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There's No Success Like Failure...
This story came so close to being accepted. Majority rules and many people who read it misinterpreted it. We have had an argument for two weeks here over it. "White Girls with Black Asses," do you think you could tone that down a little bit? .... And although it works wonderfully, what is the reason that Cleve beats his wife? He is always remorseful after he does it, enough to where he lashes himself to the tree in the lightning storm. Some people were revulsed by it.... You have great talent, and with material like this you will need great stamina. --From "92 Days," by Larry Brown (collected in Big Bad Love)
Larry Brown has great stamina. He is a writer as unlike Samuel Beckett as one might imagine, but I can think of no writer who more embodies Beckett's famous advice about writing: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Brown has published seven books in the past 12 years, all well-received, and in doing so built for himself a considerable readership (since John Grisham left town, Brown has become the most popular living writer in Oxford, Mississippi -- no mean feat in William Faulkner's hometown, where novelists are as plentiful as kudzu leaves). He's earned praise from and comparisons to such kindred-spirit novelists as Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and Harry Crews. Brown, in fact, dedicated a book to Crews, calling him "my uncle in all ways but blood."
Brown's fourth novel, FAY, is the story of 17-year-old Fay Jones, who descends from the hills of northern Mississippi (and a horror-show family situation there) and means to walk all the way to Biloxi. She is a naïve and ferociously unworldly kid, but she's also cast-iron tough. Like any good pilgrim, she gets involved with several people along the way: drunk, trailer-dwelling fishermen; a state patrolman and his wife; a pilot; a bouncer at a strip-club. The book reads as briskly as an Elmore Leonard novel and yet also begs comparison to Faulkner's Light in August. It's high praise (to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor's remark about the ill-advisability of Southern writers inviting comparison with Mr. Faulkner) that Brown manages to avoid getting his mule and wagon stuck on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.
None of this much smacks of failure. And while seven books in 12 years does require stamina, it's less impressive than the sort of stamina that preceded it.
As a high school senior, Brown failed English and did not graduate with his class. After summer school, he joined the Marines. After that, he came home and worked a series of manual-labor jobs. He joined the Oxford Fire Department. He decided he wanted to be a writer. He never went to college. He decided he could teach himself.
Brown's first novel, like most of ours, wasn't really his first novel. It was not his second, either. Or his third. Or his fourth, his fifth, or his sixth.
It was his seventh.
Throughout that excruciating process, Brown worked 48-hour shifts for the fire department and also, because he had a family to feed, day-labor jobs hauling hay, building houses, and whatever else he could find. Still, he tried to write every day. All he had to show for all that work were stacks of unpublished manuscripts, a large postage bill, and one published short story (in a biker mag called Easy Riders). He stayed married. He kept trying to fail better.
The first novel concerned a man-eating grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. The second was about two entrepreneurial pot farmers in Tennessee. The third ventured into the supernatural, at which time Brown realized he needed help.
Almost no self-taught writers really are. Hemingway, for example, received private tutorials from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, the greatest teachers of writing of his time. Larry Brown broke down and took a creative writing class at the University of Mississippi, from novelist Ellen Douglas.
Douglas not only exposed him to scores of novels and novelists he hadn't read but also got him to see how contrived his own work was, how "from the heart" it wasn't. Brown, after all, was a man who'd served in the Marines just as Vietnam was ending. He'd lived practically his whole life on the edge of a university town, an utter outsider to it. He knew first-hand the hard details about blue-collar life that, in a post-Raymond Carver world, a lot of young writers were trying to fake. As a firefighter, almost every shift brought him right into the center of human folly and loss: burned houses, wrecked cars, surprised corpses. And yet here he was, writing novel number four -- a boxing novel. It was his best book so far, but he knew nothing at all about boxing that he hadn't seen on TV.
After that, he failed better, and wrote a novel based on people he knew in the Mississippi woods. It came close to getting accepted, but it never did. His short stories were getting published. One landed in Best American Short Stories of 1989. The series editor of BASS then was Shannon Ravenel; she was also an editor at Algonquin, where she published his first collection, Facing the Music. By then he'd written another novel. Ravenel told him she had good news and bad news. The good was that the novel was pretty good. The bad was that it needed a massive revision.
By that time, though, he'd started working on a new book, and he wanted to see it through. Novel number seven. It was about two badly wounded Vietnam vets, and it was brilliant. It was called Dirty Work. Larry Brown was a published novelist.
He went back and rewrote the sixth one. It became his second novel, Joe.
Book sales took off. After 16 years, Brown quit fighting fires. He published his second book of short stories, Big Bad Love. Nine stories in the book feature blue-collar characters doing what Larry Brown's characters do: walk down the wrong roads and drink while they're driving and intersect with good and evil and sex and violence and run-ins with the law and death and Marlboros and Budweiser. And every protagonist's initials are "L.B." All those things are present in the tenth and longest story, too, but in "92 Days" the protagonist is a writer (Leon Barlow), and while the plot is invented, the writer's darkly comic struggles bear more than a little resemblance -- right down to the tone of the rejection letters that fill the mailbox -- to Larry Brown's.
Leon Barlow is still learning how to fail better. Larry Brown has failed well enough to have earned his success, and succeeded amply enough to have earned the title "writer's writer."
