The American Voice

Knopf, 258 pp., $25

With Ava's Man -- a sequel of sorts to his masterful bestseller All Over But the Shoutin' -- Rick Bragg has accepted a daunting challenge. He conjures up a memoir of a man he never met (his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum) whose life and accomplishments were too slight to be noted in the public record (save births, deaths, and an occasional brush with the law). Instead, he must rely on family memories tainted by the vagaries of time, devoted kinship and, most likely, the presence and consumption of moonshine whilst many of the events recounted were being hatched. The result is unfailingly affecting and vital.

Charlie Bundrum, whose daughter Margaret (Bragg's mother) was famously profiled in Shoutin', was a brawler, moonshiner, roofer, and fierce protector of kith and kin whose short 51 years on earth have been rendered larger than life by those who remember him. Bragg says, "He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name."

The majority of his story takes place in the Appalachian Foothills along the Alabama/ Georgia borders during the Great Depression, though it stretches forward to Florida and 1958. The facts are not especially unique for that time and place. He was a raw-boned but pretty man -- rail-thin at 6-foot-2, with huge hands hanging off his east and west ends -- whose hardscrabble past presages a similar future. Ava Hamilton was a purely upstanding, churchgoing beauty. They meet by chance and, almost inevitably, marry their fates together and settle in for 34 years of hard times, child-rearing, backbreaking work, and near endless bouts of squabbling exceeded in intensity only by their passionate reconciliations. He is 17, and she is 16.

Rick Bragg has proved himself again to be one of American letters' most unique and authentic voices. There's something audaciously simple about Ava's Man and its heartfelt celebration of Charlie Bundrum's quiet heroism that extends to all the hard-working poor who might be battered and bruised but are anything but downtrodden. Rick Bragg's unvarnished prose is timeless. Ava's Man is brilliant, rustic poetry.