach would allow me to arrange events thematically more than chronologically, which seemed like it might be good.  I had some grave doubts along the way about whether this experimental approach was working out well or not, but most readers seem to like it . . . so far.

Henri, a black man from Haiti, is the novel's other central character, and much of the tale is told through his eyes. He calls Forrest "a man you can follow" despite having originally planned to come to America to lead a slave rebellion. What inspired this character?
Jack Kershaw, lawyer, polymath, outsider artist of real distinction, perhaps best known to you as the creator of the Bedford Forrest equestrian statue on I-65 north of Old Hickory [in Nashville], told me a story that Forrest’s personal bodyguard was all black men and captained by a son of Toussaint L'Ouverture. I could find no evidence to support this assertion (and any blood son of Toussaint would have been over 60 by the time of the Civil War).  But I liked this idea, and in a novel you do get to make things up. I created a Haitian character who had some misfortunate involvement with actual events in Haiti around the right time and needed to go elsewhere for a while.
 
Devil's Dream ends after peace is declared, without going into Forrest's life after the war and his controversial involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Do you feel that the war was the most meaningful part of his life?
I think the post-war events are a really a separate story. I think the war was the peak of Forrest’s life, though (in spite of his great talent for pure violence as well as military tactics and strategy) I don’t think he’d have chosen for it to be. The war wore him out and broke his health—he never completely recovered.  

As for the KKK, a chronology of real events at the end of my novel throws some light on it. Because of the secrecy it’s hard to know anything for dead sure, but what seems likely is that Forrest did not found the Klan, as is often alleged, but was invited to assume its leadership by Nashvillean John Morton, who had been his artillery commander during the war. Forrest had enough prestige to enforce some organization and discipline, which can be hard to do in a clandestine terrorist organization spread over such a large region.

The Reconstruction KKK was devoted to restoring white supremacy and getting back political rights for former Confederates. It was among other things a resistance movement on the part of a people whose territory was under military occupation by a hostile power. In that sense, the Reconstruction KKK resembles entities like, say, the PLO more than it does later avatars that cropped up in the 1930s and 1960s, which I consider to be racist fascist hate groups and nothing more. The Reconstruction Klan was disbanded after Confederates got their political rights back and Forrest did say that he ordered it to be permanently disbanded at that time, which I am inclined to believe.

Forrest offered freedom to some of the slaves that served with him, and called for harmony between the races in at least two public speeches after the Civil War. Yet he was a slave trader and Klan member. How do you explain these contradictory impulses? Do they need to be explained?
The contradictions are certainly interesting and rather hard to figure out.  For one thing I think Forrest was not a very reflective person, and so could accommodate paradoxes in his being and behavior more comfortably than more reflective people could.

Beyond that, I think the key is that Forrest did nothing half-heartedly. At the end of the war he desperately wanted to go to Texas or Mexico to carry on some kind of struggle in one of those places but he was persuaded by Anderson that it would be wrong to abandon his soldiers that way. So he threw himself into dealing with the consequences of defeat with all the energy he had thrown into the war. The Klan was about making the conditions of defeat more tolerable to the interest group to which Forrest belonged. Once the Klan disbanded though, Forrest was vociferous in denouncing white on black racial violence, and did work quite seriously for racial reconciliation.

Now I have no doubt that Forrest was a white supremacist through and through, that he thought blacks inferior to whites and believed that blacks needed to be governed and directed by whites . . . as in fact did most white men of his time. (Abolitionists who were also true egalitarians, like Wendell Philips, were exceptional).

A big difference between Forrest and most others in the South is that he had more contact with a greater variety of black people because he was a slave trader. Forrest was constantly encountering every type of person who was in slavery. He had far more acquaintance and knowledge of them than most—and I think that in spite of that deep vein of virulent racism his instinct was to take individuals one at a time and finally judge them (um, to quote a famous phrase) on the content of their character.

Another thing, Forrest was a pragmatist and a somewhat unusually farsighted one.  That allowed him to understand what Sherman was up to way before anybody else, during the war . . . and after the war, I think he was early to understand that for the South to recover its social harmony and prosperity there would have to be meaningful racial reconciliation, acceptable to both whites and blacks. That idea did not get itself generally accepted until the 1960s, and then not without a lot of struggle and pain.

