Robert Inman, originally from Elba, Alabama, has had a long and impressive career, producing six novels before turning his energies to writing movie scripts and stage plays. Still a fine storyteller, he has returned to his original form and in some ways to his original subjects.
Inman’s first novel, “Home Fires Burning” concerns the stresses in a small, Elba-like Southern town during WWII, with many of the sons away in Europe. Sixty-four-year-old Jake Tibbets is the town’s newspaper editor, and head philosopher. He considers their home place “an inherited town, a place where men generally did what their forebears had done, where families carved out a little slice of the town’s life and passed it on.”
This same kind of town, now called “Copernicus,” is the setting for “Villages,“ but the time is the twenty-first century and the war is in Afghanistan. Jonas Boulware, 21 years old, has returned. His unit was ambushed in a small village in Afghanistan. A Navy corpsman with a squad of Marines, Jonas acted heroically, risked his own life, was wounded in the hand and leg and carried his sergeant to safety, for which he has been recommended for the Navy Cross.
In the opening chapter at, perhaps, Walter Reed in D.C., he remembers almost none of it, and he really doesn’t want to. The counselors there, and later at the VA hospital, see that he is “detached,” feels numb. They urge him in many ways to remember: “Can you tell me about…” Jonas resists, and especially rejects the idea that he has PTSD.
But back home, suffering insomnia, the sweats, jitters, it becomes undeniable. Shadowy, threatening figures appear at the edge of his vision; memories of the firefight in that village return, in pieces. Gradually, Jonas remembers what happened in Afghanistan, and we also learn a number of important things about his childhood.
As a boy, his father had been unrelentingly mean to him, sarcastic, abrasive, fault-finding, in fact throwing him out of the house two months short of high school graduation. His mother had NOT moved to protect him. Why not? He has forgiven neither of them.
We learn that when the traumatic experience happens to a person with an emotionally difficult childhood, the effects are heightened. We watch as Jonas helps a broke (but undeniably pretty) young folksinger and a teen-age boy clearly being abused at home. Jonas, we are reminded, is a natural-born caregiver, more empathetic and thus more emotionally vulnerable than the average person.
At first an isolato, Jonas allows the number of people in his life to expand to include the girl, the family doctor, and a childhood friend, and slowly comes to better understand the neurotic, paranoid concerns over what other people might think, that have warped so many in his hometown, even in his own family.
