War Memorials

From screenwriter and two-time American Fiction Award winner Clint McCown comes this wickedly funny novel about a small southern town and its odd preoccupation with war. By most standards, Lincoln, Tennessee, seems an ordinary place. Its men, having fought in every conflict from the War of 1812 to Desert Storm, are enjoying a hard-earned time of peace, which they fill with visits to famous battlefields and with tales of heroism egregiously inflated. But Nolan Vann, the feckless son of Lincoln’s local war hero, is fighting another kind of battle, to reclaim his life and, with any luck, his wife. His tour of duty takes him to the back yards and bingo halls of Lincoln’s unsung heroes, including a Jesus impersonator, a snake-handling evangelist, an aspiring zookeeper, even an inconvenient corpse. Gradually Nolan begins to see that he actually can be the hero of his own life. WAR MEMORIALS is a “prime piece of storytelling . . . rich in the rough and tumble of everyday life . . . as well as laugh-out-loud funny” (Larry Heinemann). If Sherwood Anderson had taken up comedy or Eudora Welty had frequented the VFW, they might have written like Clint McCown.