There are many memorable monuments to Forrest throughout the South—even schools have been named in his honor. These often inspire controversy. Do you feel those who want to remove Forrest's name from buildings, etc., have a valid case?
If there are public schools named for Bedford Forrest I think they should take his name off the door and put a few good books about him in the library and require students to read them alongside the works of Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth, and so on.  In general it’s probably not a great idea to name schools for combatants in a civil war.

More generally, I believe the principle is the same as not flying the Confederate battle flag on government buildings—the flag, or the enshrinement of the Confederate hero in the school, is bound to make some people think they will not get the unbiased treatment they are entitled to, when they go into those places looking for education or for justice.

I feel differently about Civil War monuments on the battlefield sites, and squares and so on.  These memorialize one aspect of the story: the struggle and sacrifice of white men fighting for what each side at the time conceived to be its nation.  That’s only part of the whole story but it is important and it would be stupid and destructive to push it into oblivion. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to . . . etc.  At the same time, there could stand to be a few more monuments commemorating the struggle and sacrifice of other classes of people, particularly black people of the period, in and out of slavery. I’m for putting up more and tearing none down.

You started out writing contemporary fiction, but your recent works have been historical fiction. What is it about the past that inspires you? Do you think you'll continue to write historical fiction?
Well, the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution struck me as a wonderful tale that few Americans knew anything about at the time I started working on it. . . . A discovery, that is.

And in general I think that diving into the past every so often is good for refreshing your sense of the present. I like to write a mix of contemporary and historical narratives.

What are you working on next?
A book with a basically contemporary setting, otherwise so weird I can’t really describe it, and a novel about the Creek Wars (which pitted Andrew Jackson against Lamochattee (aka Red Eagle and William Weatherford).

What are you reading now?
Mvskoke language instruction, Karl Kerenyi’s book on Dionysus, memoirs of Milfort, Davy Crocket, Benjamin Hawkins and Sam Dale,  Yanvalou pour Charlie by Lionel Trouillot, essays by Edwidge Danticat, a book on the “Clovis” people in Pleistocene America,  novel about Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn, novel about stock and bond traders by Cortwright McMeel, The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola… you know, stuff like that.

On the telephone from her home on the coast of South Carolina, Josephine Humphreys talks about her new book in a soft, thoughtful voice. Her accent is a beautiful subspecies of East Coast Southern. The overall tone is similar to the compassionate voice that has won her fiction both popular and critical acclaim. Probably best known for her novel Rich in Love (which Hollywood made into a film), she is the author of two other highly regarded novels, Dreams of Sleep and The Fireman’s Fair. She has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Humphreys speaks excitedly about the arduous but joyful task of writing her new novel, Nowhere Else on Earth. "The new book is almost a total change for me, in terms of subject, method — everything’s different," Humphreys says. "Before this book, I used to say that my ideas for a story began with a vague feeling that I wanted to follow. In my first three books, writing was a process of discovery for me. Everything was written without a plan. I never thought out a plot in advance."

Nowhere Else on Earth was a whole new ballgame. "The story existed before I began," Humphreys says. She has had it in mind ever since she heard the facts behind it as a teenager. Rhoda Strong, the book’s narrator, was a real woman who came of age during the Civil War. She lived in an impoverished Indian community along the Lumbee River in North Carolina, the daughter of a Lumbee Indian and an immigrant Scot. Rhoda’s heroism in the face of white violence and attempts at subjugation became legendary in the region. Humphreys researched the setting and era until she breathed its very air. By doing so, she allowed her characters to perform their drama on a fully realized stage without seeming like reanimated museum pieces.

There are two kinds of historical fiction — lightweight genre pieces about a certain era (a perfectly respectable form of entertainment) and serious novels that happen to be set in the past. Nowhere Else on Earth is in the latter category. Although it is fast-moving, suspenseful, and amusing, it is very much about what Serious Critics like to call "the human condition": growing, loving, working, and dying.

"My life and era are illuminated by Rhoda’s in a thousand ways," Humphreys says. "One is that my notion of ‘Southernness’ has changed because of her, because of the book. My thinking about race has changed. My ideas about community identity and racial identity, about the fate of Native Americans — these have all changed. Also, I think I know more about the difference between private dreams and community dreams. While I was working, I saw what she dreamed of in the beginning as a girl. She dreamed of private discovery and love. But she learns through the man — and he learns through her — that it’s important to work for a better, bigger world."

