Brill Among the Ruins: A Novel

Vance Bourjaily

apr 2015 · Open Road Media

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An American man goes searching for himself in the ruins of Mexico in a novel that “deserves comparison with the best novels of the post-war generation” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

At the start of this vibrant and invigorating novel, Robert Brill has a farm, a law practice, a daughter in high school, a son fighting in Vietnam, and a wife who deep dives into the sherry bottle every night. What more can a typical midwesterner ask for in the late 1960s? A lot, thinks Brill.

Tired of distracting himself with drinking, hunting, and sleeping around, Brill leaves Illinois and his family to join an archaeological dig in Puebla, Mexico. As he sifts through pre-Columbian artifacts, Brill considers the ruins of his life and imagines what might have been. One exhilarating fantasy involves a beautiful and free-spirited woman named Gabby. If there is a lesson to be learned from cataloging ancient pottery sherds, however, it is that the past never disappears, no matter how far you try to run from it.

Hilarious, candid, and deeply felt, Brill Among the Ruins is considered by many critics to be Vance Bourjaily’s finest novel.

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Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, a Lebanese immigrant, was a journalist, and his mother wrote romance novels. Raised in New York and Virginia, Bourjaily interrupted his studies at Bowdoin College to serve in the Second World War, first as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service and later as an army infantryman in occupied Japan. Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins commissioned Bourjaily’s debut novel, The End of My Life, while he was still in the army, and the book is widely considered to be one of the finest accounts of World War II in American literature. Bourjaily’s many other acclaimed works include The Violated, Confessions of a Spent Youth, and Brill Among the Ruins, a nominee for the National Book Award.

A longtime teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Arizona, Bourjaily was the first director of the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Louisiana State University.