When John Chenneville comes to in a hospital bed in Virginia a few months after the end of the Civil War, his memories are shadowy and half-formed. Everything from his service in the Union Army to his happy childhood in an old French family outside of St. Louis comes back to him in pieces. Upon returning home to Missouri, he learns that his beloved younger sister and her family were murdered, which triggers a quest for vengeance that takes him from St. Louis to modern-day Oklahoma and then Texas in this excellent, haunting historical novel/literary Western.
I’ve been an avid Paulette Jiles reader ever since a stranger came up to me at Books in Bloom and highly recommended Enemy Women to me. I’ve been hooked on Jiles’s work ever since and keep an eye out for her newer releases. (A special thank you to Julie for ordering this book and adding it to the collection!) A Missouri Ozarks native who spent years in Canada and now lives in Texas and was an accomplished poet and memoirist before becoming a novelist, Jiles has a keen ear for language and an equally astute eye for observation. She excels at writing complex but likable and engaging characters, evocative historical settings, and elegantly lyrical but readable prose.
She’s probably best known for News of the World, which is superb in its own right, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Enemy Women. In it, her enigmatic protagonist Adair felt like a real person rather than a book character, and the chaos of Civil War-era Missouri is vividly rendered.
Chenneville has a lot of parallels with Enemy Women–John is an inherently less socially awkward person than Adair, but the debilitating effects of his wartime head wound, which Jiles does a great job of depicting, isolate him. The settings in Chenneville are also highly evocative, whether it’s the hospital John wakes up in, his long-neglected family home, or the many places he stops along the way. As a bonus for our local readers, one of John’s stops is Fort Smith in Arkansas.
Though Jiles’s primary draw as a writer is her characterization, setting, and prose, she also knows how to spin a story that is equal parts compelling and thought-provoking. A vengeance-fueled road trip is a pretty standard Western trope, but in Jiles’s hands, it is thoughtful and anything but predictable.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys historical fiction and/or literary Westerns.
*Also available as an ebook and audiobook on Libby.
Have you read Chenneville? Are you a Paulette Jiles fan? What are you reading? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on any of these items or to place them on hold.
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