Humphreys orchestrates masterful changes of pace and tone even in a single scene. For example, about halfway through the book Rhoda is left to tend a dying soldier. At first she finds his bloody, filthy body offensive. However, thinking that he is dying, she cleans him up and even cuts his hair. As she nurses him, reflecting on her mother’s comment that one who comforts winds up comforted, she begins to see him as a sacrifice, then a heroic figure, then the very embodiment of America. She reads the heartbreaking note he left to be found on his body. Yet suddenly the scene turns comic as the soldier begins to revive. Then it takes still another direction. When you reach the end of the chapter, you realize you have been in the hands of a writer who is securely in charge of her material, and that it comes alive for us because it came alive for her.

"There’s a wonderful crossover between me and Rhoda, a connection that I haven’t had in any of my earlier books with characters. I feel that. . . ." She pauses and thinks about it and begins again. "Trite as it sounds, I feel that she, for a short while, inhabited me. I feel that there was such an amazing closeness that I realized a power that fiction had never had for me before — and that I really would never have guessed that it could have. When I describe it, it sounds like hallucination. But as I get older, life does get more mysterious and more wonderfully surprising — whereas my young life was very rationally controlled. Now I realize that there is more that we don’t know."

"I don’t feel that I have a mission to discover and publish untold stories," Humphreys points out. "The Rhoda story is well known in North Carolina. I don’t approach things that carefully. I just know that there’s a presence that I can’t ignore. To ignore it would be to write something not necessarily inferior, but somehow secondary to what I should be doing. To think of it as alchemy — to think of it as the discovery of a transformation process that I can get back into — seems a good approximation of what I feel. You want something that explains other things to you. I think that’s why I love this woman — because getting back to her helped me understand so much of the rest of the world. I hated to let her go." Humphreys laughs. "But that’s the great thing about writing — that you can keep doing it and, even when you finish a book and give up those characters, there are more waiting. I love it. I feel very lucky to be allowed to do this."

Fans of Nowhere Else on Earth will be pleased to learn that Humphreys is already working on a second historical novel. "It’s about a man I inadvertently came across and was stunned by — a man I had never heard of before, but who seems to me crucial to understanding our history."

She laughs again. "I am obsessed and possessed already. My family is dismayed. They knew how long this Rhoda book took me. And they heard me say several times in the past few years that I would never undertake another historical novel. Every time I said that, everybody said, ‘Thank God.’ And now I am beginning another one and no one can believe it." This time she laughs almost in embarrassment. "But I can’t help it. I honestly can’t help it."

Michael Sims is a writer, curator, and regular contributor to BookPage.

Author photo by Tom Hutcheson.

The problem with catching literary lightning, as Dennis Lehane did with Mystic River, is, how do you follow it? Now that he has done so, and even surpassed himself, with his deeply moving historical novel The Given Day, the problem falls to readers to find something—anything—that doesn't pale in comparison once they've closed the covers on this 720-page masterpiece. Quite simply, The Given Day is about as close to the great American novel as we're likely to read until . . . well, until Lehane writes another.

If Mystic River was a perfectly controlled roller coaster ride, The Given Day is an entire amusement park of themes, subjects, subplots, set pieces, real and fictional characters, and good old midnight-oil-burning storytelling set during the year leading up to the 1919 Boston police strike. It's a year in which Danny Coughlin, son of police legend Capt. Thomas Coughlin, will come to lead the strikers in their struggle for a living wage. It's a year in which Luther Laurence, a displaced black munitions worker in Capt. Coughlin's employ, will discover that honor knows no color. It's a year in which America will squarely face both the bombings of Bolsheviks bent on igniting a worker's revolution and the burgeoning FBI under a youngJ. Edgar Hoover, whose war on terrorism will not be constrained by the Constitution.

Babe Ruth, who became America's first true sports celebrity during his last year with the Red Sox, serves as our Falstaffian guide. Along the way, Lehane vividly depicts the apocalyptic horrors of the 1918 flu pandemic, the unimaginable-but-true Boston Molasses Disaster, and the police strike itself, a heartbreaking Pyrrhic victory that would change the course of American unionism.

Lehane, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, had a personal interest in the historic strike. "I'm a son of a union man, and I wrote this book in some respects to say, somehow in the last 20 years in this country, we've become pretty anti-union. When Wal-Mart can thrive and people shrug, we've made a real mistake," he says. "I wanted to say hey, remember the people who gave us the weekend? Who gave us the good old eight-hour day and the 40-hour week and governed child labor? Those people matter, and the concepts matter. But big business would be very happy if they went away, and always have been."

