Laird Hunt - Neverhome

It was a long letter. I included in it too an apology that when the General had come to see me in the lunatic house, I had unbuttoned my dress and made to sit in his lap. I apologized for having scratched his face and hit him with the vase of flowers at the start of his visit and for having cursed him to his grave when he shoved me away. I told him I had since tried to do better but had not always done better.

Fear finds you out, I wrote. It always finds you out.

I have not had any answer yet.

Neverhome could not have come into being without the help and support of Linda K. Wickens, Susan Schulten, Susie Schlesinger, Susan Manchester, Kathryn Hunt, Selah Saterstrom, Eva Sikelianos Hunt, K. Allison Wickens, Harry Mathews, Anna Stein, Chris Fischbach, Josh Kendall, Nicole Dewey, Miriam Parker, Pamela Marshall, Garrett McGrath, and Eleni Sikelianos (always). Profound thanks also to the Lannan Residency Program in Marfa, Texas.

A few of the many excellent works I consulted during the writing of Neverhome deserve special mention: Dearest Susie: A Civil War Infantryman’s Letters to His Sweetheart by Frank Ross McGregor; The Civil War Notebook of Daniel Chisholm, edited by W. Springer Menge and J. August Shimrak; Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Frank Wilkeson; The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust; They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook; and, most crucially, An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, Alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864 by Lauren Cook Burgess.

The Southern Landscapes and battlefield photographs of Sally Mann were indispensable in helping me travel with Ash through mid-nineteenth-century America, as were the first two New History Warfare albums of Colin Stetson and the song “Sorrow, Sorrow” by Lorna Hunt.

Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction. He won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2013 and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and a two-time finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. A former United Nations press officer currently on the faculty of the University of Denver’s creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

An online version of this reading group guide is available at littlebrown.com.

1. From the opening sentence, we know that the narrator, Ash, instead of her husband, chooses to fight in the Civil War. By the end of the novel, we recognize that there may be several reasons for her choice. What do you think was her greatest motivation for leaving? What do you think Ash herself believes about her choice?

2. Did Neverhome change your understanding of the Civil War?

3. As represented in Neverhome, what is the role of women in the Civil War, and what in particular is the relationship between women and violence? What might be the larger implications of Ash’s donning a woman’s dress to evade and then kill the bandits?

4. Describe Ash’s relationships with the various women in the novel, such as Neva, Ash’s mother, and the Colonel’s wife. How are the relationships similar? How are they different? What do her interactions with each reveal about Ash?

5. Discuss the role of men in Ash’s life, both before and during the war.

6. Why does the Colonel take such a particular interest in Ash? Discuss the squirrel hunting, the battle midway through the novel with the Colonel’s kinsman, and the visit in the psychiatric hospital.

7. How does Ash feel about her husband and her marriage? Do those feelings change when she returns from the war? Are those feelings different at the end of the book?

8. The narrative alternates structurally between intensity and calm, horror and grace, reaction and reflection. How does this structure clarify your understanding of war and deepen your understanding of Ash?

9. Go back through the novel and highlight the letter-writing efforts of Ash and others. What role do letters play in the story? Most fundamentally, what function does the act of letter-writing perform for the novel’s characters?

10. What is the symbolic import of Weatherby’s greenhouse? How might his damaged grandson be connected to its construction?

11. What is Ash’s motivation for telling her story? Is Neverhome a confessional, and if so, is there more than one reason for Ash to confess? What acts, both major and minor, impel her to tell her story? Does Ash actually understand or know herself?

The seed for Neverhome was planted eighteen years ago when my wife bought me a copy of An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. That seed eventually grew into a very short story that tells the tale of two women who go off to fight in the war. The women, close friends, are initially swept up in the adventure, only to be ground down by the horror of the conflict. One of the women is captured and exposed for what she is and made to suffer in the worst way at the hands of her fellow prisoners. Her friend is waiting for her when she is finally released. This is how “A Pine Forest,” narrated by the friend who is waiting, concludes:

We walked the roads until she one day got her voice back. “Now that was something and goddamn that was something and goddamn all of it to hell,” she said. She said this as we were walking through a pine forest. Every step we took through that forest lifted up something soft and special to smell. You could have just laid down on that ground and gone right to sleep or died. There we went a walking. We turned a corner and come upon a pool of water. When we stepped up close to drink we saw it was shallow and full of dead crickets. She looked at those crickets and the tears came welling up. “Every one of them is dead,” she said. We cried and cried.

Some time after writing those words, I chanced to read a comment by Tony Horwitz, author of the excellent Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, to the effect that there was still much unturned earth in the history of that conflict, so many stories still to be told. This made me think again of all those women — historians place the number at around four hundred, though it was probably more — who, like Sarah Wakeman and the imagined characters in “A Pine Forest,” went to war and fought for their country, even though their country didn’t want them, or wanted them only as long as they could conceal their identity as women. What, I asked myself, would prompt a young woman to leave home when no one expected her to, to travel far away and face not only bullets and cannon balls but also the fear of discovery? What well of joys and sorrows might underpin such a decision, and would this person, at the end of her perilous journey, return home again to drink from it? I thought about these things and others and took a deep breath. For I had suddenly caught my first glimpse of Ash Thompson, pulling on a pair of sturdy shoes and setting off for war. And I knew I had to gather up my own courage and follow her.

“A spare, beautiful novel, so deeply about America and the language of America that its sentences seem to rise up from the earth itself. Laird Hunt had me under his spell from the first word of Neverhome to the last. Magnificent.”