A family history distilled vibrantly

The Bondurant brothers had something of the younger Corleones about them: diverse siblings conjoined in criminality. Forrest was the brains, the hard man; Howard was the brawn, the drinker, and gambler; and young Jack (the author's grandfather) was the callow one with expensive tastes, keen to separate himself from the rabble. All three were players in the business of illegal booze (a.k.a. white lightning, white mule, mountain dew, stump whiskey; never moonshine, apparently) in Franklin County, Va. - the eponymous county - in the early decades of the 20th century. "The Wettest County in the World," Matt Bondurant's "novel based on a true story," is a free interpretation of his family's past, a parallel history, as he calls it, in which real characters are developed with a novelist's liberty. Whether fiction or biography, it succeeds in delivering a pungent slice of Americana, a portrait of a place and an era and a way of life that is part romantic, part viscerally violent, part metaphorical, all wrapped in a kind of rural poetry.

Set in the rolling hills and dirt-poor tobacco-farming valleys of southwestern Virginia, the story dodges between two time frames and perspectives: the late 1920s, when the brothers played a significant role in the production and movement of illicit alcohol, and the early 1930s, when a journalist and author, Sherwood Anderson (a historical figure, friend of William Faulkner and Edmund Wilson), arrived to write about it. Bondurant delivers a patchwork narrative, sometimes supplying answers to questions before they have been asked. The central dynamic is the standoff between grimly entrepreneurial Forrest, the legendary survivor of a throat-sawing razor attack, and Carter Lee, the commonwealth attorney seeking to control bootlegging and extract protection money. It's a tale full of slow-burning cause and effect, heading inexorably, it seems, in the direction of bloody confrontation but allowing plenty of opportunity for rich glimpses of the community - its response to drought and the Depression, its dependence on booze, its music, rituals, religions, cars, and long-suffering women.

The crabwise construction lends a modernist edge to what could have been presented as purely historical and local material, and this sense of enlargement is compounded by Bondurant's repeated invocation of the mythic, the tragic, and the cosmic. The brothers' slow grinding under the wheels of organized corruption; their complex masculinity, marked by violence but also inarticulate grief; and the authorial reaching for something larger, more weighty and looming, place an air of Greek immensity over the proceedings, and a mood of valediction.

The confrontation between the Bondurant brothers and the law turns out to be a low-key, nonfatal shooting, the outcome of a deal gone wrong. Jack and Forrest are wounded but will recover; Forrest makes another miraculous recovery later, when a load of lumber is deliberately released to roll over him. In fact, all three boys survive not only their crimes but also the landmark Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy trial of 1935, although the booze business was never the same after that. Forrest will die in bed, his body found by Jack's son Andrew, the boy who will grow up to be Matt Bondurant's father.

The hero of Bondurant's well-received debut, "The Third Translation," also claimed: "My father was the son of a bootlegger and small-time crook in rural Virginia." This less conventional, far more intriguing second book places these unusual forebears center stage, and the result is a powerful, quasi-cinematic reconstruction of silent men in a tough landscape, living the history they chose never to document. Occasional grandiosity does not diminish the impact of a fine, unflattering elegy to a savage past that - astonishingly - is scarcely 80 years distant.

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City.