Lehane wrestled with the ambitious scope of The Given Day for four years, offering in the meantime appetizers like Shutter Island and the short story collection Coronado to readers hungry for a full-course feast. "It took a long time, and I think I regretted coming up with the idea through 90 percent of the writing of the book. This is one time where I thought on a pretty consistent basis, what the hell did I do this for?" he admits. "When I started to tell this story and realized I couldn't exactly start in September of 1919, I had to back up a little bit. And as I did, I kept saying oh, I can't pass up that event, and I can't pass up that event, and lo and behold, I ended up back a year before. Because what gradually took hold in me was this fascination with this year, this one 12-month period in American history when you had to believe the sky was falling."

Tying so many narrative threads together, especially for a writer like Lehane who prefers to let the plot find him, led him into "the valley of darkness" where the moral ground becomes slippery.

"When I went into the Boston police strike, what came up time and time again were the questions," he says. "Yes, they had the right to strike; certainly they were aggrieved. They were getting ass-f—–ed, there's no other way to put it. At the same time, do you really want to live in a country where the police force can walk off the job? Because what happened in Boston was disastrous. With that, I felt very good, because usually when I feel I don't have the answer is when the best drama is going to happen."

As the writing progressed, Lehane began to notice strange similarities between the era of The Given Day and the current one. "I didn't set out to write a book with parallels; they just sort of happened," he says. "A lot of it was gift-wrapped for me by history. I was just writing along and it was, oh wow, isn't that interesting?" In fact, he decided to cut one 30-page descriptive passage about the molasses flood, which was initially (and wrongly) blamed on radicals, when he discovered that most of the victims were firefighters. "You just look at it and it was a very, very tiny baby 9/11, so I cut it," he says. "I was like, why don't you just hold up a sign that says allegory on it, you know?"

But there is no disguising the author's underlying fury at the state of the nation, which he sees as the bitter fruit of the ongoing struggle between the haves and the have-nots.

"Is this book enraged at the politic, or the state of the politic? Yes, without a doubt. I think I'm icily pissed off at what I see as a battle as old as time. What the haves understand, and what the institutions understand, is how to win this battle, because they've been taught very well. But they lose every now and then. The Boston police strike effectively killed the union movement in this country for several years, but when it came back, it came back twice as strong."

Although he originally intended The Given Day to be the start of a trilogy, Lehane admits it's too soon to know what will catch his interest next.

"What slows me down now is, I keep raising the internal bar," he says. "I'm not setting the standard for anybody else but myself, but that standard has to be met."

Jay MacDonald writes from molasses-free Austin, Texas.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Mystic River
Review of Prayers for Rain

Leif Enger's novel, Peace Like a River, is generating enough pre-publication buzz that it is already being compared to Charles Frazier's 1997 surprise National Book Award winner, Cold Mountain. That's not a bad comparison. Both novels seem to have come out of nowhere and arrived fully formed, alive with inspired casts of characters and powered by an old-time joy in storytelling. Of the two, Peace Like a River is the more humorous, though its humor is shaded by enough tragedy to make the experience of reading it complete and resonant.

And there all comparisons should end. Because Peace Like a River casts a spell all its own. The spell is already being felt in the book world: enthusiastic booksellers are raving, and at a recent national book convention Peace was listed as the "buzz book" to watch. All this attention comes as a total surprise to the book's author, Leif Enger. "I'm completely amazed by it," he says during a call to his home in Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two sons. In my greatest dreams of success—which every struggling writer lives upon—I didn't dream that something like this could happen."

Enger, who has wanted to write fiction since his teens, was a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio from 1984 until the sale of Peace Like a River to publisher Grove/Atlantic allowed him to take time off to write. In the 1990s, he and his older brother, Lin, writing under the pen name L.L. Enger, produced a series of mystery novels featuring a retired baseball player.

"It was one of those mercenary adventures that comes up empty-handed," Enger says with a remarkably good-natured laugh. "Nobody really read them and they didn't get much attention and we didn't get paid very much for them. We had a lot of fun doing it, and it was a fabulous apprenticeship for me."

By the time he began to write Peace Like a River six years ago, Enger had given up great expectations of publishing glory. "I figured since I had given commercial writing my very best shot, I was free to just write something that I could read to my wife and kids. When I finished a scene I would gather them around and read it to them, and if it didn't make them laugh or if it didn't provoke some strong reaction, I knew I had to go back to the drawing board. What I wanted to do and what I think I did is just put everything that I love into it. I didn't think about the book commercially until I was over half done and I realized the book was going to have an end."

