Remembering Larry Brown's Lyrical Realism

Meeting Joe, Meeting Larry Brown

In 1991, after his masterful collection of stark, humorous, and fierce stories, Big Bad Love, Larry Brown released his second novel, Joe: A Novel. More so than his first novel (Dirty Work), Joe brought together the great themes and the rich environment that would typify this work: The struggle with poverty or barely making your way from job to job; the struggle between decency and outright evil; and, the inner struggle to resist the forces to implode in furies of self-destruction.

In Joe, Brown has fully formed his unique lyrical and spare voice and has breathed life into characters that are so real the reader leaves the novel with the impression that they have met Joe Ransom, Gary Jones and know low-down dogs like Wade Jones, Gary’s father. We recognize in Wade, like Faulkner’s Anse Bundren, the father-figure whose whole being is bent on an entirely selfish objective that is typically achieved through the exploitation and destruction of their children. Whether after teeth, a wife, alcohol, or money, the unsuppressed desire of the father sets both Faulkner’s and Brown’s novel into action.

We are first introduced to the chronically homeless and fleeing Jones family, Wade, Mama, Fay, Gary, and Dorothy wondering from Oklahoma to Florida back to Mississippi through highways and country by-roads in sojourn to an old familiar place that Wade remembers from his younger years. As his family suffers from excruciating depravation, Wade’s unchallenged desire for alcohol is pathetically apparent. As they walk the highway, Wade finds a couple unopened can of Budweiser and joyfully/miserly hogs them to himself. The chapter ends with the industrious Gary finding an abandoned house/cabin that quickly becomes the residence of the Wade Jones Family.

In the next chapter, we are introduced to the Joe Ransom, a forty something ex-convict whose job entails poisoning trees (clearing the land) for a lumber company. Joe’s wife left him after years of living with his gambling, drinking, and carousing. He has got a couple of children whom he rarely sees; drives a broken down truck; keeps a pit bull to guard his house; has a girlfriend, Connie, roughly the age of his own daughter; and has an ongoing feud with several of the degenerate locals (chiefly Willie Russell). His independent mentality of self-reliance and suspicions of the local authorities comes through as an ‘authority complex’ that repeatedly threatens to have him return to prison. But, his outlook also promises the hope of redemption because of his awareness of his limitation, faults and sense of right or order.

The intersection of Joe and Gary forms the stories central understanding of the relentlessness of evil and the hope of redemption in sacrificial caring for another person. In between Wade steals, connives, and even kills as he embarks on a perpetual quest for another jug of liquor and a pack of smokes. He dominates by terror the entire Jones family with such violence that the eighteen-year-old daughter, Fay, flees the house and family to seek a life (Fay: A Novel). Gary stays with his Mama and Dorothy out of a sense of misguided loyalty. Though he cannot read or write, Gary becomes the primary wage earner in the family and begins working for Joe poisoning trees in the woods. A bond in formed between Gary and Joe, between a form of innocence and a dreaming or longing for innocence in the form of making things right by doing something really right for someone unable to save themselves; redemption.

As the novel draws to the showdown between Wade and his radical exploitation of everyone, particularly his family, to satisfy his basest desires and Joe’s vicarious salvation through his ennobled protection of Gary, the world of moral ambiguity is quickened and solidified against the violence against innocence. Joe’s sense of what is right and what must happen propels him to be found with the power and justification of a ‘fated’ act. He acts not from a place of puritanical moral purity, but from the grayness of his own moral compass that allows for complete clarity as he sees the lives of Gary and Dorothy threatened with a violence of grotesques magnitude.

Joe ends as it began. Nothing is resolved. No one has escaped the pain of life or even the pain inflicted by individuals bent on their own desires without consideration or care for those around. Wade, a master of the art of using people as a means toward his own end, poisons people at their roots or base so that he can control them in their weakness. Like the poisoned trees, everyone has been damaged and will not stand long. Fay has fled, Gary returns to his Mama with a traumatized Dorothy, and Gary is left to settle matters in violence. All that is innocent is damaged. All that is free is bound. All that is withheld is taken by force, violated and destroyed.

Larry Brown’s Joe stands at the beginning of his amazing and too brief career as a gateway to the moral complexity and flawed realism of the world we inhabit. No one’s motives are pure. No act is without self-service or self-gain. Even Joe’s sacrifice is framed within the larger context of a countdown to his return to prison due to his anti-authoritarian mentality. One knows, doesn’t one, that Joe was going, eventually, back to prison. Yet, his decision ennobles and redeems him nevertheless. Brown reaches for no easy solutions or convenient resolutions. Joe’s painful realism, which depicts characters as flawed, struggling agents of their own lives, disallows anything but authenticity and integrity in understanding actions and consequences. We are the wiser who benefit from Brown’s deeply philosophical novel whose moral complexity reads like a Camus of the American South.

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This review of Joe: A Novel and the "Biographical Profile of Larry Brown" below were originally published in the Southern Literary Review: March/April Edition, 2007.
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A Biographical Profile of Larry Brown

His work evokes the sounds, smells and sensations of the land, people and world of the rough south. No parlors or doilies, no society dances or church picnics, Larry Brown wrote of the events, troubles and hopes of everyday people whose world is fatally realistic. It was his world he evoked and reflected through a mirror of discernment, care and empathy. Larry Brown wrote fiction with flesh and muscle - that breathes deep and sweats. Life lived in his fiction, and that life began in 1951 in Oxford, Mississippi as one of six children. His father relocated the family when Larry was only three to Memphis, Tennessee to work in at the Fruehauf Trailer Company. They returned to Oxford in 1964 where they were to remain. At the pivotal age of sixteen, his father died. Larry did not fare well in school and joked ironically in later years that he flunked senior English.

