"Escape, ambiguity, friendship propel 'Prisoners of War'
By Fredric Koeppel
Prisoners of war stand on both sides of the barbed wire in Steve Yarbrough's new novel, set in Loring, the Mississippi Delta town he created for his last novel, "Visible Spirits."
That horrific and compelling novel took place in 1902 with glimpses back to the 1880s. "Prisoners of War" occupies the last six months of 1943 as Dan Timms waits for his 18th birthday so he can enlist in the army.
There's plenty to flee from. Dan's father committed suicide recently; his mother, Shirley, seems to be dissolving into self-pity and alcohol; Dan is uncomfortable with his suspicions that his mother was unfaithful to her husband with her brother-in-law, Alvin; and Dan is stuck for the duration driving a converted bus around the county selling snacks, groceries and other household supplies for Alvin, the deal-making king of the local black-market.
Outside Loring stands the compound where German soldiers are imprisoned. During the day, they are contracted out to farmers and plantation owners to harvest cotton, painstaking and backbreaking labor.
One of the guards at the camp is Dan's best friend and former high-school football whiz Marty Stark, who has just returned from Sicily where his job was to kill German soldiers similar to the ones he is now guarding. Some terrible experience on the battlefield left Marty vulnerable, withdrawn and angry, and he tries, as best he can articulate, to tell Dan that war will not be what his younger friend expects.
Another psychological prisoner of war was Dan's father, whose spirit was broken in the trenches of France in World War I. Gradually his farm had fallen to ruin, he had become loquacious and unpredictable. When he shoots himself, his son discovers the body. Of course it's possible that Jimmy Del Timms had his own suspicions about his wife and his brother. Or perhaps, never forgetting the horrors of World War I, he killed himself to keep his son from having to fight in World War II.
Yarbrough, writing with straightforward yet singing clarity, maintains this level of suggestion and ambiguity throughout "Prisoners of War," allowing the past to seep into the present and the present irrevocably to permeate the here and now, both personally and publicly. The racial virulence that infused "Visible Spirits" is in "Prisoners of War" reduced to a monolithic sense of habit and customary outrage. The white farmer who beats Dan's friend L. C. Stevens and arranges for him to be drafted from under Alvin's protection - L. C. drives Alvin's other "rolling store" - does so not so much because L. C. is black and "uppity" but because the man's son was killed in the war and he can't stand to see what he thinks of as a shirker and draft-dodger.
Escape is the motif that propels "Prisoners of War" from beginning to end. Dan wants to escape from the stultifying life in Loring, from his father's suicide and his mother's smothering feelings. L. C. wants to escape from racial oppression and take his guitar and voice and song-writing talent to Chicago. Marty wants to escape from the terror and fear he experienced in Sicily. And the Germans want to escape from the camp, a desire they plan for meticulously, thinking they can walk south through Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, until they are betrayed by a prisoner who tells Marty that he is Polish, not German, and was forced to fight for the Wehrmacht.
Is the man Polish? Is he a hero or a malcontent? Neither Marty nor the camp commander knows for sure, and Yarbrough ensures the novel's tenor of ambiguity and blamelessness by leaving those questions unanswered.
By the end of "Prisoners of War," where Dan impetuously and forcefully prevents L. C.'s arrest, we understand that the foundation of the novel is the nature of friendship. Many people require saving, if not salvaging, but some are unsaveable, and it is sadly their characters or the damage done to them that makes them so. With subtlety, compassion and detachment Yarbrough teases out the notion that the line separating those who can be saved from those who cannot is very fine and too easily crossed.
Fredric Koeppel
©2004 Memphis, TN"