Madison Smartt Bell’s new novel sees Nathan Bedford Forrest for the complicated man he was

"White folks music..."

So thinks a slave named Benjamin, in a music-dream himself, as the finger-quick opening notes of "Devil's Dream," a traditional fiddle song, thickly mark the Mississippi air.

Madison Smartt Bell's new novel Devil's Dream, to be released Nov. 3, will certainly result in perplexed and dismayed head-shaking, even outraged finger-pointing among many of his readers. Bell's detractors will be delighted. No doubt he acquired a few after his 1986 essay for Harper's, "Less Is Less: The Dwindling American Short Story," an almost Lutheran edict in its criticism of the minimalist approach to fiction among some of America's best-known and most anthologized writers, namely its starkest architect, Raymond Carver.

Controversy is bound to center around Bell's measured yet ambivalent portrayal of the man Gen. William Tecumseh proclaimed the "devil himself," Nathan Bedford Forrest—and Tecumseh was no angel himself, by a long shot. Bell has shown himself fearless when it comes not only to writing essays criticizing the fiction of his generation, but also to creating novels based on historically bloody and gruesome events, contentious characters, race and religion, as his Haiti trilogy proves. (All Souls' Rising, part of the trilogy, was a National Book Award finalist.

Nevertheless, Nathan Bedford Forrest, inexhaustible war hero (Memphians lined the streets for his funeral procession), slave-owner, family man, adulterer, millionaire, compulsive gambler and a Ku Klux Klan founder (though later repentant of his role and the organization itself), remains a complicated and explosively divisive figure, even in the New South's 21st century melting pot. Bell is not interested in delivering any great declarations about the Civil War; he leaves the saber rattling to Forrest. But Bell strongly implicates the North in the "peculiarities" of Southern slavery. To Bell's mind, everyone was complicit in keeping the iron-chained tradition of slavery profitable for Dixie landowners and Yankee industrialists.

Bell, who lives and teaches in Baltimore—a place he says is "neither North nor South"—has always been regarded as an "American" as opposed to "regional" novelist, despite his Southern roots and Tennessee farm-boy raising. He hightailed it up North early on to study at Princeton; in 1983, his first novel Washington Square Ensemble was published. The novel established him, along with Bright Lights, Big City's Jay McInerney, as part of a new generation of writers coming of age in the decadently glittery and gritty New York City. But Bell never seemed fully engaged with the literary scene that would make a pop star out of McInerney. And, much to Bell's satisfaction, McInerney's characters were never a match for Bell's own fast-talking, street-smart survivors.

Bell's return to familiar soil may be found in his introduction to Algonquin Books 24th volume of New Stories From the South, 2009. Bell, guest editor for this year's anthology, gathers together a remarkable ensemble of writers—young, old, black, white and Asian. More than half are women, including poet Elizabeth Spires, his wife, and his former classmate, Jill McCorkle. Both women appear at this year's Southern Book Festival. Bell, much like Walker Percy (though less ornery), is astute at recognizing the signposts that render a South in transition: What the Southern experience used to be has already passed. The white Old South, haunted by the Confederacy and the KKK, has pretty well gone up in smoke—just a few wisps and fumes remain.

In the great tradition of writers worth their salt, when something (or someone) is reckoned dead and gone, it's time for an exhumation. And, lest anyone forget, what Bell desires to accomplish in Devil's Dream is what every writer struggles to do: tell a good story. Why else put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard? One need only read the first few pages to behold a writer in full command of his imagination and craft. "Surprised at his movement, a copperhead poured itself over the edge of the stone and slipped away, rustling the bed of dry cane leaves," Bell writes early on. Not one word is misplaced or missing, and nothing rings falsely. Many of Bell's dreamlike images have the effect of ripples across water from a skipped stone—quick and close in the beginning, they slow, then disappear back into the smooth-as-glass water.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was admired among his troops, but disdained among both Southern and Northern generals for his hell-fire, backwoods candor, free of any courtly, lilting cadence. His ability to infuriate, even threaten, his superiors and avoid court-martial was legendary. Bell stays true to Forrest's abrasive dialect, but reader beware, it takes a little getting used to. I admit to wincing and rolling my eyes at some of the romantic language between Forrest and both his wife and black mistresses. And a few of Bell's descriptions—"a fine stout buck," for example—sound like a throwback to an Erskine Caldwell novel.

Still, no one can quibble with Bell's dramatic, pulse-raising battle scenes, which would do the late Southern historian Shelby Foote proud. I suspect Foote's masterful Civil War tome kept Bell burning the midnight oil on many a night. Forrest's courageous and cagey battlefield tactics had more in common with Crazy Horse (impervious to cavalry bullets) than with West Point graduate and stone-faced stoic Robert E. Lee.