As heart-warming as all that sounds, Enger also notes that the kernel of the book "was a little bit of desperation." Peace Like a River is set in the Midwest in 1962 and is an account of events that occurred when narrator Reuben Land was 11 years old. As a boy, Reuben was so severely afflicted by asthma that he was unable to draw breath at birth and was only saved by his miracle-performing father, Jeremiah.

"When I was starting the book six years ago, my son was fighting a terrible case of asthma," Enger says. "He was just fighting for breath. It was terribly frightening for Robin and me. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know how to treat it. We didn't know how to prevent it. As a parent you want to work a miracle. You would take your son's place if you could. Basically I wanted to understand what he was going through and I wanted to somehow translate my wish for his good health into the book. All I knew at the beginning was that the narrator was asthmatic and his father did miracles."

From that beginning, Enger weaves a story that is a surprising and beguiling mix of heroic quest, cowboy romance and moral fable. Reuben's older brother Davy gets caught up in an escalating feud with two small-town bullies, is charged and tried for murdering them, and when the verdict seems about to go against him, escapes on horseback for parts unknown. Reuben, his father and his younger sister Swede set out in their Airstream trailer to find the outlaw Davy Land, and along the way, Reuben learns more than most of us about sacrifice, redemption and faith.

Reuben's younger sister Swede is a writer of heroic cowboy verse about a complicated hero named Sunny Sundown. Her talents, swift wit and force of personality hold her older 11-year-old brother in her thrall. The two share a fascination for the West and, indeed, seem to live out a kind of timeless cowboy adventure.

By rights, a storyline like this should not work in a literary novel like Peace Like a River. But such is Enger's unflagging, high-spirited storytelling that the relationship between Reuben and his cowboy poet sister is a high point of the novel. As is her clunky, comical, oddly affecting verse.

"That stuff was tremendously easy to write," says Enger, who relates childhood memories of long summer afternoons dressed in a breechcloth roaming the woods and fields around their home in Osakis, Minnesota, with his older brothers. "I'm kind of like Reuben, in that I'm a very slow study of things, and don't think well on my feet. But I love people who are fast and brilliant like Swede."

He adds, "Swede almost had to be a poet and write heroic couplets and cowboy verse because I grew up being read to from Robert Service, who wrote the great sourdough poetry, The Ballad of Dan McGrew, The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill and The Ballad of the Iceworm Cocktail. And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson. Mom read us Treasure Island every year for many years, starting before I was old enough to understand any of it. It was confusing to me, but I loved it. I loved the play of words. I loved the language. He was a strikingly contemporary writer for the time; he was ahead of his time. He's my favorite writer of all time. I just love his poems, his great adventure tales, his brand of moral fiction."

Then, finally, at the very end of our conversation, Enger describes one of those unexpected moments when creative opportunity presents itself: "I was about 20 pages into the manuscript and was working on it early one morning when my youngest son, John, got up and came toddling in in his pajamas. He said: 'How's it going, Dad?' I said: 'It's going pretty well.' He said: 'You got any cowboys in that book yet?' And I said: 'No, not yet. But that's a fabulous idea. You think I should?' And he said: 'Yes!' I said: 'Well if you could give me a good name, I'll put a cowboy in the book.' And he said: 'Sunny Sundown.' No hesitation. Sunny Sundown. He'd been thinking about Sunny, apparently, for a while. I just happened to be at a spot where I could take off into it. By the end of the day the first few stanzas of Sunny were written and I just never looked back."

And thus a cowboy, a cowboy poet and a novel of uncommon appeal are born.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Tracy Chevalier feels lucky. Not because her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has sold one million copies and is still making the bestseller lists. Not because she has just released her new novel Falling Angels. She feels lucky because she lives in the modern era. "I'm incredibly thankful to be born when I was," says the author. "It's only relatively recently women have more choice. I have opportunities even my mother didn't have."

Chevalier's novels show just how far women have come. The author set Girl With a Pearl Earring in 17th century Holland and gave her narrator, Griet, a true artist's passion and eye. Born to a lower class family, the best Griet can do is work as a housemaid to the artist Vermeer. The new book, Falling Angels, takes place in Edwardian London and tells the story of Kitty Coleman, a young wife and mother. Chafing against her role as matron, Kitty thwarts convention — and her family's wishes — by becoming a suffragette.

