A Quick Q&A about My Third Novel (with micro-excerpts!)

Many thanks to Erin Lindsay McCabe, author of the spellbinding new novel I Shall Be Near to You, for “tagging” me with the following questions about my third novel. 
Before you read mine, take a look at McCabe’s own Q&A about her lively and heroic protagonist Rosetta Wakefield, who dons the Union blue to fight alongside her husband at Antietam and who, once she’s whispered in your readerly ear, you will not soon forget.
After my Q&A below, I will in turn tag three gifted writers — Harriet Scott Chessman, Kate Gray, and Laura Stanfill — who will answer the same seven questions on June 9th.
Alors... 
1. What is your character’s name? Is s/he fictional or a historic person?
The novel concerns five generations in an American family, so there are really several main characters. Then too, a few change so significantly over time that their younger and older selves could be considered separate people. But I suppose you could narrow it down to two people with whom the reader becomes most intimate: Benjamin Lorn, born in the 1860s in a tiny Iowa town and the son of an embittered, crippled Civil War veteran, and Benjamin’s daughter Avis, who we meet in World War Two era San Francisco.
Fictional or historic, you ask. Ah, well, the personalities and experiences of both Benjamin and Avis are, like most people in serious works of fiction, confabulated from a great deal of true historical and familial anecdote and wide-ranging observation. Neither wholly invented nor wholly historical, they tread the luminous, super-enriched middle ground of imagination — more real, in some ways, than real folk.    
2. What should we know about him/her?
Benjamin: He’s a latter-day Hamlet of kinds — he and much of his situation hearken back to Shakespeare’s ageless play. He becomes the unwitting keeper of dark family secrets and must choose between vengeance and forgiveness. He’s a sensitive, reticent soul who often feels helpless to control his circumstances, brooding upon “how it smarts, in one who wishes to author himself, to feel himself authored by others.” For reasons revealed through the book’s central mystery, he ends up a hard, icy old man.
Avis: She cuts silhouettes in San Francisco’s glamorous City of Paris department store (a Selfridge’s of the 1940s West). She’s alienated from her irascible father and, as it turns out, from her own teenage son (having inherited more of her father’s sternness than she’d care to admit). Her mother’s death thrusts a new intimacy upon her and old Benjamin.
3. When and where is the story set? 
Iowa in the 1870s and 80s San Francisco in 1944 Civil War era Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas (a confederate prison camp)
Benjamin, in his Westward travels, roams Washington, Oregon, and California in the 1880s.
4. What are the characters’ personal goals? 
Benjamin: He becomes adept in telegraphy at an early age, and nurtures an increasingly mystical/delusional view of the new technology. Ultimately, “he wants to be the humming wire, outside time. To let nothing cling to him” — an impossibility, of course.
Benjamin falls in love with a girl from a neighboring town, and, when he abruptly leaves Iowa for the West, they undertake a passionate courtship by mail. Though he often believes himself unworthy, he comes to see his long travels as a form of purifying exile that may ultimately render him deserving of her love: “If I’m ever to return to you it must be as a man improved, man who’s pried the lead from his spirit and buckshot from his heart.”
Avis: More than anything, she wants her seventeen-year-old son Benny to come home. When we first meet her, Benny’s been missing for weeks, a runaway. Avis fears he’s enlisted.
5. What is the main conflict? What messes up the characters’ lives?
A few things consistently account for the conflicts that spur the characters through the plot:
1.  War (familial, national, and international)Young men, baited by glory or righteousness, unknowingly harbored longings for their own destruction — primed for the orders of generals who sat at polished desks, tea and biscuits at hand, plotting devastation.
2.  Secrets kept, discovered, and toldAvis: We are each and every one born alone amid strangers. It begins this way, how could it not? And hasn’t she, haven’t they all — Benny, Benjamin — kind of stumbled around in each other’s lives, lost?
3.  The persistent American myth of Manifest Destiny (in its various forms)Benjamin: To live without a history looked desirable to the lot of us. You want to shake history right off your shoulder and brook no ghost or shadow — and yet man needs community after all, and what is community but a kind of history?
4.  Time itselfThough morning brought new light, now it was just that: new. Not the same light and could never be.
6. What is this novel’s title, and can we read more about it?
The Silent Generations. See an excerpt (one of Benjamin Lorn’s letters) HERE. And view some of the pre-publication praise, as well a low-fi trailer I made for a pre-contractual galley of the book HERE.
7. When can we expect the book to be published?
Started back in 2007, finished back in 2010, this unduly delayed novel will see the light of day by the end of 2015 — of that I’m now certain. It’s been too long........ Next Up in this “Blog Hop” are…
Harriet Scott Chessman . Author of the #1 IndieNext Pick Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, the Good Morning America Book Club Selection Someone Not Really Her Mother, the acclaimed Ohio Angels, and The Beauty of Ordinary Things (released last Fall by my own Atelier26 Books and praised by Ron Hansen as “soulful, tender, affecting…wonderful”), Chessman has taught literature and writing at Yale, Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. See Chessman’s Q&A at RedRoomon June 9th.
Kate Gray . Author of three award-winning collections of poetry, Another Sunset We Survive, Bone Knowing, and Where She Goes, Gray’s debut novel Carry the Sky — a brilliantly poetic page-turner set in 1983 at an elite Delaware boarding school — appears from Forest Avenue Press this September. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines, and she has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Norcroft, and Soapstone. She teaches creative writing at a community college in Oregon. See Gray’s Q&A at her author blog on June 9th.
Laura Stanfill . Novelist, editor, journalist, and founder of Forest Avenue Press (recipient of a 2014 Oregon Literary Fellowship), Stanfill has earned numerous awards for writing and editorial work. Forest Avenue’s first title, Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life, spent four months on the Powell’s Books Small Press Bestseller List and was named the Best Book of 2012 by the Powell’s On Oregon Blog. The author of two novels, Stanfill will discuss The Serinette, her latest, a nineteenth-century epic romp set partly in France and partly in New York City. See Stanfill’s Q&A at her author blogon June 9th.