Mark Winegardner
Albert Mobilio
Brown, a former firefighter in Oxford, has written several novels and short-story collections all dedicated to the proposition that folks born south of the Mason-Dixon line are biochemically altered by this accident of geography. It predisposes them to overheated lives of hunting, boozing and hopeless love and enrolls its male chroniclers, like Brown, Harry Crews and Barry Hannah, in Hemingway's 3-F club of fishing, fighting and fornicating."
The New York Times Book Review
Entertainment Weekly
Gifted with brilliant descriptive ability, a perfect ear for dialogue, and an unflinching eye...stark, often funny...with a core as dark as a Delta midnight.
Mens Journal
He left the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department after his first novel was published. It paid off.
The New Yorker
He is blunt and abrasive about subjects that tend to cause flinching. He tells stories in plain language.
Time Magazine
Clear, simple and powerful.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A powerful tale of love and betrayal, family ties and brutal revenge.
New York Times Book Review
The model is Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended.
The Orlando Sentinel
So vividly written it is almost cinematic.
Dallas Morning News
It reads like a stud poker game of life, tension growing with the turning of each card.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Cancel the competition for suspense thriller of the year. Larry Brown has already won it with Father and Son.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
The South of Larry Brown (Dirty Work) is a country devoid of genteel manners and magnolia trees. His deeply flawed characters generally lack money, education and a fair chance at the pursuit of happiness, yet he portrays them square-on, with a restrained compassion that neither panders to nor patronizes their struggling, often violent lives. This saga of degradation and violence is his most powerful novel yet. It is the coming-of-age story of a young woman whose downward trajectory seems fated, despite the glimmers of luck that she hopes are her salvation. Fay Jones is 17 years old when she runs away from her sexually abusive father and the poor white family shack outside of Oxford, Miss. Dangerously innocent and naive about the world (she has never used a telephone or left a tip in a restaurant), she is stoic, resourceful and desperate to better herself. Like everyone else in this novel, she is addicted to beer and cigarettes; whiskey and dope will come later. And she is beautiful, which is both the source of opportunity and the limit of her aspirations. It seems almost too good to be true when trooper Sam Harris rescues Fay and takes her to his lakeside home. His wife, Amy, still grieving over the death of their teenage daughter, takes Fay under her wing. But Amy is an alcoholic, and in one of the car crashes that punctuate the novel--all caused by drunken drivers--she is killed. Though he is already involved with a predatory mistress, Sam falls in love with Fay and she with him; when Fay becomes pregnant; she has a brief vision of a safe and settled life. The cycle of events that ensue--a murder in self-defense, Fay's flight to Biloxi, sexual exploitation, several premeditated killings--are, in the force field of this story, inevitable and preordained. All his characters, including the decent, anguished Sam (who is heroic in his police work) and bewildered, frightened Fay, behave foolishly, rashly and badly. Yet Brown's laconic narrative is constructed on a merciful understanding of his characters' limitations. Though he takes a long time to get the plot under way, describing such mundane activities as fishing and police patrols in the detail necessary to make them clear, the narrative acquires tension and velocity and by the end the reader is mesmerized, waiting for a gun to go off, but praying for a miracle. There are no miracles, of course, but the raw power of this novel, the clear, graphic accounts of both humble and perverted lives (in the bars and strip joints of Biloxi), is a triumph of realism and a humane imagination. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
When 17-year-old Fay walks out on her abusive, dirt-poor backwoods family, she is taken in by Mississippi trooper Sam Harris and his wife, Amy. First a surrogate for a dead daughter, Fay is soon Sam's lover and becomes pregnant after Amy dies (in a car accident involving alcohol), but then, more or less in self-defense, she shoots and kills Sam's ex-lover while Sam is on patrol. She flees, again on foot, this time ending up with Aaron, a volatile, violent, and bulked-up bouncer and part-owner of a Biloxi strip joint. The magnetic Fay innocently draws (big) trouble in Brown's (Joe) hard-drinking, hard-drugging South; you just know a lot of people are going to die in this hard-to-put-down book but not exactly who, when, why, or at whose hands. It's like George Pelecanos (ethos) meets James Lee Burke (atmosphere), or Daniel Woodrell (characters) meets Anita Shreve (star-crossed passion). Just don't look for it on Oprah. Highly recommended.--Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
From the Publisher
Bill Nichols USA Today Brown will show you another America his America and dare you to try to forget it exists.
Polly Paddock Gossett Chicago Tribune Larry Brown is a true original, and Fay is among his best works. Follow Fay past the kudzu-draped woods and cinderblock bars and sunburned fields of Brown's imagination. It's a journey you won't regret.
William Plummer People For years, Larry Brown has been known and respected as a writer's writer. But now, with Fay, this profoundly southern novelist may win the broad readership he so richly deserves....Spellbinding.
Jean Charbonneau Denver Post A well-oiled machine...More ambitious than any of Brown's previous novels, Fay might just be his best work yet.
FEB/MAR 01 - AudioFile
Stechschulte's performance in this dialogue-rich Mississippi-based novel is breathtaking. The dialects he puts on and takes off are not mannered or stagy in the least. They seem firmly rooted, as if arising from a particular place. And within that accent, he still manages a convincing variation among the main players--the title character, a young girl running from abuse and impoverishment, and the two men who come to love her, a world-weary state trooper and a brutal Biloxi bouncer. If the novel sometimes sinks to the level of little more than a male sexual fantasy, Stechschulte's assured reading, slipping easily from menace to tenderness to fear, is never less than captivating. M.O. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine