Cementville

November 25, 2013
In Livers’s debut, it’s 1969, and seven young men from the most well-respected families of Cementville, Ky., are coming home from Vietnam in body bags. Also returning home is still-breathing Lt. Harlan O’Brien, the town’s former football star. O’Brien and the other seven all joined the National Guard in the hopes of avoiding real conflict, but war found them anyway. Long, lyrical chapters explore the wounds wrought on those left bereft, but Livers ups the ante by putting a killer on the loose in the small town. And with townsfolk already on edge, mutual respect and tradition are replaced by fear and suspicion. Livers uses each chapter to explore a different facet of war and its aftermath. At times, sorting out the different families and individuals can be confusing; the most distinctive characters include Wanda, an agoraphobic librarian, for whom the tragedy provides an incentive to reconnect with town and family, and Maureen, a teenager whose chronicling of events offers a sort of naïve insight. But most of all, the novel comes off as an atmospheric piece, a portrait of a traditional town on the brink of much change, whether welcomed or not.

January 15, 2014
The arrival of dead soldiers from Vietnam in 1969 upturns and rewires the lives in a small Kentucky town. As Livers' debut novel opens, the reputation of Cementville (pop. 1,003) has shifted from its namesake cement factory to something much more visceral: The arrival of the bodies of seven National Guardsmen who were killed in a firefight. The tragedy has sent the town into public displays of mourning, though as Livers shifts the story's perspective among a host of residents, more complicated emotions emerge. For Maria Louise, a young journalist who skipped town for the city years before, it means a return home and sudden romance with a member of the low-class Ferguson clan. For 13-year-old Maureen, it's a revelation about her family's capacity for secrets. For Harlan, a POW who lost a leg overseas, it means a hero's welcome that's been overshadowed by a week's worth of funerals. For Evelyn, the elderly head of the town's wealthiest clan, it's an opportunity to sourly recall years of Cementville shortcomings. (Though the novel turns on an act of benevolence on her part.) And so on, and so on: The chief flaw of the book is that's it's stuffed full of characters who are hard to differentiate, consistently possessed as they are of Livers' eloquent if down-home voice. The episodic, character-sketch arrangement undercuts the central drama of the novel, involving the murder of the Vietnamese wife of another war vet. Livers means to explore the ways that perception and reality often fail to overlap in small-town life, and there are moments where the novel sings in that regard, particularly in one section where the supposed bad girl of the Ferguson clan finds a refuge in the home of an elderly resident. But the overall tone is curiously muted. An earnest and sober portrait of the homefront, filled a bit past capacity.

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October 15, 2013
Cementville is the story of a small Kentucky town in 1969, facing the return of the bodies of a group of local young men killed together in a firefight in Vietnam. The young men come from all kinds of families: the prominent Slidell family, the ne'er-do-well Ferguson clan, the solid Goins family. As scattered members of the town come home to pay their respects, their collective grief cracks open the walls of their reserve, allowing them to know each other as never before. Cementville is not strongly plot-driven, and the murder-mystery element introduced halfway through feels incidental. What is central and valuable is the depiction of a specific and near-forgotten way of life. Through her strongly drawn characters, Livers portrays a community drawing on its traditional strengthskindness, respect, and practicalityto support each other through the very new challenges presented by war, trauma, and suspicion. This novel will be enjoyed by fans of Marilynne Robinson and of lyrical novels that depict the awesome inner struggles and resources of seemingly everyday people.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)