Synopses & Reviews
Hilary Plum’s grave and elegant novel
They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.
A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This is an elegy for those two deaths and the war itself. In They Dragged Them Through the Streets Hilary Plum gives form to the anger and troubled idealism of the American home front’s experience of today’s wars.
Moving freely in time among multiple narrators who are seldom named or clearly identified, They Dragged Them Through the Streets highlights the trauma of being unable to hold on to what matters in life, to find a way to alter or influence what cannot be controlled. Poverty, madness, despair, the deep bonds and boundaries of friendship, love, family, national politics, the national obsession with war, addiction, idealism, nostalgia, grief—these all have a place in Plum’s reckoning. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation’s conflicts.
Review
andldquo;Does a nation care for what it does? Usually, it doesnandrsquo;t. But we need to be reminded of our reality largely filled with wars. And we wait. And this novel does it. I read it as if in one breath, grateful on behalf of the millions who could identify with it. It took a woman with a conscience whoandrsquo;s also a andlsquo;woman of wordsandrsquo; such as Hilary Plum to create a bunch of people scarred by the war (in Iraq), to speak on behalf of the living and of the dead, as Literature must. She does more than combat silence, she conveys the sense that each of us is history (even if a history of lies), that we are American history. And her novel makes it clear that the great American silence is at the root of the great American melancholy.andrdquo;andmdash;Etel Adnan, Master of the Eclipse
Review
andldquo;In the cool and graceful prose of They Dragged Them Through the Streets,Hilary Plum traces the fault lines of paradox and contradiction her cast of young activists are driven by as they attempt to make sense of and respond to the official violence of the era.and#160;This courageous novel addresses the anxieties of our age.andrdquo;andmdash;Stanley Crawford, Petroleum Man: A Novel
Review
andquot;Hilary Plumandrsquo;s debut novel delves into our private and public sorrows with wrenching grace.and#160;This is a book of enormous compassion, meticulous beauty.and#160;Plum grapples with the devastation of war and environmental degradation, with suicide and madness, the tenacity and delicacy of friendship.and#160;The novel offers no easy redemptionandmdash;her people blunder around in the dark.and#160;They are impulsive, admirable, failing, often paralyzed.and#160;And yet they love, Plum insists, and they prevail.andquot;--Noy Holland, author of
Swim for the Little One FirstSynopsis
Hilary Plumandrsquo;s grave and elegant novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.
Synopsis
A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This grave and elegant novel is an elegy for these two deaths and the war itself.
They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on idealism, anger, and the American home frontandrsquo;s experience of todayandrsquo;s wars. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generationandrsquo;s conflicts.
About the Author
Hilary Plum is from New England and now lives in central Pennsylvania. This is her first novel.