This book broke my heart. I'm not sure what else to say about it. It has some lyrical passages and some that maybe try a bit too hard, the time line is maybe a bit disjointed, and we get some occasional seemingly random glimpses into minor characters' thoughts. But the power of this book is in its story and the author's ability to inhabit the minds of two diametrically opposed characters, even to the point of being able to see how one might rationalize heinous actions.

We get the life stories of two men, both soldiers in World War II, one a black man and one white, whose lives intersect one Thanksgiving after the war. The narrative builds to the place we don't want it to go and we cannot stop it, and then we have to close the book and try to give it meaning in our lives, when really there is no meaning that can ever suffice.

Do not read this book looking for a happy ending, but rather for another perspective on a history we want to bury or deny but which must always be remembered.

...Mather feels an incantatory power men have felt since time's beginning as the four other men each submit to, or are submersed in, the larger engine of the whole, like pack-hunting animals gathered under a primitive spell whose bonds and tribal affinities can be seen playing out their wanting of blood, but which is not, not ever, understood in plainspoken language or logic of diagram and symbols.

.....events must be interpreted and given meaning, either to fit and be accepted, or else to be rejected from the space of men, and this interpretation reinforcing who and what they are, so it is not the event that makes their culture--anything is liable to happen anywhere at all--but the meaning they give to it, which makes them what they are and gives them their self-imagining. ( )