The Yellow Birds (2012) by Kevin Powers

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Yellow Birds (2012)

by Kevin Powers

Richmond, Virginia

Virginia: 1/17

    Virginia is the most significant state hit I've tackled since I finished off New York and it's 100 books of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  This chapter has Delaware (3), Maryland (9), Washington DC (12) and North (20) and South Carolina (13).   Delaware and Maryland are both "minor" states and the rest are mid-range.  I have little personal experience in Virginia outside of the garden suburbs of Washington DC- which are just as likely to come up in the DC books as they are here.  As for the rest of Virginia... I drove through the state on my post-college drive back to the west coast, but didn't stop.  I've never been to Richmond, the location of The Yellow Birds, an Iraq war and its aftermath novel by Kevin Powers, and I've certainly never been to the rest of Virginia, so in that sense, I'm looking forward to learning some more about the state beyond what I know of its super racist history and purple state present. 

   

   The New York Times gave it a rave review in 2012.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award.  A movie version was released in 2017 with a cast that included Jenifer Aniston, Toni Collette and Jason Patric.  The movie version cost twelve million and made fifty thousand in theaters, which I think means that it essentially went unreleased.  It has a 44/37 split on Rotten Tomatoes.   The Amazon product page has 2000 reviews which is good but not great. 

 

 Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Times, called it "brilliantly observed and deeply affecting" and compared it to Tim O'Brien, specifically to his 1990 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried.  Thankfully, The Yellow Birds is not a collection of short stories.  It does track backwards and forwards in time in an attempt to find out what happened to Murph, a naive young soldier who Bartle, the protagonist and frequent narrator, swears to protect before they go off to fight in the first Iraq War.

   Powers intersperses the present- which is Bartle back in Richmond, living under a bridge by the river and bemoaning his PTSD with florid glimpses of the gritty, bloody scenes of the first Iraq War.  I'm a huge fan of reading about the horrors of war- the inevitable scene of field medics or the soldier himself trying to stuff his intestines back into his body after falling victim to an explosive is one of my personal favorites and of course it happens in this book.

     The secret at the center of The Yellow Birds left me a bit overwhelmed. In fact, I'm hard pressed to explain what Kakutani found so enchanting about the prose- maybe it was good timing on the part of Powers, publishing at the exact time when readers were looking for this particular perspective. In 2024 it's like, throw it on the horrors of the forever war pile.