"Since I write about women in the past, they're invariably going to be circumscribed by circumstance," says Chevalier, speaking from her home in North London. "There's going to be a conflict with them wanting to have a life different from what they have."

Griet from Girl With a Pearl Earring manages this conflict by quiet subversion. She cleans Vermeer's study but over time comes to influence his art as well. She plays a part in the creation of a masterpiece, but still, she is aware as a young woman and a maid that her role is restricted. "People ask why Griet couldn't have gone off to become a painter. Well, that wasn't how it was," says Chevalier. "What women could do was very limited then. I chose a realistic ending, not a romantic ending."

While Griet operates within the narrow social avenues open to her, Falling Angels' Kitty Coleman actively defies them. The book opens in London, in January 1901, after the death of Queen Victoria. "That's when attitudes changed," says Chevalier. With Victoria's death, some of the previous era's confining notions about societal roles began at last to give way — good news for Kitty.

"For the first time in my life I have something to do," Kitty says of her stance as a suffragette. She takes up her mission with a convert's zeal but not everyone in her life is as enthusiastic. Her husband and daughter feel dismayed and abandoned, her stuffy mother-in-law is apoplectic and their upright neighbors, the Waterhouse family, are mortified. By telling the story through multiple points of view, Chevalier makes sure everyone gets a say, particularly Kitty's daughter Maude and Maude's best friend, Lavinia Waterhouse.

Maude and Lavinia begin their friendship in a cemetery, which Chevalier bases on historic Highgate Cemetery near her home. "It's this grandiose place, all Gothic excess," says the author. "It's Victorian, overgrown with ivy, the graves are tumbling down." The cemetery in the book becomes a recurring symbol, the site of beginnings as well as endings.

Kitty, the central character in Falling Angels, is headstrong and impulsive, more of a rebel than the author herself admits to being. "When I was 19, I went to Oberlin and went around everywhere saying I was a feminist. I used to make all sorts of pronouncements [like] 'Men and women [are] absolutely equal.' Now I'm 38 and married with a kid and I understand how things aren't equal," she says. "I'm not sure I could call myself a feminist. I'm much more wary of labels than I used to be."

One label she does not mind owning up to is that of outsider. "I'm comfortable with that," says Chevalier, who was born in Washington, D.C., and has lived in London since 1983. Chevalier came to London after college for a visit, took a job in publishing and stayed. She's since acquired a husband and a son, not to mention a reputation as a novelist who articulates the way women negotiate the demands of society.

Though she hasn't picked up an English accent, she has embraced what she considers an English sensibility. "At first that English buttoned-up-ness bothered me, but now I find I don't always trust American emotionalism. It feels overdone."

Even the English have been effusive about Girl With a Pearl Earring, though, and the book's success still takes the author by surprise. "When I see my name in the paper, I somehow think they're referring to some other Tracy Chevalier." It also puts her under pressure. "People wanted this book to be Girl Part II, but I didn't want to be boxed into that," says Chevalier, who confesses Falling Angels "was a hellish book to write. I wrote the first draft in third person. It was like a lead balloon. I read the first draft and cried. I wanted to throw it away."

She turned to the work of another author and found a way out. "I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. She did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way. I wanted it to have lots of perspective."

After wrestling with the initial draft for a year and a half, the rewrite went swiftly, blissfully. "I rewrote 90 percent and it became a great pleasure. When you carry a story around in your head for a couple of years, it's like knowing your own family's stories; they just stay there. It gets easier," says Chevalier, who's already tackling her next novel, a return to the past, to art and of course, to women, all of which come together with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. These rich medieval tapestries are displayed at the Cluny Museum in Paris, just a Chunnel ride away from London. And Chevalier will probably tack up a poster of them in her office to inspire her as she writes, the way she did with Vermeer images while working on her previous novel.

"I'm no art historian. I'm not a social historian. I write about things that interest me," Chevalier says. "I feel comfortable looking into things I don't know too much about. I want to learn."

Like women around the world, the author says she struggles to balance the demands of career and family. "I love my son, but my time for writing is broken up into little bits," she says. But still, she counts her blessings. "I'm in the perfect occupation. And think of Kitty in Falling Angels, how frustrated she was trying to achieve independence. I live in a world more open. I feel privileged."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.