Is the hint to Brown's talent found in his novel's dedication? "For my uncle in all ways but blood: Harry Crews." Maybe. Crews gets lumped in with the bourbon-clouded likes of Bukowski, and in ways, Brown does remind me of Bukowski. Despite the spatial/spiritual separation of their work (L.A. versus rural Mississippi), there's a general crossover in chosen subject matter (poor folk, bad living, continuous drinking, hard-boiled realism). But that's not quite it, either: Both authors are compulsively readable. It's that quality that's hard to pinpoint--a style that effaces itself through movement, a regaling that comes with such apparent ease that the reader is mesmerized.
Have I just described the elusive (non)qualities of what professional blurbists call a "page-turner"? That's one cliché I swore I'd never use. The phrase connotes something between pulp fecklessness and emotional yank, a nifty-swifty calculated for pure escape, devoid of psychological acuity, and generally missing all the good ambitious stuff of literary craft and assemblage. But Larry Brown's books don't fit the dog-eared profile of best-selling trash. He's a damn good writer and--here comes personally sworn-off cliché #2--even at 489 pages, I couldn't put Brown's latest book, Fay, down.
"She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince." That wince says it all. From here on out, Fay--a primitive, naive, but ass-kickingly tough 17-year-old Mississippi hick intent on ditching her dirt-floored hillbilly shack and her sexually predatory father--sets out on a jerkwater odyssey of emotional, erotic, and world-wearying discovery. She simply sets off down the trail, Huck Finn style: sticks out a thumb, keeps walking. The girl doesn't even know how to use a phone.
Early in the novel, a state trooper picks her up by the side of the road. Officer Sam Harris is surely a rarity in modern fiction--a fucked-up but genuinely decent cop, drawn with depth and vulnerability. Sam's wife, an alcoholic rutted in perpetual mourning for their teenage daughter (killed in a gory car wreck), is momentarily brought back to life by the couple's quick adoption of Fay... but then is also killed while driving, loaded up on Schnapps. Sam and Fay are heartbroken; the two raise eyebrows by attending the funeral together. They fall in love. Fay gets pregnant. Things in the department get hot for Sam, especially when his previous lover, Alejandra--a rich, spoiled, jealous demon of a woman--shows up dead, shot with her own pistol by Fay. It's an act of self-defense, of course, but Fay skips town--to protect Sam, to protect herself.
All these twists take place during the first third of the book--so enough with the riveting plot, and back to the indefinable greatness that makes this one of the most surprising, enjoyable, and thought-provoking novels I've read in some time. As for outward signs, I guess I've answered that one: Pacing. Brown's sense of rhythm, and the means by which he ever-so-quietly (almost lackadaisically) builds plot and suspense, are impeccable. And without a pantheon of believable, interesting, complex characters, all that gothic sound and fury would come to naught--so there's another answer. Fay--along with the assembly of chicken hawks, do-gooders, and burnouts who swoop and stumble around her as she slowly wises up--is someone you truly care about, despite her missteps, despite her moon-headedness, despite her beautiful innocence that, literally, kills.
The shit really flies in Fay, the kind of outrageous stuff people love to stump about--and the kind of outrageous stuff that occurs all the time in the deadpan panoramic of reality. Brown traces every sling and arrow of white-trash misfortune with a kind of Nietzschean appraisal; he's the sharp, amoral observer, not the punitive judge. In Brown's wounded fictional world, life itself is the fatal flaw, nobody is purely any one thing, the circumstantial evidence of behavior is an existential nolle prosequi, and love always burns--both hot and cold. If he has anything to whisper about the awful things he so smoothly depicts, it might be this: Learn from your own damn mistakes. Or, as Fay herself thinks late in the novel, hopping into yet another hitched ride: "And she thought about it only for a second because that was the last thing she wanted, to be alone again and walking. That and the devil you know against the one you don't."
