The Native Tongue of Violence

In 2012, Kevin Powers published his landmark debut novel, The Yellow Birds. A stark, elegiac tale of American soldiers enduring the chaos of the Iraq War, the novel was the PEN/Faulkner Award winner, a National Book Award finalist, and a bestseller. Powers’ intense depiction of combat and camaraderie and his credibility as an Iraq War combat veteran certainly played some role in the popularity of The Yellow Birds. But its critical acclaim derived much more from the lyricism of Powers’ sentences and the precision and vividness of his images, earning him comparisons to the likes of Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy, and even Erich Maria Remarque.

The last comparison feels especially apt with respect to Powers’ new novel, Children of the Wild, the story of two young men from rural Virginia — one rich, one penniless, both in love with the same woman — and the inseparable bond they form through the shared experience of the horrors of World War I. Powers’ themes draw to mind Remarque’s timeless classic All Quiet on the Western Front, but the style and form of Children of the Wild hew closer to that of McCarthy, American fiction’s archetypal bard of graphic violence and humanity’s capacity for inhumanity.

The novel begins in 1917, as wealthy scion Roy Young returns from his studies at Vanderbilt to Ewer’s Rock, a fictional town in the Appalachian region of southwest Virginia. After college, Roy expects to take up his rightful place as his father’s heir and to marry Samantha Hatton, his lifelong friend and childhood sweetheart. Samantha, however, doesn’t view herself as Roy’s to claim.

When the mysterious Ennis Duke emerges from the mountain woods and is taken in by the people of Ewer’s Rock, a powerful mutual attraction draws Sam into a passionate romance with the so-called “wild boy.” This love triangle results first in conflict, followed by the less predictable formation of a fast friendship, as Roy humbly accepts Sam’s choice and embraces Ennis as a kindred spirit. Such a turn of events would stretch credulity from a less skillful writer, but Powers’ subtle characterization makes the intense bond between the raw, uneducated Ennis and the entitled but honorable Roy not just plausible but persuasive. “Roy sensed that, despite their differences, they shared certain qualities,” Powers writes. “For one, they were likely the kind of boys for whom violence was a native tongue, a way of expressing themselves that didn’t require insight or maturity. If they both spoke that language, Roy figured, it was no surprise they’d tried to understand each other by conversing in it.”

Not long after, the United States enters the Great War. Roy, an avid reader of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, enlists in pursuit of glory, to the deep chagrin of his father, who recalls the bloody cost of a previous generation of Virginians’ Romantic delusions. Ennis enlists alongside his new best friend, and the two travel to Europe and experience their initiation into the reality of war. The carnage they witness notwithstanding, Roy’s and Ennis’ most shocking discovery may be what they themselves are capable of when forced to fight for their and each other’s lives.

Meanwhile, back home in Ewer’s Rock, Samantha fights her own war against a deadly and seemingly invincible enemy when the 1918 flu pandemic reaches Appalachia. Many close to the trio fall to the dual ravages of war and disease. By the time Roy and Ennis reunite with Samantha, a new scourge has descended upon Ewer’s Rock: rapacious industrialism, personified by Fintan Thoreau, Roy’s former college roommate, the boorish son of a coal baron whose envy and resentment of Roy’s “golden boy” status metastasizes into a malignant drive to do to Roy’s beloved valley what the Germans did to the countryside of France.

Powers’ themes are clear and universal: Goodness and beauty are always under siege; evil must be fought with courage and resolve, but also with the awareness that the lines between right and wrong are easily blurred; and violence is historically cyclical, unending, and exponential in its magnitude and its toll. The author is at his best narrating combat, conveying the chaos and terror of battle with clarity and grace. “Roy searched frantically for Ennis,” Powers writes, narrating their first experience of combat. “He found him in the center of the crater where the trench had been. Ennis was on his knees, brushing off the layers of smoking earth with the palms of his hands, gentle as an archaeologist with his brush.”

Again, the comparison to Cormac McCarthy is apt, both in Powers’ unflinching but lyrical rendering of violence and in his heroes, who call to mind the young protagonists of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy: passionate but outwardly stoic, idealistic, scarred by tragedy and violence but nevertheless undaunted.

Children of the Wild is a throwback to the kind of storytelling that seems increasingly rare: serious writing about subjects as timeless as poetry itself — namely, the trials and travails of traditionally masculine men and the proud, unconventional women who love them, cast into perilous, tragic circumstances invulnerable to irony.

Powers approaches love, friendship, war, class, poverty, disease, and industrialism with clear eyes, but also with a sense of stoic idealism about the value of persisting through and beyond the endless cycle of cruelty which humankind continues to inflict upon itself. He’s too honest to promise a happy ending. But his mastery of language, narrative pacing, and nuanced characterization make Children of the Wild a testament to the redemptive power of beauty even in the midst of inescapable tragedy.