During the Vietnam war era, October 1970, Brown joined the U.S. Marine Corps, but was stationed at Camp LeJune and never saw action. This experience and the people he meet while in the Marines became the rare material of his first novel, Dirty Work. After his term in the Marines was over, Brown returned to Oxford and married Mary Annie Coleman and became a Firefighter (experiences that were memorialized in On Fire).

While working as a Firefighter in 1980, Brown began teaching himself how to write fiction. He had worked for the Fire Department for seven years and knew that he did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He intuitively knew that learning to write was work and that if he worked hard enough at it he could learn to write well. And so he wrote five novels and between eighty and ninety stories (eight years of writing) before he published his first book. During this literary apprenticeship, of an auto-didactic nature, Brown read writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, and Raymond Carver.
What happened next is the stuff of legend around the Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Shannon Ravel read of story of Brown's while looking for new material for her New Stories from the South. She loved what she saw ("Facing the Music" the second story Brown had published) and wrote Brown to see if he had any more stories, he replied about a hundred. His first collection of stories was published, Facing the Music, was published in 1988

Brown’s first novel, Dirty Work (1989) about the struggles of two injured veterans won the Mississippi Library Association's Award for Fiction. It was followed by a collection of short stories Big Bad Love (1990) depicting the struggles and tensions between holding onto relationships (husband, wife, and friendships) and being true to yourself (particularly while dedicating the time, energy and focus necessary to be writer.) In 2001, Arliss Howard directed a screenplay adaptation of Big Bad Love written by Jim Howard where he played the role of Leon Barlow with Debra Winger co-starring as his ex-wife, Marilyn. Brown appears in the film in the role of Mr. Barlow, father of Leon, uttering his words of wisdom to his son, “Take the high road son.”

His next novel, Joe: A Novel (1991), a story of redemption and ruin as two unlikely characters discovery and fulfill a shared need in each other, won the Southern Book Critic's Circle Award for Fiction, was named a Notable Book of 1991 by the American Library Association, and was a Best Book by Publisher's Weekly. Joe (named for Joe Ransom) introduces readers to the Jones family, Ward (the father), Gary, Fay, Calvin and Dorothy and is the first in a proposed trilogy that was to include novels on Fay and Gary and resolve the questions about the fates of Fay, Gary and Calvin.

Brown’s third novel, Father and Son: A Novel (1996), won the 1997 Southern Book Award. Here Brown addresses the core questions in the struggle between good and evil without either falling into cliques or simplifying the complex motives and drives of each character. As in his other fiction, characters are portrayed at their most vulnerable or base, in full light of their weaknesses and make their way, for better or worse, toward their fate.

In 2000, Brown released Fay: A Novel, the second installment of his proposed trilogy. It takes up the questions left open in Joe regarding the fate of Fay Jones. Writing in the first person in the voice of Fay, this novel records her life from immediately after she had fled from the sexual advances of her father, Wade, a man who had traded his son Calvin for a car and pimped his youngest mute daughter for a few $20s. Not since Faulkner’s Light in August has a narrative struggle of a young woman reached this epic proportion. In recognition of his accomplishments he received the Artist's Achievement Award given by the Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts.

Brown changed publishers for his novel Rabbit Factory: A Novel in 2003 from Algonquin to Free Press. In many ways Rabbit Factory reminds one of the stories in Big Bad Love with the significant difference that Brown has successfully woven these stories of broken, self-destructive, long-time losers in and around Memphis, Tennessee. It is the most sophisticated formal experimentation with fiction that Brown had yet achieved. Experience and proximity are the glue that holds these stories together. Each character is absorbed in their lives were violence is as familiar as their own face. In these stories, the main character is the absurdity of each thought and action as played out in a world in which it appears normal; in which the absurdity of a reformed, thoughtful pit bull setting out to become helpful to other animals makes equal sense.

On Fire (1993) and Billy Ray's Farm: Essays from a place called Tula (2001), together gather Brown’s published non-fiction prose. Each draws from his life and interaction with the people, places and animals he cared about most. They provide the most vivid written portrait of Brown available. This portrait was enhanced in 2002, when director Gary Hawkings made a documentary, "The Rough South of Larry Brown" that dramatized some of Brown's stories, including "Boy & Dog" and featured an interview with both Brown and his wife, Mary Annie.

Larry Brown died tragically on November 24, 2004 at his own near Oxford, from a heart attack. Those surviving him include his wife, Mary Annie Coleman Brown, three children (Billy Ray, Shane Michael, and LeAnn), and two granddaughters. His lose is deeply felt by the literary community and by readers who eagerly awaited each new volume. His example of a self-made literary giant stands tall for all who would learn from him the lesson of hard work and perseverance on the path to becoming a writer.

His last novel, A Miracle of Catfish, was published by Algonquin on March 20, 2007. It contains all chapters that Brown finished plus the notes for its conclusion. The novel recounts the story of Cortez Sharp, a widower, who decides to build a catfish pond on his land in Mississippi and that of a young nine-year-old boy, Jimmy, who lives down the road. You will have to read his book or upcoming reviews to find out more.

Another significant addition to the Brown corpus is the collection of interviews edited by Jay Watson, Conversations with Larry Brown published by the University of Mississippi Press in March of 2007